However, the evolution of mobile marketing has made a detour and becomes mobile app marketing. It works because the app has provided better user experience with rich interactivity. The market has a huge collection of applications for iPhone and is going to have even more for Android.

Apple has made clear for its intention to take part in the mobile advertising market. The move will not just settle in mobile ad distribution. Cupertino envisages a future with a total domination through a RFID enabled iPhone. An Apple patent called  ”Concert Ticket+” will turn an iPhone into a digital wallet.

We don’t need to wait for Apple to operationalize its vision. In China, China Mobile already has launched a RFID sim service that enables a regular cellphone to buy grocery and pay for a subway ticket.

The reality is finally here with advertising meets commerce catalyzed by technology for a solution that people will adopt in their everyday life. Let’s see if this combination will make things work.

If you use iPhone before, you will get along with N1 within minutes. You tap and navigate the phone just like iPhone. Compare with iPhone, N1 has less applications. But N1 App Market has everything that you will need for everyday use. No fancy, good enough to use it without complaint.

Alright, I used to worry about if my N1 will work normally in China. I am currently in Shanghai where I write this post. My Gmail on N1 works like a charm. Calendar is good, contact work just fine. Everything on the Google cloud is functioning without problem.

The only weird issue is that I cannot use Google on my Opera Mini, which seems to be blocked in China. I can use the N1 browser to search on Google.com but not Opera Mini. I then find an official statement issued by Opera:

On Friday November 20, 2009, Opera Software started directing users of the international version of the Opera Mini mobile browser in China to the Chinese version. Opera Mini is the world’s most popular mobile browser with more than 35 million monthly users worldwide. The difference between the Chinese and the international versions is that the former connects to compression servers within China while the latter connects to servers outside China. In more direct terms, this means that users of Opera Mini in China are using Opera’s servers in China to fetch, compress and process the Web pages before they are returned to the mobile phone. Benefits enjoyed by Opera Mini users in any country, including China, are higher speed, lower costs and an overall improved mobile Web browsing experience. Opera Software is not making statements regarding the background for this decision.

Anyway, my experience of N1 is above satisfaction. Worth to say a few words to recommend it.

If you have watched the iAd demo, it is not a display type of advertising nor anything close to the conventional message-based advertising. It is an embedded ad spot inside an iPhone App where the App users will interact with the advertisement. It is not a click on the banner. The advertising experience is like an embedded mini site created using HTML 5 for the rich content such as animation and video. Flash is completely out of the picture of iAd.

Unlike Facebook’s In-App advertising, Apple will be the sole company to serve the ads so there won’t be any opportunity for the 3rd party ad network. But we will expect to see new analytics platform come out very soon and there should be a new set of metrics to measure the end user interactions.

When Steve Jobs was demonstrating iAd, he somehow unveiled a very important critical success factor “the target audience patience level” but in a reverse scenario. Jobs is certainly not a guy who plays game on his iPhone very often. He was very impatient to play the game and immediately jumped to interact with the ad. I guess this scenario is too good to be true. Well, that’s why contextually relevancy, compare to ad creative, rules the advertising world when it comes to the end user engagement.

I have doubt… for that 30 minutes per day per device of the user interaction with an App, how much patience level that we can get from the target audiences? And how much that we can get after factoring out the relevancy from 1 billion ad opportunities? Looks like Apple will leave this question to the advertisers.

I handle quite a lot of B2B marketing in China. In my opinion, Google is always an effective platform for lead generation. Because the Chinese economy is still export-driven where the Chinese exporters are looking for overseas buyers, B2B marketing in China means overseas buyer marketing. Previously Google has launched a special Adwords service called “TradeYep” in China for B2B lead generation. TradeYep does everything in a box from building a simple website, keywords research, English Adwords copy, off-the-shelf Google Analytics, etc. It is a service tailor-made for the Chinese exporters who want to engage overseas buyers.

TradeYep is developed by Google China for the advertising on overseas Google platforms. So technically it shouldn’t be affected by the shutdown of Google.CN. But whether or not Google can manage to keep Google.com operating behind the Chinese Firewall remains a question. If not, I will doubt about why the Chinese exporters are still willing to pay for the service.

What would be the alternative? Baidu is not an option because it is a domestic media. In fact all the search engines in China are developed for domestic use and the ranking algorithms are developed primarily to favor the Chinese contents.

Take another example. Travel industry has long been a big advertiser of search marketing. Imagine if you are helping a local travel agency in China who mainly provides service for domestic travel targets the foreigners who live in China. The target audiences use Google everyday but not Google.cn. If Google can’t manage to keep business as usual for Google.com in China, I simply don’t see any better-off marketing alternative.

You may also say most of the expatriates in China are using VPN to keep googling. If this is the case, it will pose another technical challenge because the VPN will mess up the geo-location and it is hard to identify if the target audience is on VPN or not. Search marketers in China will have to play extra smart and tactful from now on.

This is not new to everyone of us in the field. The size and skill issue in the agency world has been a synchronicity. Here is the chronical.

In early 2008, an ANA, IAB and 4A’s joint-study on the marketing & media eco-system suggested, “Brand marketers identified their most critical needs in marketing today to be the acquisition of consumer insights, behavioral targeting and brand strategies. They are looking for leadership from agencies, not just execution.”

The founder of TACODA, Dave Morgan, said in his 2008’s article, “the supply chain of online media planning, buying, sales, delivery, optimization and measurement is a mess.”

And then in the same year, Gary Elliott, the VP of Marketing at HP had made an open statement in an ANA panel said, “I would have to say, with HP, is that I don’t think any of these agency relationships are satisfactory enough that we would continue them without having some degree of experimentation… Agencies are still focused on creating ads and placing the media…all of us in marketing say we generate revenue for the bottom line through branding and direct…the problem is there is more to branding and direct than ads and media.”

In 2009 Sir Martin Sorrell, the CEO of WPP commented “brands’ online spend is lacklustre because the people who run agencies tend to be of an older vintage and are too old and resistant to change.”

Today according to a new study by research firm R3, “marketers in China are rapidly changing the structure of their agency relationships and moving from a ‘one stop shop’ structure to a range of specialist solutions to meet their marketing needs… and there has been a tendency towards specialist digital agencies with 52 per cent of marketers stating they would prefer to use a specialist digital agency than either of their current creative or media agencies.”

Alright, as I’ve seen not much has been changed. The supply chain of online media is still a mess, the vintage still runs the big agencies, big agencies are still just creating ads and placing the media. Except, except the advertisers are now tired of paying the big size one-stop shop. They want strategic mind, innovative with dedication, someone with the right size and good skill to get the job done and meet the bottom line.

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.