How do media buyers, agencies and platform owners engage in creating new and effective campaigns in the challenging financial climate? Here's some food for thought.
With the evolution of social media practices and digital marketing, there is a considerable amount of inertia from media buyers, PR agencies and brand marketers to adopt new technologies for experimental marketing in Asia. This article addresses three lessons with some established case studies in Asia on the following issues:
(1) The emergence and adoption of new digital marketing technologies and social practices for media buyers, brand marketers and PR agencies that come in the form of rich media content sharing, online social networks and virtual worlds.
(2) The nature of advertising has changed for both corporations, publishers and consumers.
(3) As a consequence, a change in mindset and expectations is required.
(1) Emergence and adoption of new digital marketing technologiesCurrently, there is a plethora of new digital marketing technologies that have emerged and gained mainstream acceptance. These platforms include:
(a) Rich media content sharing sites where users convey their opinions on products via blogging, podcasts and vodcasts, e.g., Twitter, Blogger, Flickr and YouTube.
(b) Online social networks where users distribute and create a mindshare via the web or mobile among their friends via their activity feed e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn.
(c) Virtual worlds (includes gaming platforms).
While some of these tools have become mainstream recently, there exist interesting and emerging platforms that offer new ways of reaching and engaging consumers.
For example, OrSiSo, as an aggregator of social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn), offers a virtual personal secretary to the consumer that provides a way to deliver brand advertising merged with social conversation. The platform also allows the user to simplify and organize his own content based on his affinity with his own network of friends.
Another example comes in the form of virtual worlds where the user interacts within a 3D environment. Twinnity did an interesting campaign with the CineStar movie theatre in Berlin, where they created a virtual space to interact with the CineStar community last August. The virtual world became a meeting point for Batman fans for the movie "The Dark Knight" and provided an impetus towards directing them towards video on demand services and tickets.
(2) The nature of advertising has changed
With the emergence and adoption of new digital marketing technologies, the way customers consume and react to data has also changed. These digital technologies and social practices remain as tools and it is important that brand marketers, media buyers and PR agencies have specific goals and objectives in how to adopt them for their own purposes.
The F1 Grand Prix in Singapore adopted by SingTel, the largest telecommunications company here, was an interesting case study to demonstrate how a large corporation adopts technologies to fit how consumers are reacting to data.
SingTel, together with Microsoft, commissioned Crayon Digital to build an F1 Grid Girls (an integral part of the F1 race) campaign, in anticipation of its prime time reality TV show based on the 20 ladies, using Microsoft Silverlight technology. The site displays the energetic personalities and images of the Grid Girls in an engaging, highly participative online experience. At the same time, users can interact via several actions and get a "real time" response from the Grid Girls.
As a result, SingTel increased the daily visitors to the race site by 33 percent. It also utilized viral marketing, where users stood a chance to win an F1 ticket and Xbox set by sending an email to their friends to tell them about it. The most interesting part about the campaign is that SingTel made a decision to not have advertising on the site, and found other ways to work with organizations to monetize its F1 investment from the social capital by extending it free to consumers.
(3) A rethink of the ROI and pricing model is required
As a consequence of how users in the online world consume and react to content, traditional metrics such as clicks per impression, referral or action may not be suitable to measure the success of these new digital marketing tools.
For example, how does one measure the effectiveness of a marketing ad seen by an avatar in a virtual world? From the perspective of the brands, they may prefer to reach where the technology involved helps to target people who are enthusiastic about the latest news on products and services about the brand. So, there is a conundrum on whether advertising dollars should be spent on wide reach or effective targeting.
Right Media (a company recently acquired by Yahoo! in 2007) provides a new business model in how the different players can combine reach and effective targeting and enables publishers, advertisers and ad-networks to trade digital media. The platform uses an auction-based model and allows different services for (a) large publisher, advertiser/agency or networking seeking an enterprise level solution, (b) publishers who are looking for a way to manage an ad network, and (c) sellers who need market driven tools and insights to capture advertiser budgets.
These three lessons provide us food for thought in how media buyers, agencies and platform owners engage in creating new and effective campaigns in our current challenging financial climate.
Bernard Leong is a partner of Thymos Capital LLP.