2017 Digital Marketing Mid-Year Observation Report

2/1 of 2017 has been marked off. Riding on the wave of digitalization, brand marketing and consumers’ lives continue to integrate and penetrate each other. Through the complex marketing offline and topics, SocialBeta has two deeper feelings:

1. Brands are trying every possible way to find and extend consumer experience. In addition to conventional new and old media, products and stores have also become channels for delivering brand experience.

2. Our understanding of marketing can no longer be limited to advertising. In the past, we believed that advertising was a means of publicizing brand marketing appeals, and over time, marketing became synonymous with advertising. Today, only by broadening their horizons and not limiting themselves to just one picture or one text can brands discover more good ways to communicate with consumers.

In the first half of the year, many campaigns are worth talking about, precisely because brands were the first to try new things in certain areas and with certain methods when communicating with consumers in the digital world.

Standing at the crossroads of digital marketing transformation, the only constant is probably change. This is a reminder that only by constantly innovating and making changes can we adapt to and lead the changes in today's consumer life. SocialBeta has launched the "2017 Digital Marketing Mid-Year Observation Report", which points out some marketing strategies that you can follow and learn from in the challenges of the second half of the year from multiple dimensions such as digital brand building, digital experience design between brands and consumers, demand creation, and digital product or service upgrades.

Observation 1: After social media became infrastructure, campaign materialization became an extension of consumer experience

Let’s talk about one of the most impressive cases in the first half of the year - a campaign that Oreo did with music boxes as the core. There are already many analysis articles on the highlights of this case, but SocialBeta would like to talk about: In addition to the continuous sinking of digital channels for communicating with young people, matching products are sometimes the best "key" to integrate into consumers' lifestyles.

1. The same idea, why is it more popular this year?

If you are familiar with the series of actions taken by Oreo from last year to this year, then you may know that the creativity of this year's limited edition music box is actually a continuation of the jukebox that the agency FCB Shanghai created for Oreo last year. In the 1.0 concept version, the Oreo cookies turned into "little records" and were able to play six different Oreo theme songs, including rock, jazz, electronic, and Chinese style. This year's physical version simply adds the sense of participation of "take a bite of Oreo and there will be a different song" on the basics. But judging from the results, the 20,000 music box sets that Oreo initially released and the 4,000 restocked ones that followed were quickly sold out after they were put on the shelves.

Why is the same idea more popular this year? SocialBeta would like to propose a concept called "marketing campaign materialization", that is, based on marketing appeals, brands will present their core ideas in a non-mass-produced physical form and sell them with products in order to increase the voice of the campaign. The purpose is to increase the threshold for consumers to actively spread the word by creating a fresh and scarce experience.

So, what psychological needs of consumers does this biscuit record music box meet: a piece of biscuit adds an extra entertainment element, which increases the pleasant experience on the product; the customizable product + limited-time and limited-quantity sales model stimulates consumers to "show off and share" on social media.

Since 2015, when Oreo launched the “Play with Oreo” marketing campaign, Oreo’s definition of the brand is no longer limited to satisfying consumers’ appetites. Fun and imagination are new elements added to this cookie. The customized version launched last year allows consumers to select, color and design their favorite packaging when purchasing on Tmall . In a sense, this is also a physical manifestation of customized marketing.

2. For brands that want to sell products, physical marketing may combine communication with sales appeal

In the years since the rise of social networks , the social marketing trend of brands "going online" has made it possible to connect with consumers, but blindly pursuing an online feel is not suitable for every brand, especially those that want to sell goods. If the online excitement cannot be combined with the desire to sell goods, viral spread will be futile.

In the first half of the year, Nike and New World also tried to materialize their marketing campaigns, leveraging new ideas to promote product sales from a communication perspective. Nike has specially designed a set of "Medals of Courage" for children. In fact, it is a set of sticker band-aids. The original intention of the creation is to allow children to play and exercise freely. When Xin Shi Xiang was selling Bob Dylan's poetry collection, it also designed a potato chip packaging for it, which attracted attention.

Comments:

Consumers who are constantly upgrading their consumption demands along Maslow's needs curve now have more and more incentives to pay for a certain product. In addition to satisfying the most basic physiological experience or usage experience, consumers are more concerned about the social experience, emotional needs and personalized satisfaction that the brand can bring. In particular, these additional consumer experiences attached to brands or products are no longer a plus point for the brand, but have become a compulsory course.

In a sense, the materialization of marketing campaigns can be understood as an extension of the tools or methods for consumers to experience brands. When social media channels become infrastructure and marketing methods centered around product packaging and new product development cause consumers to become aesthetically fatigued, materializing campaign ideas may be a new medium to stimulate consumers' excitement.

Observation 2: “People-friendly” pop-up stores, a marketing tornado after social aesthetic fatigue

Pop-up store marketing swept through the first half of 2017 like a tornado.

This business model, which was born at the beginning of this century, was originally a temporary store designed by brands for promotion and publicity with themes, concepts, seasons, trends, commemorations, etc., to quickly test market reactions. Now it has become a new means for brands to attract consumers with "social aesthetic fatigue" and "interaction fatigue". How to enhance consumer experience, promote brand exposure, and create communication topics... These demands have become the new mission of current pop-up store marketing.

1. Has “pop-up store” become a “people-friendly behavior” for luxury brands?

Chanel's Coco Café pop-up shop, which has opened in Singapore, Toronto, Tokyo and Shanghai, is actually a coffee shop transformed to recommend a newly released lip gloss. The store will also provide Chanel's celebrity makeup series for customers to try. With the dedicated promotion of celebrities and KOLs on social media and the exquisite layout of the pop-up store, Chanel provides a large number of potential consumers with the opportunity to get close to the brand. These users, especially female consumers, will also invest "social currency" in return. Similar luxury brand pop-up cases include YSL's pop-up yacht party.

The traditional spokesperson strategy of luxury brands is gradually becoming ineffective for young people. Young consumers with a stronger desire to buy are more inclined to be influenced by KOLs, word-of-mouth recommendations from friends, and their own personal experiences when making decisions. Therefore, the flash marketing purpose of these luxury brands is to have an in-depth experience with consumers, with the offline flash as the center, and users spontaneously drawing circles in their own online and offline communication circles. In terms of connecting online and offline, users who participated in the event left their information, which is the most valuable potential customer base for the brand, making subsequent marketing more accurate.

2. Internet brands’ flash marketing makes the experience more ceremonial

The convenience of digital life often makes people feel less bounded between virtual and reality. Therefore, when Internet brands or non-physical brands occasionally appear in our offline scenes, it can also bring some unexpected sense of ritual. From a brand perspective, this way of moving from online to offline can help us understand more real consumer feedback and enhance user awareness and favorability.

NetEase News and Ele.me opened a pop-up milk tea shop around the topic of " sorrowful tea ", making the presence of sorrowful marketing fully felt. QQ Music has opened what is claimed to be the world's first digital music pop-up store, but in essence it is a relatively closed offline setting that allows users to deeply experience the various functions of QQ Music and enjoy a high-quality listening experience.

Comments:

Compared to the initial pop-up stores that were created for purposes such as quickly testing consumers, providing site recommendations, and displaying merchandise, the purpose of today’s pop-up stores has completely shifted from purely commercial purposes to marketing-centric business practices. The core value of pop-up store marketing lies in capturing people's unreserved curiosity and fascination with fleeting things, and is therefore widely favored by brands ranging from luxury goods to retail fast-moving consumer goods brands, and from online to offline.

On the other hand, changes in consumer purchasing behavior have also indirectly contributed to the popularity of offline marketing activities such as pop-up stores in the first half of the year. More and more young people tend to go to nearby physical sales points to experience products first, and then look for channels that can offer the lowest prices online to buy, making experience instead of promotion the keyword for brand offline activities . Therefore, the limited time nature makes the theme and consumer experience content of offline marketing activities such as pop-up stores particularly important. What is fed back to the online world is not only spontaneous social sharing, but also consumer purchase conversions .

The popularity of pop-up store marketing also shows that offline is being redefined, and traditional retail stores are upgrading from displaying goods to creating consumer experiences and personalized physical services.

Observation 3: The concept of “sorrow” is an upgrade of the brand’s understanding and expression of young people

"Sorrow" may be one of the marketing keywords in the first half of the year, but in fact, last year, a vivid and imaginative Internet celebrity word appeared, which planted the seeds for the spread of sorrow on social media, namely Ge You's collapse. SocialBeta author Xunkong wrote in "Negative energy coffee and sad tea are so popular, how to do the marketing of "sad" culture? 》 analyzes the popularity of the culture of sadness and argues that today’s "sadness" is different from negativity, despair, and negative energy. It is a feeling of incompetence, helplessness and powerlessness, and this emotion spreads like a virus on social networks.

Many brands have targeted the sad mood, which has its own topics and hot spots, and created wave after wave of "sad marketing". This has also become one of the highlights of the brand's cultural insights into young people in the first half of the year.

1. NetEase News x Ele.me, let consumers drink a cup of sorrow

At the end of April, NetEase News and Ele.me jointly launched a pop-up store called "Sangcha" which was open for only four days. This store was originally written by netizens as a joke to open a Sangcha opposite the popular Heytea , but it was quickly realized as a pop-up store that was open for only four days. Endorsed by Wang Sansan who has a very sad expression. Wang Sansan also wrote a special column about "sorrowful culture" "Life is so depressing, why do you still love to drink toxic chicken soup so much | Sansan has a joke", and the most important thing is that the brand has disassembled and re-expressed sadness, such as "Your life is an oolong macchiato", "You are not nothing, you are also sick, oolong tea", and effectively combined with the product, allowing consumers to truly enjoy this cup of sad emotion. The short-term hunger marketing also stimulated consumers to experience offline and share online.

2. New hope turns into hopelessness, leaving young people facing a bleak life

In addition to Sorrow Tea, there was also a "hopeless" yogurt in the first half of the year, and this was actually a sorrow marketing campaign by New Hope Dairy. The brand even carried out a crude offline campaign - it printed many "没" stickers and sneaked into convenience stores. When the store clerks were not paying attention, they pasted "没" on the New Hope Yogurt logo. Consumers who were unaware of the truth actually bought the "没希望" yogurt. In addition, the brand also launched two new products: "Unripe Yogurt & Heart-breaking Yogurt". A series of posters have been made for this "Hopeless" yogurt. Each sentence exposes the hard life, grasps the pain points of young people, and uses self-deprecating methods to make them brave enough to face the bleak life without being embarrassed.

With the help of social media, these brands' mourning marketing activities have caused some degree of screen-sweeping and sparked discussion and thinking among many netizens. Xunkong pointed out that the reason why this type of mourning culture marketing is so popular in some aspects is because (it sees into) young people's aversion to chicken soup culture. They like mourning culture products, which is actually a kind of self-mockery of their real life. Playing tricks on bottles and names is nothing new, but New Hope cleverly uses its own opposite to provide a medium for young people to mock themselves.

Comments:

The expression of a brand is often closely connected with our daily lives. It is both an understanding and a proposition: the brand is also part of the construction of our daily world.

SocialBeta once analyzed in an article about the top 10 trends in digital marketing in 2016 that the focus of brand youth marketing is first to find out what is popular among young people and understand their fashion and trends. As brands pay more and more attention to and understand this group of main consumers, it can be seen that brands' understanding of young people is also gradually deepening. From Coca-Cola nickname bottles and dialogue bottles, they share happiness with young people and deliver fun. To some extent, sad marketing with some negative elements is favored by brands, which also reflects the brand's progress in actively capturing and expressing the more real life status of young people, and is also a manifestation of a more open brand mentality.

However, it should be noted that in marketing activities that are based on insights into young people such as "sorrowful culture" and "empty-nest youth", brands need to strike a balance between youthfulness and brand tone.

Observation 4: In addition to information flow advertising , marketing has also become more native

The concept of native advertising has specifically pointed to native information flow advertising since its inception, realizing the content-based advertising.

Compared to the television era when brands pursued a powerful advertising magic bullet effect, today's brands face a more fragmented media environment and have become more pervasive. Consumers have also spontaneously formed a set of automatic advertising blocking rules. For example, when they receive information flow ads that match their demographic attributes but are not needed, they either ignore them or block them.

In the first half of the year, we discovered the following native marketing methods. There are brands that approach the market from a social perspective, brands that look for communication opportunities through question-and-answer sessions, and brands that directly turn brand marketing into offline schools for users. Each method has its own merits, but the common point may be that these brands have learned how to integrate their brands into consumers' lives with restraint.

1. Social Gifts

WeChat red envelopes have extended the traditional custom of sending and receiving red envelopes during the Chinese New Year into a social activity that everyone can participate in. Tencent is also slowly opening up this social magic to brands. In February this year, Starbucks and Tencent jointly launched a new social gift experience " Say It with Stars ". Starbucks became the first retail brand to use the " WeChat Gift Card" product, integrating coffee cards into the social scenarios of WeChat friends and experiencing a new digital consumption experience.

2. Social Q&A and Knowledge Q&A

At the end of May , Trip Advisor launched an information flow advertisement on WeChat Moments , targeting people with potential demand for outbound travel. But what was special was that they wrote in the copy: "This is an advertisement where you can ask me questions! @TripAdvisor Interact, if it's interesting, I'll answer!" Looking closely at the replies in the friends' circle, they actually replied. A core team of about 10 people, consisting of colleagues from TripAdvisor's marketing operations team, products and agencies, answer questions from users behind the scenes. Thousands of questions were received within just one day of going online, including questions that teased the owner of the homepage, such as: Who are you, are you a male or a female? If Booking and Ctrip fell into the water, who would you save first? Wait, the 10-member team will also answer a lot of travel-related questions.

If you find the question-and-answer ads in Moments novel, you may not know that Mafengwo had already implemented a similar approach on Zhihu in March this year. Mafengwo asked a question through its Zhihu institutional account: Have you ever thought about where the "end of the world" we can reach is? Users are invited to give their own answers to the "end of the world". The destination with the highest number of likes on both platforms will be defined as the "end of the world" for Chinese travelers, and the answer contributors will also receive round -trip tickets and travel funds to the "end of the world" in their minds. In the subsequent 520 event, QQ Music also invited friends to express their love through music in the form of a question and answer session.

3. Offline courses

The popularity of pop-up store marketing in the first half of the year has allowed brands to find another effective way to communicate with consumers, and Apple intends to turn this offline communication into a long-term project. Today At Apple is a series of free activities launched by Apple in its offline stores. They offer more than 60 interactive courses in creative skills, including photo and video, music, programming, art and design, parent-child, teachers, and business in Apple Store retail stores around the world. Products and other topics. The purpose is also very clear, which is to allow consumers to subtly influence their consumption decisions and brand loyalty to Apple when they understand and learn various courses.

Comments:

Scott Brinker, a world-renowned blogger in the MarTech field, once put forward a hypothesis in 2013: marketing is expanding. "The number of touchpoints with consumers and potential consumers is expanding. Digitalization is not a single touchpoint, but a collection of multiple touchpoints. From web pages to applications, to self-media , to the unprecedentedly prosperous social media, as long as you are willing, you can always find dozens of touchpoints where you can or should interact deeply with the audience." Therefore, in response to the increasing number of touchpoints, brands also need to find a matching way of contact. If you simply press Ctrl+c and Ctrl+v to open the advertisement on different platforms, it will definitely backfire. Socializing, sharing, Q&A, experiencing...how consumers experience digital life. If brands can delve deeper into it, solutions to make marketing more native are also hidden there.

Observation 5: The value of media platforms to brands lies not only in content co-creation, but also in their ability to endorse brands

One of the hot topics in the media industry in the past few years is that traditional media is declining under the impact of new media . But in fact, it is more accurate to say that new media channels are killing traditional media. However, the so-called old media still retains some advantages that the current new media does not have, or is catching up with, such as professional content production capabilities, grasp of content tone, and influence accumulated over many years.

So we see that media platforms are taking over from advertising agencies as creative planners. On the one hand, they are able to produce content that suits the preferences and tastes of their own audiences for the survival of the brand, which is a professional ability; on the other hand, their influence among their audiences is increasingly favored by brands, which is media endorsement.

1. How does Tmall let the five major media interpret its new concept?

Tmall, which joined the 618 battle this year, carried out a brand upgrade in May, upgrading its original slogan "Just go to Tmall" to "Go to Tmall for an ideal life", expressing its desire to upgrade its image from a sales platform in consumers' perception to a new positioning as an advocate of an ideal lifestyle.

In order to interpret it more concretely, Tmall extracted and summarized the five most prominent consumption trends at present - single consumerism, smart life consumption, green and healthy consumption, hobby consumption, and cross-age and gender consumption, and put forward five keywords "Enjoy being alone", "Meticulous", "Happy and green", "Playthings to set goals", and "Personality freedom", and invited Xia Yu, Li Jian and others as witnesses.

In addition, New Weekly and Tmall jointly released the "Top Ten Trends in Playthings and Aspirations", GQ Zhizu selected the 10 most representative "contradictory personalities" (sissy straight men, social geeks, etc.) for Tmall based on the consumption trend of "personality freedom", and Curiosity Daily analyzed the ideal life of young people who enjoy life alone from the perspective of curiosity and found out what fun it has, and jointly released a "Report on the Ideal Life of Young People Who Enjoy Life Alone" . An ideal life think tank has been formed by many media organizations including Lens, New Weekly, GQ, National Geographic China, Curiosity Daily, Geek Park, etc., which interprets and endorses it from the perspective of media attributes.

2. What value does the co-creation of media content that weakens its commercial nature bring to MINI?

MINI, another master of content co-creation, fully reflects its content marketing strategy in its signature slogan on Zhihu’s homepage: to enable a more exciting urban life and provide creative solutions. The group MINI wants to attract is the creative class.

This year, MINI launched the new COUNTRYMAN series, and its content marketing also revolved around lifestyle. The slogan "There is always a good story" made people's imagination go beyond the car. MINI invited Pu Shu, Huang Jue, Ethan Ruan and Rene Liu to shoot four short story films titled #There are always good stories# for the COUNTRYMAN model. The media that tell the story together are Lens, Esquire, etc.

Lens filmed the story of Pu Shu's trip to India, "Going to See the Ganges", for Mini, telling the story of Pu Shu's trip to India and what he saw and thought about music. As the Lens of a humanities magazine, its perspective is more like shooting a travel story of Pu Shu in the form of a documentary rather than shooting a commercial. The humanistic color displayed in it is also conveyed to MINI and its creative class.

Comments:

Brands and media work together to create content, and the logic behind this may be the same as the brand's preference for advocating a certain lifestyle. Let’s talk about the latter first. Whether it is Tmall, MINI, or other brands, proposing, advocating or integrating into the current lifestyle is a theme that brands often sublimate in their communication. On the one hand, as a summary of consumers' diversified consumption choices, lifestyle no longer just describes life, it also reflects consumers' attitude towards life. Advocating lifestyle is the best way to make a brand enter the minds of consumers. In the past, the media had the greatest influence on consumers' lifestyles. As a third-party authority, traditional media still has residual influence on consumers. In fact, when brands choose partners for content co-creation, they are also selecting representatives or authorities on lifestyles. This can also be understood as a flank attack by brands trying to enter the preferred lifestyle of consumers.

Observation 6: Without young talents, local brands are competing for a place in the "consumption upgrade"

Young people are still the main theme of digital marketing, so brands are racking their brains to find ways to approach young people. The spokesperson strategy is a relatively easy one, so you can see that the daily chemical brands under giants such as Procter & Gamble and Unilever: Crest, Safeguard, Tide, Ariel, etc., have successively invited popular idols such as Lu Han , TFBoys, Zhang Yixing, and Yang Yang.

But for local brands, despite seeing the huge consumption potential of young people, the high endorsement fees are not affordable for brands that have just started to change their mindsets. Moreover, as you can see, young spokespersons and commonly used daily chemical products are not often compatible. The fans' joyful payment and the ordinary consumers' indifferent reaction seem to be two different worlds.

So, how did these local brands, which previously entered thousands of households through products + channels and caught up with the tide of consumption upgrading, regain the minds of consumers?

1. Make up lessons on "brand image building" and narrative skills

The younger generation, who grew up in an era of great material abundance, has a definition of consumption that goes far beyond simple material satisfaction. Impulse buying, personalized customization, empathetic consumption... constitute a diverse consumption landscape. Beyond products, this generation of young consumers pays more attention to the brand's concept, image, reputation, and the consumption satisfaction it brings. Therefore, in a fragmented media environment, brands are increasingly becoming an important channel for consumer communication. As a result, some local brands have begun to make up for their past neglect of brand building.

Qinyuan, a local brand that has been engaged in the water purification field for 19 years, has obvious advantages in its products in the industry. In particular, in June this year, at GWPS, a top industry summit, we won two awards, which can be understood as obtaining " Oscar "-level industry certification. But this also poses a challenge: how can Qinyuan transform its long-standing industry recognition into consumers’ mental recognition? The root cause of this is that traditional brands, which have long been dominated by product business and channels, have not yet adapted to the rapid changes brought about by consumption upgrades. Therefore, Qinyuan began to focus on the creation of its brand image, and the introduction of the "Invisible Dad" brand image is the emotional memory point that the brand continues to strengthen to consumers.

2. Creative ways to play against traditional TV ads

The distance between brands and consumers is shrinking at an accelerated pace. At the same time, in a fragmented media environment, the contact points between brands and consumers are also expanding. For brands, TVC + strong exposure is no longer enough.

If you didn’t click on this fan advertisement from electrical appliance brand Airmate, you might guess that it was talking about the product’s high-quality performance. The fan’s usage scenarios are also inseparable from the keywords "summer", "heat" and "night", but Airmate broke the conventional practice. They invited 26 engineers to conduct an experiment using 120 fans and 1 feather. Under the precise control of the fans, the feather performed a visual poem of wind titled "Waiting for the Wind to Come."

This advertisement received positive reviews from many netizens. The fan that fights against the monotony of summer has aroused people's pursuit of long-lost freedom, reminded them of the beauty and poetry of the wind, and also given fan products a new and emotional usage scenario. In the fragmented era of social media, consumers' attention is scattered, and it is almost impossible for them to pay attention to a brand's communication in all channels. Therefore, Airmate linked all its communication activities to create a large scene that is linked together: creative TVC and wind-chasing notebook posters, as well as an interactive H5 with the theme of "Suddenly I want to be blown away by the wind".

Comments:

On the surface, in order to continuously improve their presence in front of consumers, you see these brands presenting a new look that is completely different from the old-fashioned and unoriginal ones in the past, but in essence, these changes are rooted in changes in consumers' purchasing paths. In the stereotypical marketing perception, there is a spatial and temporal distance between marketing stimulation and actual conversion. But digitalization is smoothing and dissolving all of this.

From offline to online, and from online to offline, on the one hand, contact, understanding, sales conversion, and consumer decisions are becoming more and more real-time. On the other hand, digitalization is not a single touchpoint, but a collection of multiple touchpoints. Therefore, by connecting the marketing department and the e-commerce department, and linking media channels and e-commerce platforms, the significance of internal brand change may be far greater than external brand reshaping. This is also the real top-down digital transformation of the brand, so as not to fall behind when consumers' purchasing paths change.

Observation 7: Advertising giants tend to integrate, and consulting companies enter the market

In recent years, the traditional agency model represented by 4A has been criticized for its overly complex business structure and the resulting opacity. Brand owners are also re-examining existing agency relationships in an effort to improve marketing efficiency and streamline costs.

After criticizing the shortcomings in the media supply chain at the beginning of the year, Procter & Gamble's Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard called for a simpler agency structure at the 4A Transformation Summit in April this year. Another major advertiser, Unilever, also plans to reduce the number of creative agencies worldwide by about half.

Faced with brands' demand for a "one-stop agency shop" and the industry's current situation of slow growth and declining profits, large advertising groups are seeking change under heavy pressure, while also facing external challenges from the entry of consulting firms.

1. Large advertising groups tend to integrate

The biggest news in the advertising industry in the first half of the year was Publicis Groupe’s announcement of its withdrawal from next year’s Cannes Lions Festival. The new CEO of Publicis Groupe said that it will cut investment in industry awards, and the funds saved will be invested in the construction of the AI ​​platform Marcel. Publicis hopes that Marcel can bring a new approach to operations and creative inspiration.

Since the beginning of this year, WPP, the world's largest advertising group, has also made drastic reforms to the structure of its digital, media and creative agencies: At the beginning of the year, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide announced that its sub-brands would gradually merge into a unified, single group brand;

▲ Sub-brand of Ogilvy

Agencies MEC and Maxus under GroupM were reorganised into a new company combining media, content and technology capabilities; Neo@Ogilvy was re-assigned to Mindshare after 10 years; and digital agency Possible was recently absorbed into Wunderman.

Havas, the world's sixth largest advertising group, also announced in early March that it would reorganize its creative and media businesses globally, unifying the business and financial profit and loss (P&L) of the former Havas Creative Group and Havas Media Group; and creating a more unified, simplified, customer-centric organizational structure.

Behind these initiatives, all advertising giants hope to enable business units such as media, data, creativity and CRM to collaborate better to meet customers' digital transformation needs.

2. Consulting companies enter the market, with 4 seats in the top 10 global agents

While agencies rarely face consultancies in big client pitches, the threat from Accenture Interactive, Deloitte Digital, PwC Digital and IBM’s iX unit is real. These companies help CMOs solve business problems that cannot be solved with traditional advertising through a range of strategic and data analysis solutions.

According to Ad Age's 2017 ranking of the world's top 10 agency groups, digital marketing units under Accenture, PwC, IBM and Deloitte occupied four seats, ranking only below WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, IPG and Dentsu.

Last year, only Accenture and IBM made the top 10. In the individual ranking of digital agencies, Accenture Interactive topped the list for the second consecutive year.

Ben Tolley, partner at M&A consultant Clarity, even boldly predicted that within the next five years, a consulting or IT giant will buy at least one of the six major advertising groups.

Comments:

Whether it is the internal integration of advertising giants or the external challenges from consulting firms, the deep-seated reason behind it is that market demand has changed. The emphasis on digitalization within companies has also risen from "digital marketing" at the tool level to the strategic level of "digital business."

According to market research firm Gartner, in 2017, CMOs' IT budget (including data analysis, front-end and back-end IT spending) will exceed that of CIOs. In other words, CMOs have realized that marketing is no longer just a matter of promotion, media buying and advertising . What is more important is to build digital capabilities internally and create a consumer-centric customer experience at all touchpoints. To do this, companies need to be prepared in terms of mindset, infrastructure and organizational structure.

After all, compared to becoming a single-link supplier or "production company", striving to become a brand's digital business partner is obviously a wise move to "stand out from the crowd."

Observation 8: Marketing Technology (MarTech) and Advertising Technology (AdTech) are converging

For the highly complex and specialized digital marketing industry, AdTech and MarTech have long been seen as two distinct fields. However, in the past two years, as advertisers have placed increasing emphasis on transparency, ROI of digital advertising , and cross-channel customer experience, the situation seems to have changed and the two have begun to converge.

1. AdTech from the supply side perspective

AdTech is a technology from the supply-side perspective. It refers to the system used for advertising sales, purchasing, delivery, and targeting. It is designed to meet the needs of various websites to monetize traffic and advertisers to reach more audiences. AdTech’s origins can even be traced back to the history of the internet itself. In 1993, the first Internet banner ad was launched. With the booming development of various digital media, AdTech is also constantly developing and evolving towards more refined audience targeting methods.

Compared to MarTech, AdTech is more likely to be adopted on a large scale. However, the effectiveness of AdTech is difficult to measure and can only rely on attribution analysis of the final conversion. In addition, the metrics that AdTech provides to marketers (such as clicks, impressions, etc.) cannot be directly linked to the company's business goals.

2. MarTech from the advertiser’s perspective

MarTech is a technology from the advertiser's perspective, and its emergence stems from the internal demand for sales and marketing automation in enterprises. The tools it can provide to corporate marketing and sales teams include lead cultivation, customer relationship management, marketing funnel analysis and attribution analysis.

For example, CRM systems provided by companies like Salesforce can help brands simplify sales and marketing processes and improve the conversion efficiency of the sales funnel. The emergence of marketing automation tools such as Marketo and Hubspot can help brands scale their lead nurturing capabilities.

Using these platforms or tools, marketers can manage every stage of the customer journey and promote interactions with consumers across screens and touchpoints (such as social media, apps, and emails). At the same time, by integrating customer data from different channels and data sources , MarTech can also transform the data assets accumulated by the enterprise into executable marketing insights, laying the foundation for more relevant and personalized communication between brands and consumers. For example, marketers can promote cross-selling opportunities through customized messaging, emails, etc. to increase revenue and customer lifetime value.

Comments:

Why do we say the two are merging?

A notable sign is that the well-known IT consulting company Gartner discussed digital marketing and advertising technology together for the first time in the technology maturity curve released last year.

According to Gartner, “Marketers’ emphasis on data-driven strategies has driven the convergence of MarTech and AdTech. From a strategic perspective, this convergence is the result of companies focusing on providing valuable customer experiences to consumers, regardless of the products and services they offer.”

Another sign is that IT giants Oracle, Adobe, and Salesforce have also set their sights on competing in customer experience (CX), and have spent heavily to acquire advertising and marketing technology companies in the hope of winning more digital transformation budgets from CMOs.

What impact will the integration of AdTech and MarTech have on the entire industry? Joe Stanhope, vice president and chief analyst at market research firm Forrester, noted that the integration of the two is not a zero-sum game . Advertising and marketing technologies can eventually prosper and coexist, and marketers, advertising agencies, and technology suppliers can all benefit from the general trend of integration:

Marketers take full control of customer journeys: The integration of the two provides a technical foundation for creating a consistent consumer experience.

MarTech Suppliers maintain growth momentum: MarTech Suppliers can gain AdTech Suppliers’ technical expertise, infrastructure and media ecosystem networks to extend existing solutions to media touchpoints such as digital media and mobile.

AdTech suppliers break through the oligopoly "walled garden" ecosystem: The integration with MarTech can enable AdTech suppliers to reduce their dependence on media in their business model, and enhance their relationship with direct customers by strengthening supervision of privacy and traffic fraud.

Advertising agencies can enter emerging markets: Advertising agencies have the opportunity to seize the dividends brought by data and technology-driven customer journey optimization and get more budgets.

Observation Nine: E-commerce platforms switch to marketing positions, open up data, and build marketing power

The long-tail effect of P&G's bombardment of dark media supply chains is gradually emerging. One of the main targets of bombardment, Facebook released several transparency tools in June to give advertisers better control over ads. For example, to solve the problem that Facebook cannot display the exact location of the ads, Pre-campaign's transparency tool allows advertisers to review in advance, and if advertisers don't like the status of the ads they see, they can choose not to serve certain media. Although neither Facebook nor Google has developed real-time third-party measurement verification. However, in China, brands’ demands for “real, visible and safe” traffic are gradually being implemented from the conceptual level to the action level.

1. Media transparency from concept implementation to action

Weibo and Alibaba have successively announced in-depth cooperation with third-party testing. At the end of June, Weibo and Nelson reached an in-depth data cooperation. Based on Weibo’s big data , it will help advertisers to more comprehensively understand netizens’ behavioral preferences through Weibo’s interest tags, and provide unified measurement standards to evaluate the real-time reach rate for target audiences in digital advertising, helping advertisers and media companies to quickly correct their delivery strategies.

Alibaba has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the third-party data company Mieye System. Uni Desk, an advertising platform under Alibaba Mom, has officially connected with Mieye's AdMonitor product, empowering Mieye to verify at the brand advertising level based on Alibaba's big data.

GroupM China (GroupM) announced the launch of the "Brand Safety Initiative" in the first half of the year, joining forces with major brand owners such as L'Oreal and Nestlé, media platforms such as Tencent, Youku, iQiyi , and third-party testing parties to solve complex and important industry problems such as advertising visibility, advertising fraud and brand security in the online context, focusing on the four main areas of advertising delivery: advertisements are seen, seen by real people, displayed in a safe environment, and seen by target audiences, in order to promote the construction of a safer and more honest digital advertising environment.

2. E-commerce upgrade, Tmall and JD.com open data and marketing capabilities to brands

In the past, media platforms that were only used as terminal delivery channels have become increasingly important in digital marketing, especially these Internet giants. Both Tmall and JD.com are outputting their e-commerce marketing methodology to open up data and marketing capabilities for brands. In particular, JD.com, the JD IDEAL e-commerce marketing methodology released by it marks that JD.com Mall is transforming from an Internet channel vendor into a pan-retail service provider.

But you can also understand that when Alibaba CMO exaggeratedly stated that "there are only two brands in the world now, one on Tmall and the other on the way to Tmall", JD.com also hopes to become one of the main positions for brand digital marketing upgrades. Brand choices have also influenced media giants to embrace these platforms. From the end of last year to this year, Alibaba launched Uni Marketing's global marketing methodology and Brand Databank in terms of data. Publicis has become the first agent partner to connect to Alibaba's global advertising platform (UniDesk). Not long ago, WPP global CEO Sir Su Mingtian also personally led more than 100 senior executives to visit Alibaba to learn about Uni Marketing.

Comments:
While Scott Brinker proposed the assumption that "marketing is expanding", he also assumed that marketing is collapsed. The most direct manifestation is that when consumers are exposed to a marketing stimulus, they can immediately convert the stimulus into a purchase click through the e-commerce platform, or give up quickly. The distance between marketing stimulus and customer experience continues to collapse, approaching zero. This is why e-commerce platforms have such a strong voice.

Observation 10: All in short videos , what have these media platforms come up with?

According to the " Mobile Internet 2017 Summer Report" released by QuestMobile in July, the user scale of the short video industry in the first half of the year was close to 200 million. In the short video platform track, Miaopai ranked first in the industry with a monthly user scale of 286 million, and Kuaishou ranked second, also reached 129 million. The development of short videos has become a contest between platforms.

1. Short videos are becoming the core of all content.

The consumption of billions makes short videos the core of all content.

Zhang Yiming, founder and CEO of Toutiao, has talked about his optimism about short videos many times and said that he would enter the field with the attitude of "ALL IN". So after constantly grabbing the land, Toutiao mainly fought and apps, Xigua Video, which focuses on videos within 4 minutes, Volcano videos aimed at live broadcasts and UGC short videos around 15 seconds, and Douyin, which focuses on short videos and social networking in the pan-music field. Toutiao has a complete layout of information-based, comprehensive, social and tool-based short video platforms in the short video field. In QuestMobile's summer report, Toutiao short video apps are also in the top 10 industries.

Tudou, who has been silent for many years, announced in March that it had fully transformed into a short video platform, which is considered an important point of action in Alibaba's short video strategy. Compared with Youku Tudou's differences that highlight different positionings, iQiyi has opened up to short video content by launching iQiyi account and provides multiple resources such as user portraits , platform data, cooperation resources and share income. The purpose is to complement the long tail of the video content and thus complement the head content.

2. The platform transforms into "creator alliance"

To put it bluntly, short videos still have to be produced by people. Therefore, the media platform's All in for short videos is also reflected in the platform's unscathing money on content creation. Tudou invested 2 billion yuan in cash to create the "Big Fish Plan" to promote the development of PUGC's Big Fish Account content. Toutiao’s subsidies to short video and short video creators are 1 billion yuan.

Alibaba Mom has upgraded cooperation in data, products and traffic to general content cooperation, expanding from vertical media to e-commerce scenario cooperation in the entire region of traffic, promoting cooperation with content producers and various media, and transforming more content production into business opportunities.

After launching an internet celebrity e-commerce platform connecting e-commerce brands and Weibo celebrities, Weibo also focused on short videos. Weibo, Miaopai and MCN institutions such as Wanhe Tianyi and Taomeng reached a strategic cooperation on MCN based on mini dramas and micro variety shows short videos, and established the "Creator Alliance" to introduce high-quality short video content through the MCN management model, and at the same time discover high-quality creators to feed back video content institutions on the Weibo platform.

Comments:

The popularity of short videos and content entrepreneurship is the huge commercial value contained in short videos is unquestionable. However, the exploration of its commercial potential and marketing value is obviously slower than the migration of users. Most brands are still waiting and trying for short videos. Their confusion and difficulties are mainly: the innovative model and marketing influence of short video marketing are still not mature enough, and the cluster effect of short videos and the dislocation of advertisers who prefer to spend a lot of money on big IPs.

But the huge traffic of short videos is very attractive. Currently, brand owners have the following ways to market short videos: create short video information streams and integrate them into the content ecosystem of the platform; create content co-creation with top short video KOLs, etc. However, these fragmented cooperation is difficult to bring sustainable benefits to the brand. However, with the development of top short video KOLs towards brand IP and the platform itself is committed to short video creation, I believe that it can also provide brands with a fertile ground for better and longer-term content marketing.