Coca-Cola China turned to Chinese portal MyRice.com to penetrate that country's Net and wireless audience.
When Coca-Cola wanted to increase its Web presence in China, the company turned to MyRice.com, a leading Chinese portal reaching users in China, Hong Kong, Macao, Japan, South Korea, Europe and the United States. MyRice.com, once part of Lycos China, is one of the world’s top 50 Web sites (Alexa ranking: 40) with more than five million daily unique visitors and 35,000,000 daily page views. Livedoor Co. Ltd., the largest free ISP and one of the largest portals in Japan with a current market cap of over USD $3B, recently acquired MyRice.com. (LiveDoor also acquired ValueClick Japan last March).
MyRice.com works with a variety of global brand advertisers such as General Motors, Nestle, BellSouth, Walt Disney, Hewlett Packard, Dupont, Panasonic and Budweiser. Due to its impressive advertiser roster, reputation as being a leader in both Internet and wireless markets (MyRice.com has strategic partnerships with China’s leading mobile providers China Mobile Monternet, China Unicom Uni-wise and China Telecom V-net), and its target demographic focusing on users between the ages of 18- and 30-years-old, it is no surprise as to why Coca-Cola chose MyRice.com to run its Chinese site.
Since 2003, MyRice.com has been an integral component of Coca-Cola’s online strategy to reach China’s Business to Consumer vertical. MyRice.com has created branding campaigns through launching online promotions centered around events such as the Olympics, NBA and Coca-Cola’s 25th Anniversary. MyRice.com strategically deployed both Web- and email-based marketing campaigns on other leading Chinese portals such as Netease, Sohu, Lycos, Yahoo!, and Sina. Because they bring in large numbers of consumers, general portals make attractive additions to B2C online marketing strategies. As MyRice.com executed on the online media plan, Coca Cola China’s traffic rose by over two million page views in one year.
According to Morgan Stanley’s 2003 report regarding mobile marketing in China, there are 3.5 mobile users to one Internet user -- or 300 million mobile users compared to 87 million. With these statistics, MyRice.com was smart in launching a cross network interactive platform for fans of the Coca-Cola brand utilizing Internet and wireless services. As an example, MyRice.com set up a SMS notification system to keep members updated with Coca-Cola events. Users simply register through Coke's Web site or SMS, become a member of the Coca-Cola club, and gain access to company news, promotion events and chats with other members.
Asia-based portals such as MyRice.com have realized that the way to increase their brand advertiser base is to partner with traditional companies to launch extensive, coordinated online advertising campaigns. Additionally, MyRice.com’s agreements with local mobile and telecom companies has positioned MyRice.com as China’s top cross network (broadband and wireless) entertainment portal specializing in news, sports, music (MP3 Searching -- a music search engine), photos, books, movies, games, blogs and a friend community titled “World Friends.” According to China Mobile Communications and China Unicom, the two state-owned telecommunications companies that monopolize the wireless market, 220 billion text and image messages were received by cell phones in 2003, roughly 10 percent of them originating from Internet portals.
For brand marketers interested in penetrating the China market, aligning with portals such as MyRice.com that can launch both Internet and wireless services is imperative. The key here is launching a cross network interactive platform for your brand.
Elizabeth M. Lloyd is the Director of Corporate Marketing for Netblue, Inc., an online direct marketing company based in Silicon Valley. Previously, Lloyd was the Director of marketing for opt-in email provider, NetCreations, in New York City. Prior to NetCreations, Lloyd was responsible for the PR department of ValueClick, Inc.