Is China’s digital ecosystem “fragile”?

Shanghai - On April 23, leading digital marketing leaders in the Asia-Pacific region gathered at the second Digital360China Summit of Campaign Asia-Pacific to discuss the latest digital trends and other thought-provoking hot issues, one of which was It is the vulnerability of China’s digital industry.

The summit lasted one day, and the first session in the morning agenda went straight to the topic: the vulnerability of China’s digital industry has become one of the core challenges facing the marketing industry.

“We have carried out extensive global cooperation with big brands such as Facebook and Google, but in China, faced with various digital platforms, we have to choose to cooperate separately,” said WPP Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Digital Officer Scott Spirit said.

David Porter, media director of Unilever China, agrees with Spirit. “Although the digital tools in the Chinese market are different, the actual application is very similar to other markets,” he said. "China's digital ecosystem is very fragile, and we need to be extremely cautious in choosing partners."

On this point, Alan Hellawell, managing director of Deutsche Bank's Asian Securities Research Department, also has the most knowledge, He is concerned about China's rapidly changing digital industry landscape. "We ask questions like this every day: Are we surrounded by a bubble? Once the music stops, what unexpected turmoil will happen?"

At the summit, hot discussions on industry trends focused on With the rapid advancement of e-commerce and O2O (online to offline, referring to online marketing and online purchasing driving offline operations and offline consumption) marketing models.

Stephen Drummond, senior director of creativity, integrated marketing and design at Coca-Cola China, said that in the next year, Coca-Cola will "focus" on developing e-commerce marketing while continuing to explore O2O business opportunities.

“One of the fundamental challenges we face is how to turn small digital ideas into high-impact brand communications campaigns,” said Drummond. "The Chinese market is extremely receptive to emerging technologies, and what follows is a test for brand owners."

Porter believes that "it is not difficult to make a small splash in the Chinese market; it is difficult. It is to achieve large-scale development.”

Kufela CEO Allen Liu advised that brand owners and marketers should look forward when formulating digital marketing plans.

“As new e-commerce models continue to emerge, the current ecosystem will be eliminated in the future,” Liu Shuang said. "With the rise of the O2O business model, the evolution of China's digital ecosystem is inevitable."

Rasheed Zhao, digital director of Kellogg's China, predicted that the digital ecosystem will accelerate its evolution in China. situation. "What is certain is that at some point in the future, many seemingly absurd ideas (such as Baidu's "Magic Lamp Search") can present search results as holographic projections on the top of the mobile phone screen, and users can directly Interacting with holographic search results) may become a reality.”

Baidu specifically chose April Fool’s Day to release a new product promotion video: showing four common scenarios of using a mobile phone. Baidu's "Magic Lamp Search" is a new search experience. Such a new feature is so bizarre that people doubt its authenticity, and it has been regarded as an April Fool's Day joke by human rights.

However, Allye Group CEO Wilson Yao pointed out that these innovations also "reflect what we want to achieve through B.A.T. (China's three Internet giants Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent)."

Without technology as a driving engine, these novel ideas can only remain at the "fresh" concept level and will not help promote the development of the entire marketing industry.

However, without the support of big data from B.A.T., marketing companies may be vulnerable, said Vivien Xu, managing director of Breakthrough Communications Shanghai.

For marketing companies, the real goal should be to effectively use data to increase conversion rates, no matter where the data comes from.

For example, China's automobile industry is the first to pay attention to CRM (customer relationship management) data, Xu Heng said. "As far as our automotive customers are concerned, behind any seemingly ordinary advertising campaign, we have put a lot of effort into code mapping and data analysis, because only in this way can we obtain accurate insights and conclusions to inform our customers' marketing strategies. Provide correct guidance and direction.”

Even so, technology has not fundamentally changed the rules of the marketing game, said Tom Doctoroff, CEO of JWT Asia Pacific. In the current digital landscape, consumers' loyalty to brands is extremely thin; but at the same time, he also believes that the so-called traditional brand positioning rooted in consumption motivation research has not been eliminated by the market. He said in his keynote speech that analog and digital can not only coexist peacefully, but also complement each other.

“Only carefully planned brand creativity can achieve long-term harmony between the clarity of top-down information dissemination and the dynamics of bottom-up audience interaction (technology-driven),” Tang Ruitao said.

If data analysis and measurement standards cannot evaluate interactivity, no matter how much we talk about interactivity, it will be in vain. Nowadays, brand owners are investing increasingly larger marketing budgets on mobile platforms. The question is, in the context of China’s digital market, effectiveness analysis and evaluation are notoriously difficult. How can brand owners ensure that they can maximize ROI? In response to this problem, Calvin Chan, Chief Operating Officer of Jingshuo Technology, shared a solution: SDK (Software Development Kit). "This is a major innovation in mobile advertising measurement standards. With this tool, we can track the effectiveness of offline advertising and evaluate paid media on mobile platforms," ??he said.

Mondelez China Media and Digital Marketing Director Anthony Ho is very optimistic about the huge number of mobile users: 5 billion people in the world use smartphones, but only 4 billion use toothbrushes.

“Don’t underestimate this number, the key message it carries is: the mobile era has arrived and is here to stay,” he emphasized. For Oreo, a subsidiary of Mondelēz, content is the carrier of brand communication, and mobile phones are tools for interacting with consumers; however, mobile marketing is still in the experimental stage, and Oreo is still figuring out how to balance its mobile budget. “Content is king marketing strategy means that brands need to be able to push a lot of short and concise information,” Ho explains. “Basically, the way you can do that is to double your production budget.”

Large media companies have done an excellent job of studying China’s hotbed of entrepreneurs, adapting to industry trends and managing costs. “In the media purchasing industry, we face dual pressures from clients to cut service fees and rising employee labor costs,” said Arlene Ang, CEO of OMD China. "If you don't seek innovation, you will be out. Our innovative measure is to set up a special fund for start-up companies to build a bridge of cooperation between them and our customers."

In fact, the problems faced by start-up companies are similar to Large enterprises are not much different, added Dirk Eschenbacher, creative director and chief marketing officer of Zanadu.

"Intel is a hardware engineering services company, and innovation is an integral part of the essence of its brand. To drive innovation, we strive to create a corporate culture of "Freedom-to-fail"," Intel said David Sun, China Digital Marketing and Media Director. "We intend to help the development of the media industry. When everyone is inseparable from digital applications, Intel can get a piece of the big cake of digital media."

AIG China Society Lawrence Wang, director of digital media and digital marketing, suggested that before universal access to digital applications is achieved, everyone might as well talk about "small data" first. "AIG has a lot of data, but compared with Internet companies, the data utilization rate is much lower. In fact, we are quite conservative in data utilization and not very active.

In this regard, Huang Wei, vice president of marketing at ABI, suggested increasing investment in human resources and improving digital analysis capabilities.

In the programmatic buying seminar, Google China’s major customers Tony Chen, chief digital officer of the sales team, believes that programmatic buying should not only be regarded as a specialized technology for brand owners to provide direct and efficient advertising.

“It also has greater advantages. ——It can meet the advertising needs of advertisers centered on brand communication through accurate audience insights, attractive advertising creativity, extensive cross-screen reach and real-time monitoring of advertising effects," he said.

Advertising technology brings a long list of benefits, but if the essence of the brand is ignored, no technology can achieve the effect of brand communication, said Richard Lee, chief marketing officer of Pepsi and Master Kong Beverages China in his usual joking tone. . “Technology is changing, and media touchpoints must change with it. Perhaps one day the touch points of Pepsi products will be larger than Sina. ”

In the last session of the summit, Li Ziqiang said jokingly that when the QR code on Pepsi drinks can drive Sina visitor traffic, PepsiCo will be able to sell advertising space to Sina. Join. The guests discussed in this session include Arthur Wei, head of Sina Mobile Division.