China's interactive marketing needs customers to dominate

The Client Needs to leads for Chinese Interactive Marketing

In China, the interactive marketing industry is developing rapidly. In the next few years, it will gradually consolidate and mature, and the birth of one or three or even five interactive marketing agents, they will be able to fully represent the customer communication strategy mix of different media channels.

By then, clients will play a far more important role than they think. Now, almost all agents claim they can do everything and become leaders. Unfortunately, such a company still does not exist, no matter how they declare themselves, it is unrealistic. So by then, customers will need to proactively bring together different kinds of agents to sit at the same table and turn one single communication into an interactive opportunity, including advertising, PR, offline, and interactive agents. Unfortunately, customers don't usually do that.

Let's sit at the same table.

We, as an interactive agent, have never shown that we can dominate advertising and PR, and our expertise lies in interactivity and how to motivate a user to perform the appropriate interactive operations. Therefore, we know what elements should appear in TV commercials and print ads to better use the budget, thereby increasing the success rate of user active interaction, and this does not cost much. Customers can always ask for advice about which websites or events should be in the TV commercials to direct audience traffic to these additional channels. Alternatively, customers can decide which information is in a TV or print ad, and then we design the interactive content of the Web to match the customer's needs.

If customers give us the opportunity to be the leader on this table, we will not start a revolution, nor will we try to interfere even with educational advertising and PR agents doing their job well. We communicate with them, understand what they are doing, and try to find opportunities to integrate some of the action slogans, information, and users to motivate them to channel their communications, which in practice does not detract from the quality of the communication, the spread of content and the results they expect. Or if the customer does not want us to do this, and we do not wish to integrate the interactive activities under the lead line, then it is up to them to do the work that leads to the process. The customer has the responsibility to decide whether we should be responsible for the cooperation with the advertising and PR agents, or to complete the integration by themselves.

FAW Volkswagen did so. For the past three years, we have been sitting at the same table with their advertising agencies to identify brand strategies for brands and products. Advertising agencies are responsible for creative work in the channels of television advertising, sales terminals and magazines, and we are responsible for proposing and developing interactive content to integrate these strategies. The effect is surprisingly good. One year, we in advertising and public relations agents on top of a combination of Polaris and Kodak promotional activities, called "Bora New Life Impression Grand Prix." We put forward the concept of covering magazines, PR and, of course, the entire interactive creative network. The execution of the whole activity has maintained a high degree of consistency in all the different channels of communication, and the ultimate effect of the activity is very good.

Instead of just making a website around Bora, we're more concerned with lifestyles than just cars. Audience groups to visit the site to explore different people on the urban lifestyle of different views and views. The website does not show details of the vehicle, price or more dealer information. We have produced different video, sound and picture materials for our users, which are used to represent the models, mainly using music-combined video to visually depict modern urban lifestyles. People are invited to regroup the various materials we offer, make their own video clips--flash animations, add voice and comment. The theme of the whole event is "let us discover together, create together, share the infinite possibility of the urban way of life together!" "The event also set up a number of prizes for users to win, including a Bora sedan, Kodak cameras, free stamping and so on." The event has been a great success. In the first two months, millions of users visited the site and had thousands of registrations a day.

The FAW-Volkswagen is very intelligent because they are aware of not having enough experience in what to do and how to do it, so they let agents sit at a table and talk to them, and explain how television, print and online interactions should work together. This is a very harmonious partnership.

In addition, we have an example from Colgate, in an activity where they need to make a decision about who should be the lead of the whole project, the advertising agency, or us. We have made the same proposal as the FAW Volkswagen, which allows us to work with our advertising agencies to make the customer a leader. So the TV commercials made some changes at the end to mention everything we've done online. Without this, there would be no concept of consolidation. Activities will become a simple business behavior, just to the user that you will be our next spokesperson or Colgate Star, can not really encourage user participation, for an event, it will be devastating.

No additional charges exist

In a growing number of cases, the customer is giving us the opportunity to sit at the same table with other agents at the initial stage of strategy formation or project conceptualization, so that we may participate in the development of our major creative strategies. In many projects, we have brought a lot of valuable advice to the whole project, which I think is a form of cooperation rather than competition. The most important thing for a customer is to realize that an interactive agent, like other agents, should sit at the same table at the same time. While they often ignore this, they often ignore the fact that they will be more successful if they put the extra budget in the online media or PR into additional interactive and digital channels.

Back in 2001, as China's first interactive agent, we worked with Rhodes public relations (rudder Finn) to launch an integrated interactive campaign for the Audi A6 sedan, and one of the things we did was to make sure that Rhodes PR mentioned in the event newsletter that the login activity site was registered, and certified users will be in the public relations roadshow activities to get a special opportunity to test drive. As a result, we got 10,000 user registrations in just one months and sold 100 Audi A6 cars! Through the offline PR campaign plus tens of thousands of registered users, Audi has achieved a fairly high target audience coverage, and even a number of registered users to buy their cars, and all this, Audi no longer need to pay even a penny.

Finally, if you have a website, imagine if that would be just an extra charge? And each of your individual channels of communication have a separate site is not the opposite of your brand? Of course, it also includes TV commercials. If they want to learn more, get more benefits, awards or whatever, come on line! You don't have to spend a penny. Instead of spending 30 seconds watching your TVC, some users will choose to spend 10 minutes or more to learn about your brand by browsing through your website.

Of course, agents do not like other agents than themselves to run to their own territory, because everyone is fighting for the same cake market. Advertising agencies would never want to open that boundary line. In fact, this is a huge misunderstanding that the internet will never be more impossible to kill TV commercials, especially in markets like China, where television advertising is still the most important means of boosting brand attention and promoting sales.

We have been trying to influence our customers by having them print their brand web sites on all printed matter and appearing in all their TV commercials. The target audience will be able to gain more information about the brand, win more prizes, or discover or experience more brand-related things. At the initial stage of the discussion, let the interactive agents sit at the table, which will not cost much more. As I said before, if the integration of different channels does not occur, then the only customer who should be responsible is the client, not anyone else.