Life of running a digital agency in China is a combination of busy, exhaustive, and exciting. I’ve done a lot of things in the last 4 months. The biggest mission that I had accomplished was the management buyout for my firm – Frontiers Digital. I now run the entire business with a team of talented marketers in Hong Kong and Shanghai. I must also thank the original founding team namely Piers Beckwith, David Fischer, Luke Townsend, and Adam Murray. They helped me to create the company and gave the firm a very unique personality. Frontiers Digital has inherited many good practices and know-how from all these professional founders.

Our hard work has recently rewarded by signing up Lee Kum Kee (LKK) as our global client. LKK is one of the largest Chinese cooking sauce companies in the world. Frontiers Digital is now the global digital agency for LKK.

From this post onward, I hope to pick up my writing again, at least to keep blogging once per week. There are many things that I want to share including new practice and market development.

Two weeks ago I met Mike Grehan and Matthew McGowan in Hong Kong. We had a great chat about an opportunity of organizing SES Asia in Hong Kong and how it would be an important platform for the marketers here in China. I am indeed anticipating more exciting news from the world’s renowned search marketing event.

While I was not blogging in the last few months, the digital space kept me busy all the time. My team and I were answering questions for a lot new ideas. People in part of the world are fond of the new gig like augmented reality, high capacity barcode and they of course continue to embrace social media.

Moving forward, I would like to focus blogging more about lead generation. This remains an area which has drawn most of my attentions. I believe there are still rooms for improvement and new technology can be integrated to enhance the whole practice for better result.

Everything is moving onward and upward and I must ask you to stay tuned. Happy New Year Of Tiger!

But then, I also believe many online media companies are exploiting the technical resources from Google, for example the Google Map, to enhance its content features and monetizing the traffics through Google content network. So…, should we all discuss this issue with a more reciprocal manner?

AdChina is not the only network in China. We have a number of local networks who can deliver advanced ad serving techniques based on different behavioral parameters such as IP, broadband connection, even the ISP-based and DNS-based behavioral targeting. Some advanced targeting techniques are considerably invasive, for example, track http referer page, drop cookies through http-request, etc, they all have been using in China with less considerate manner. I have met a company in China who can put a snippet in the audience’s computer that takes control the browser for a popup ad.  For advanced advertising technology, China has everything on the menu.

But there is also a huge knowledge gap in the user side (agency) who can’t actually manage to deploy all the advanced techniques for a tactical approach. Still many agencies in China are copying or passing on the media spot plan to the clients directly, vertical network does not exist, and the know-how of the users group are very fragmented. All these have made up an immature China advertising market, which you may see all of them as the opportunities, but how you can take on the market without the supply of local talents can be a tricky question.

China is probably the place where we see an impressive growth in advertising revenue even during the down time. But how many advertisers in this country are actually benefiting from their online advertising spend if the service operators are not thinking strategic? I remain feeling skeptical towards a good lasting market prosperity.

Global Sources uses “Source from quality China, Asian & Indian Suppliers in Hong Kong” to promote its October edition of China Sourcing Fair.  The message appeals to the audiences for a reason to visit the trade show.

Canton Fair’s copy is “More Opportunities in 2009. Phase 2 and 3 brought forward bringing big opportunities earlier.” It pretty much emphasizes on the size of the event means huge business opportunities.

HKTDC has the similar approach as Global Sources, “International Buyers Sourcing For Electronics & Electrical Appliances.” It is a pretty flat tone.

Yiwu International Commodity Fair has an interesting visual that appeals to the buyers in South America. I like the presentation. It is eye-catching and not falls into too traditional B2B.

Alibaba conveyed this message months ago, “Visit our B2B site for a wide collection of Baby Care Products at low prices.” The creative was very functional with a flat tone.

But the recent Alibaba’s US advertising campaign: “Find It. Make It. Sell It” has demonstrated an interesting plot. My favorite one is called “The Itchbot Story.” It is about “How two guys & a robot became an awesome business.” The plot is presented in a very different way compare to all the previous Alibaba’s advertisements.

In my opinion, the success of crafting a good copy or creating a marketing plot depends on how the marketer can actually see things from the audience perspective. In my everyday work I come across a lot of B2B advertising copies and most of the tones are just over functional that to a point they pose almost no effect for catching the audiences’ attention.

So in your next B2B advertising campaign when all your competitors have the same USP, try to use emotional reward to engage your audiences’ mind. Perhaps it might work better.

A lot of people think that the long tail doesn’t exist in China because the online media landscape looks pretty much consolidated over there. Three years ago we were saying the top 5 Chinese Internet portals owned more than 70 to 80% of the total traffics. Which is still true as today these Internet portals still own the majority of the traffics. But when we are visioning the long tail, we shouldn’t see it like a X-Y kind of linear equation. It should be in parametric form. In order to resolve this equation, the solution is in the behavioral parameters.

Tech companies like Google which uses technology to monetize the long tail over the search engine. The search engine is essentially a network which interlinks a large fragments of websites. When a search is incurred which contextually represents an intent, Google helps advertisers to monetize it by displaying the relevant ad message. This is basically how search advertising works. In China, we follow the same rule.

But when it comes to display advertising, although we have quite a number of ad networks in China, most of them operate quite differently. These ad networks are more like a media rep and almost none of them carries remnant inventory. Why? Because the Chinese advertisers do not like unsold ad space. They all like the prominent ad space or to take over the whole home page. That’s how they interpret the money is worth spent. On the other hand, the cost of media is very high in China and the advertisers’ KPI is getting more and more demanding. The dilemma here is how possibly a two-yuan CPA can be achieved with the average CPM that is 25 yuan?

I believe in order to change the flavor of the Chinese advertisers we should introduce more ad techniques to the market. When the ad networks introduce better targeting options to help the advertisers engaging the audiences’ footprints across different publishers, when the agencies do better interpretation for the analytics other than the clickstream, we can present a new insight to our advertisers. The advertisers still need premium ad space to drive perception, but to generate sales leads and acquisitions in a long run, they should dive deep and monetize the long tail, which it does exist in China with different behavioral traits. If you are in the ad network business, I love to see you bring innovation into this space.

On a side note, I will speak for an ad network forum next week in Beijing. Stay tuned for my next post which I will write more about how the Chinese ad network professionals fancy for the long tail.

During the period of Aug 2008 to April 2009, the buyers’ response of PRC B2B advertising for the first-tier overseas countries was dropped 54.52% for the US target and 35.29%  for the UK target. Central Europe was up by 20.73% on average and Asia Pacific was up by 56.48%.  There was an obvious growth in the new markets such as Africa and Latin America. We also recorded a sharp 80% increase of the ad response for Poland and Turkey alone.

PRC and HK B2B marketers region should take note for your next buyers advertising campaign.

In just 6-month time, Hong Kong digital advertising market drops dramatically to a stage which I will describe it pathetic. The market has been greatly marginalized due to the shift of the market landscape no matter it is B2B or B2C sector.

My observation is that the B2B advertisers in Hong Kong have no imminent need to do international advertising. Why I will say so? It is because the B2B marketing here in Asia mainly purports to target buyers in the overseas, the advertisers are mostly the companies with the need for export.  But the base of the export economy is not in HK. It is in Mainland China where most of the manufacturing bases are located. Hence the PRC exporters have comparably more incentives to look for overseas buyers.

In the B2C sector where products selling in Hong Kong are very localized. They are either the commodities imported from the overseas or the local made merchandises targeting the Hong Kong domestic consumers. So I don’t see it is practical for the local merchants who will gain better opportunity to do international business. Or, I put it in this way, Hong Kong local merchants have better opportunity to do PRC business instead of selling to the overseas market.

I believe Hong Kong digital advertising market will continue to suffer from the downturn for the next 9 to 12 more months. We will have a lot of challenges ahead.

Taobao.com, China’s largest e-commerce company, was ranked in the Credit Suisse consumer survey the preferred platform for online shopping. 44% of respondents chose Taobao.com over all other search engines. The company is now speculated as the next PRC’s Mega IPO.

Last year Badiu launched Youa.com and posed a challenge to Taobao. Some other news mention Baidu is secretly developing a new B2B platform. The company was running a campaign last year to build websites and optimize web content for 500,000 PRC’s small to medium companies at free of charge. It won’t be a surprise if Baidu wants to pursue further for a B2B model.

But what really interests me is Google China recently launched a new service called “TradeYep.” It is a B2B version of Google Adwords, specifically designed for the PRC companies with the need to find overseas buyers.

All news are vibrant, onwards and upwards. That’s what we need to defeat the depressing economy.

Recently I’ve advised two marketing plans for my clients, they both adopt email as a vehicle to drive touch point and targeting effectiveness. I find that after all these years with the new digital media come out in approx. every 6-month cycle, planning a marketing mix using email remains a fun process.

In my plan, one of the target demographics is the webmail users in China. Webmail is a very effective digital touch point to target PRC Internet users. For example, one of the largest webmail providers, 163.COM, has a huge users base which is equivalent to almost 70% of the total Internet users in the country. But the challenge of marketing in webmail is that how we can get people to respond the marketing message?

In China, like everywhere else, Google Adwords is incorporated in Gmail, Hotmail has a pretty standard display advertising solution. But the Chinese webmail providers have reinvented the wheel. They allow you to connect a display advertising with the Inbox. The marketer can own a piece of ad property, typically a MPU ad, and then to use it to trigger an echo right in the Inbox. You can use the ad to call for signup, then drop a coupon to the Inbox. The users who click on the ad has consensually granted a permission to let the marketers for further communication via the Inbox.

Some marketers find this intrusive. But this is not something “I spam because I can;” on the contrary, I find it a smart integration that allows the Inbox to respond to the ad creative. If you manage to get it right, it works very effective to drive conversion.

B2B marketing in China is always supplier-driven and buyer-centric. Suppliers who advertise to engage buyers and aim for a sales conversion. This is a typical B2B goal.  At the forum, a lot of marketers are interested to explore how social marketing works for B2B.  We have been seeing some marketers are following the trend closely and they launch marketing campaigns on Facebook, tweeting on Twitter.  My opinion is that I don’t see the effectiveness, in terms of sales acquisition, is going to happen anytime soon on SNS. If your marketing objective is about starting a conversion funnel by cultivating aggregated prospects, then SNS is considerably effective or at least no harm doing that. Otherwise, social networking sites are just contextually unfitted for sales conversion.

I am not a trend follower when practicing marketing.  I like to look into the basic parameters such as demographic concentration, media consumption behavior, etc. In China, adult SNS users are only 20% out of the total Internet population. The top online media usage in China are still news portal, email, and instant messaging.

Here is a thought. If Facebook is a living room, Myspace is a bar, and Linkedin is an office, what about the BBS in China? There are millions and millions of users on BBS. The power of influence is huge. Ok, let’s call the China BBS “the water cooler,” where the word of mouth begins.

ps.: For those who I’ve met today, I love to connect with you. Feel free to add me in your Facebook or Linkedin. Let’s socialize.