Recently, Wechat App announced that they would push out
advertisements in the “moment” section in their app. This news immediately generated
much discussion among the public, especially in China, where the majority of
Wechat users live. This move, albeit within expectation, raised a lot of
question on how to advertise in a more personal environment for communication.
Why is that? Let me give you some background on the app itself first.
Wechat is an app across multiple mobile phone platforms that
allows the user to send instant text messages to each other. It functions much
like whatsapp, but with many more extensions that tap into different aspects of
life: a personal page or “moment” much like the facebook idea, a payment system
that can be linked with various bank account, a cooperation with a Chinese taxi
hailing service make it possible to use it for better travel arrangements around
Chinese cities, and they even have radio, audio and video chat functions that
rivals with services such as Skype, facetime, gchat ,etc. Given its vast amount
of functionality and ease of use, it has grown very fast in China and all over
the world. Collectively, Wechat has attracted more than 400 million users
globally, and almost the entire market in China.
Given such a huge user base, there is no doubt that
marketers all have their eyes on the pie. Additionally, given all the chat
history that the company holds, the data contain extremely high value in
figuring out when and what to push to the user – data mining becomes super
important and useful here. However, advertisements on such a platform are
considered much harder than the other platforms since this platform is much
more personal compared to the others. Looking back to when facebook initiated
their advertisements on people’s timeline, there is no doubt that a fair amount
of people would feel offended as they considered their facebook page to be very
personal. If that has been the reaction, can you imagine if Whatsapp starts to
put advertisements in to people’s phones? That is the danger Wechat is facing,
and it is no small step, an inappropriate move could potentially drive away
users and fuel rival apps’ growth. So what should they do?
Well, first of all, you can never be more careful in making
this transition. So far the Wechat team has been extremely cautions in bringing
marketers on board. They started with a Wechat team message that was posted on
people’s moment section as part of the effort to educate their customers about the
upcoming ads. Then, only a handful of prestige firms, such as BMW, Cadillac,
were brought in to do the initial ads. This not only ensures the branding and
image of the app itself, but also offers the best chance to bring high quality
ads into the platform. More interestingly, the ads themselves are targeted based
on users’ history, such that Cadillac can only target people who they thought
be the most appropriate receivers, or likely car buyers. More interestingly,
people in China actually took the ad injection very well. If anything, some
people even refresh their pages many times a day in the hope to be targeted by
the ad so that they can show to their friends how “high end” they are. We will
see what is coming next after this initial round.
No comments:
Post a Comment