How We Work : Blog

...Continued from part 1

Are Marketers in Asia Responding to the Trend?

As the market grows, online advertising has been aligning itself quickly with what people do on the Internet.  The top online activities pursued by Asians include information search, email, communications like instant messaging and entertainment (especially music and gaming).  In line with this, search advertising is gaining market share on traditional display advertising. Advertisers are also tapping into the burgeoning gaming market.  For example, in China, Coca-Cola is sponsoring an online basketball game and McDonalds has partnered with a local gaming platform GOQO in a promotional push.

With more people getting online and spending more time and money online, some insightful marketers are definitely leveraging the trend and including creative and innovative online components into their campaigns.

Motorola took it a step further and launched a few mobile phones in China last year without using traditional media channels.  Instead, it hired two college students from Guangzhou who had become famous among the Internet community with homemade videos of themselves lip-synching to Western pop songs.  The phone manufacturer’s online marketing campaign centering on the two lip-synching to a Back Street Boys hit garnered a tremendous response.  A related music competition saw dramatic new phone sales and visitors casting more than 1.3 million votes to decide the contest winner.

Online Marketing as a Long-Term Strategy

Microsoft understands the importance of the Internet for relationship marketing.  The company previously focused its developer outreach in Asia through offline events such as user group discussions and training sessions.  This was both manpower and resource intensive.  Feedback was not necessarily channeled and disseminated efficiently and events were often perceived as one-off campaigns.  In 2003, they set out to build a portal known as MSDN Connection that allowed the regional Microsoft team to maximize manpower, achieve consistency in campaign management, eliminate duplication of effort, capture developer profiles, fine tune programs quickly and most importantly drive engagement with the developer community through targeted campaigns, membership incentives and personalized online training programs.  The success of this relationship marketing program led to it subsequently being implemented in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region in 2005.

Earl

Excerpted from the November issue of AdAsia