Category: Vietnam Online Advertising

The Evolution of Agencies (Part 2)

Posted by Chris Tran 15 Oct 2011 1 Comment »

CRM to the forefront

Traditional marketing activities are very front-loaded. Advertisers and agencies spend the majority of their time trying to get sales, and to convince customers to try (trial) or convert to their brand. There has not been a lot of attention until late in creating real relationships with customers. The only industry segments that have paid much attention to fostering long term connections with consumers include:

Airlines/Travel
Finance
Ecommerce

For everything else, it just did not make fiscal sense for brands to put their customers into CRM programs. It simply was too expensive to manage as Cost per User, or even Cost per Customer. This has changed as two shifts have taken place:

Technology has made CRM programs much cheaper and scalable (i.e. lower Cost per Customer)
Social media gives each customer the chance to become a brand advocate/champion.

Or as Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen writes:

Customer service is the new media department.

When you look at the most successful brands on Twitter or Facebook (Zappos, Southwest), the story is very much centered around great customer service. A focused social media strategy is the easiest way to build Word of Mouth, and a cornerstone of that strategy needs to be a CRM program.

The CRM program identifies :

Customers with influence
What their problems are
How to deliver great customer service

Advertising agencies will start working in hand with customer service programs. Imagine websites, full of testimonials to be spread out via social media. And operations departments structured to deliver fantastic service, to give people real, credible reasons to believe in a service.

Online buzz will become a barometer of a brand’s health. And this buzz will be driven increasingly by great customer service.

Utility not Persuasion

The rise of branded mobile applications has shown that consumers are willing to interact with brands as long as they have something to gain. ”What’s in it for me” will continue to drive the conversation, as despite their best delusions, people will not become fans of Pantene or Head and Shoulders without either showing tangibly, how the brands make consumers’ lives better.

After all, isn’t the foundation of any advertising is the promise, “use our product, and your life will improve?”

Huggies had a great application for tourists in New York City, which showed on a map (and GPS) where the closest public bathrooms are. Mini Cooper has MiniMiles, which is a live loyalty system for their car owners. It also updates them with their maintenance schedules.

Nike Plus is a fantastic example, where a simple USB device tracks how much I run, and how often. Using that, I can track my progress (distance, speed, frequency and calories burned) and challenge friends. Running is a very solitary activity, and Nike has turned it around, and made it into a social one. Nike had been losing traction to other brands in its positioning, and Nike Plus has helped it regain its market leader position.

Digital Departments will disappear

I wrote about Digital Manifest Destiny, a concept liberally borrowed from people smarter than me. Essentially, it states:

All content will eventually be digital.

And as a result, all advertising will be digital also. Right now, there is an artificial divide between digital and traditional agencies, when really, ideas should be platform agnostic (and scalable!). And in so doing, every creative and account person should understand digital and how it operates in today’s world.

This is what we have done at Edge, where our combined Creative and Account management departments can handle both online and offline media. No campaign will ever be only digital, and similarly, the number of campaigns that are totally offline will decline to zero.

Agencies will start having creative technologists, essentially people who understand how technology can be used to deliver advertising ideas.

Big agencies will acquire digital agencies, and those digital agencies that survive will either die or become internet startups.

The Evolution of Agencies (Part 1)

Posted by Chris Tran 14 Oct 2011 No Comments »

Advertising agencies are at an inflection point.

Viral marketing is forcing creatives to act as both content and advertising.
Media fragmentation is breaking traditional media and PR models.
Creativity is being democratized. Agencies are no longer the sole source of ideas, and the Internet has made it simple to borrow concepts from other markets.
Everything is becoming digital, which redefines the role of Research companies. Creative agencies will need to understand technology.
Too many providers are creating intense price pressure.

These are all things that I saw first hand at Edge.

The fundamentals of advertising are changing. In the past years, and in the coming years, we will see a massive change in how advertising takes place. Already, creative directors work hand in hand with digital producers to ensure that what is proposed is executable. Real-time A/B testing is replacing focus groups.

The world is becoming a faster, leaner place. The lines between publishers, agencies and advertisers is blurring.

And this blurring allows many other types of companies to enter in the advertising agency’s domain. That domain traditionally consists of:

Strategy (understand consumer insights)
Creative (develop ideas to connect consumer insights with brand)
Media (deliver these ideas to consumers where they are most receptive)
Research (understanding consumers and how they react to advertising)
Production (building and bringing ideas to life)

And for each of these core services, a raft of competitors are appearing.

In Strategy:

Management consulting firms (BCG, McKinsey)
Brand consultancy firms

In Creative:

Publishers
Crowdsourcing

In Media:

Search companies
Social media companies
Advertising networks

In Research:

Online panels
Digital measurement

In Production:

Off-shore Freelancers
Publishers
Client in-house IT departments

And in this age of economic recession, advertisers are looking for ways to save on costs. And these boutique services can claim that they deliver quality and a lower price point. Publishers are throwing in creative and production services in gratis as part of a large media buy. According to the IAB, 52% of advertisers expect to do more creative with publishers, versus 27% more creative with agencies. These should be good trends for advertisers.

What is great for advertisers is not always great for agencies.

Agencies are getting disconnected. More and more, advertisers are taking on the role of general contractor in an advertising campaign, going direct to suppliers and leaving agencies in the cold. Luckily, agencies are nimble creatures – small, and full of smart, social and creative people. There is no question that agencies will survive into the digital age – the only question is “what will they turn into?”

It was not so long ago that every agency had its own internal media department. Bulk discounts forced agencies to re-evaluate their organizational structures, resulting in independent media agencies. Media agencies that were later consolidated and acquired – media agencies like GroupM and Vivaki.

So, will digital agencies become:

Media brand owners?
Content collaborators?
Program producers?
Brand guardians?
Social community managers?

Engage, not interrupt

The agency model of the past was all about interrupting media consumption habits. It is all about finding content (TV, print) that consumers are loyal to, and interrupting it. For example, TVCs will always air just before a big cliffhanger. Scriptwriters actually have processes in place to ensure they hit the correct commercial breaks.

And the agency of the future will have to engage with consumers. ”Brands need to become social” is already a cliche, yet few brands have succeeded in coming alive online. Old Spice was social a couple of years ago, but has largely become irrelevant. Agencies are probably the only organization structure with the critical mass necessary to crack the engagement problem.

And in engagement (vs. interruption), a whole new set of metrics are being developed. In addition to exposure metrics like, Reach, Frequency and CPM, engagement metrics will have to measure attentiveness (CTR and Interaction Rate), Receptivity (dwell time, conversion rates), and buzz potential (shares, likes). And these metrics need to be fed back into the strategic and creative processes.

Reach, frequency and CPM are good measures of efficiency.
Attentiveness, Receptivity and Buzz Potential are good measures of effectiveness.

And ultimately, agencies will probably learn how to engage many small audiences for a long time (participation platform), instead of engaging a large audience for a short time (TVC).

Scalable Ideas

Ideas will need to work on a variety of different platforms. No longer will a strategy be just “TVC adapted to OOH and print,” but instead follow consumers and work wherever they consume content. An idea will have to work at minimum on:

TVC
Print
Banner
OOH
Social

Essentially, you’ll want your idea to be effective on TV, in magazines, on web portals, out on the streets and while you are on Facebook or instant messenger. Right now, few ideas are able to meet this standard. All agencies believe that the scalability ideas will have to evolve. Big ideas will have to truly become Big.

Media is evolving.

Over the last year, the Paid/Owned/Media model has been much discussed. The industry’s understanding here is still very shallow, but at its minimum, Paid Media will include:

Activations (in-store and external)
Traditional Media (OOH, TVC, Print, Radio)
POSM
Advertorials

Earned Media will include:

Public Relations
Blogs
Viral videos

Owned media will include:

Branded media properties
Packaging (absolut did it first)

And as we focus less on interruption, and more on engagement, our strategic planning will change.

The media story will change into the touch point story. Media agencies will figure out where best to touch their audiences. It will be less about the hammer, and more about the scalpel.

(to be continued)

Mimo – For Every Digital Campaign

Posted by Chris Tran 11 Oct 2011 1 Comment »

For once, I actually will write something related to advertising!

I just attended a press conference held for Mimo.vn. They describe themselves as Vietnam’s Twitter + SMS, and I imagine that in the hearts and minds of locals here, Mimo will evolve into some sort of group chat or event/community organizer. The way it is designed make it perfect for updating large numbers of people, simultaneously, via SMS.

Essentially, they are killing the SMS blast.

The way Mimo works is similar to Twitter. You send an SMS to 8405 with the syntax:

?theo <UserName>

For example this would follow me.

?theo ChrisTran

And whenever I update my status, it would send all of my followers a text message with my update. Pretty simple right?

So, how can advertisers use this?

At the moment, if an advertiser wants to capture any date from a user, they need to go onto the web. Microsites and banners can be used to capture information which can be used to target customers in the future. To be truly effective, digital often needs its own concept, a big idea tangentially related to the ATL campaign.

There are specific skills required to successfully execute a digital campaign. These include:

Ideation
User interface design
Content Generation
Online Media planning
Forum/Social seeding
Digital KPI measurement

All of which are foreign territory for traditional advertisers.

Let’s face it, digital advertising is very complicated. The brilliance of Mimo is that it can be a very light baby step for brands to go digital, without having to invest much in banners or microsites. They just need to update their ATL spends.

Mimo is a bit different from Twitter. Mimo is built for feature phones, especially those that lack any web support. Mimo is built specifically for non-web use.

Retailers can create a database to notify shoppers of sales should use this to generate a database, which can be leveraged for loyalty programs or discount promotions.
Event companies can manage quick/real-time updates to their audiences.
Brands can add @theo to billboards and posters to quickly generate a database of clean information. Fraud is minimized here.

Sure, a lot of this can be done via custom SMS systems or microsites. The beauty of Mimo is that all you need to do is add @theo to your marketing materials (print, OOH, TVC), and BAM, you have a database of phone numbers to work with. Without Mimo, you need to drive people to a website, get them to sign up, and confirm their email address.

Designing a website, and convincing visitors to sign up are very difficult things.

Brands are constantly looking for a real connection point for consumers. Email is the fall back position, and email’s problem is that it is exceedingly easy to generate new addresses, and thereby commit fraud.

Mimo helps brands manage number of attendees to an event and also uses phone numbers as a unique identifier.

Heck, I think NhomMua should just add @theo nhomMua to their materials, and they will be able to send deals to their customers daily via the phone. Right now, their focus is on mobile web (smartphones), while their really price-sensitive core audience is probably still on feature phones. And NhomMua are web experts.

—-

Now, event agencies are always looking for ways to drive the RIGHT number of people to an event – not too many, and not too few. Forecasting is a tricky business. Certainly, not getting enough people to an event is a failure, and too many attendees can cause problems for a brand’s health. And a channel to to remind guests of events is perfect.

—-

Imagine an event (i.e. Mobifone Rockstorm), where instead of sending a text or submitting an email, the user just sends:

@theo Rockstorm

They are automatically subscribed to the Mobifone feed, and Mobifone logs a user record into their system. Imagine that this generates a database of 100,000 rock fans. Somewhere down the line, Mobifone has a promotion for business people to use a specific VAS system, and blasts it out to its database. It can then use these two data points to segment their rock fans into business and non-business users.

Granted, that is a kludgy example.

Imagine a sponsored live chat with a famous pop star (i.e. Phuong Vy, spokesperson for Coca-Cola). Instead of interacting on a webpage, fans can send SMSes directly to Phuong Vy, and she responds directly via SMS. Online interviews (giao luu truc tuyen) are very popular with online communities, with speakers from businessmen and physicians to pop idols.

The feeling of SMSing with your favorite fan is something that would be wildly successful.

—-

Mimo is another signal of digital convergence. Quite simply, every campaign in Vietnam should consider adding Mimo to their communications strategy. It would cost absolutely nothing additional creatively, and it is a very effective first step in developing a digital CRM strategy.

Mimo – Making digital advertising less threatening.

Useless Marketing

Posted by Chris Tran 11 Apr 2011 No Comments »

Surprisingly to many, I am frustrated by a lot of things in life. But nothing angers me more than Useless Marketing. Especially Useless Digital Marketing. There are a lot of bad campaigns floating out there in Vietnam, and certainly at New Media Edge we do our fair share.

As the head of an agency, I cannot indulge with my favorite pastime in a public venue. I cannot complain/critic/insult any digital campaign currently happening in Vietnam for one, very good reason. It would burn bridges, and burning bridges is something I am fairly talented at.

If I say bad things about any campaign, it opens the door for my competitors to single out my campaigns for ridicule. More importantly, the advertisers of said “insulted campaign” would immediately place me on their blacklist of agencies, thereby cutting off their nose to spite their face by immediately dismissing any advice that I offer.

And for that, I am truly grateful for Useless Marketing. The site is written by a marketer who has worked in Vietnam for over ten years, pushing digital campaigns out for a wide variety of clients. She has taken a recent sabbatical from our market, and is now taking this moment of freedom to dissect some of the poorer campaigns in Vietnam in constructive ways.

The structure of her campaign analyses are thus:

The campaign’s goals
Why it fails
How she would improve it

A simple formula, and one really needed in our market.

If you are serious about digital advertising in Vietnam, I seriously recommend that you visit her site.

The Eight Types of Bad Creative Critics

Posted by Chris Tran 19 Oct 2010 No Comments »

The best part of my job is coming up with interesting ideas and selling them to clients.

The worst part is getting the feedback.

The Pitfalls of Banner Critiques

Posted by Chris Tran 13 Sep 2010 No Comments »

I have been having an on-going debate with my team. Basically, the two sides are:

Chris:

I see a lot of ugly banners out there. I want to tell people that not only are these banners ugly, they are ineffective and I want to spell out to everyone why they are ineffective and how they could be improved. It is in this way that we can prove our own expertise, and simultaneously raise the standard for digital creative work in Vietnam.

The other side:

We shouldn’t say bad things about potential advertisers and our competition. Firstly, it is not professional, and potential clients can see our criticism as being overly proud/negative. Secondly, it also makes us a giant target for other agencies to criticize our own work.

I understand full well why agencies do not critique each other’s work. It is simply safer to stay under the radar and have unofficial opinions.

However, in doing so we allow mediocre work to survive. We have all done mediocre work, but we, the internet advertising industry of Vietnam, will continue to create mediocre work if we refuse to acknowledge it, and find ways to improve them. Furthermore, I understand the dangers of saying potentially inflammatory things about other agencies work, but I will just make it clear that I am NOT criticizing advertisers or agencies, but just CRITIZING THE WORK.

We all have opinions. I want to be counted as one of the brave ones who voices it out loud.

Why Ad Networks in Vietnam?

Posted by Chris Tran 06 Sep 2010 No Comments »

For me, why ad networks are necessary are an easy one. Of course, I am VERY BIASED in saying so, as I had the honor of running Vietnam’s first, biggest (and as far as I am concerned BEST) ad network, Admax Network. And of course, this article posted on the Admax website has its own POV, that ad networks are a necessary part of the media landscape.

I have been away from Admax for over four months now, and let me tell you, doing media plans without ad networks sucks. In a recent report, Comscore reported that the top portals reached 72% of the online population in Singapore, but they only spent 30% of their time online there. People were prone to spend 55-60% of their time online with niche sites, content or demographic-specific sites that were more tailored to their personalities and needs, instead of the mass, “lowest common denominator” portals out there.

In Vietnam, we have the same thing, except the top portals have a greater reach than in Singapore.

What is challenging from a media planning perspective, is that we do not just want to have the most people see our ads, we want them to spend the most TIME with them. If you are only looking at reach, and your target audience is only seeing your ad 3-5 minutes per week, you are missing out on deeper and more effective engagement with them as they spend more time on niche sites of 20-30 minutes per week.

Ok, these numbers are anecdotal; my gut tells me that they are off, but not far off. Until Comscore or Effective Measure releases these statistics, we won’t know. But as the Vietnamese market gets a better understanding of how online media works, these sorts of statistics will be important.

And as people realize that “Time on Site” and how it correlates to “Time on Internet,” “Share of Voice” and “Dwell Time,” the more important incorporating niche sites (and their high rates of time on site) into media plans will be. And Ad Networks are the only way to really use niche sites with any scale, and reduced drama.

So Effective Measure and Comscore, I’m looking at you guys to release those sorts of statistics. I know Ambient Digital has (though fairly unverifiable).

Yahoo Vietnam advertises on Google?

Posted by Chris Tran 30 Aug 2010 No Comments »

Dear Yahoo,

I know times are tough for you, but that’s no excuse for losing site of the plot.

Yours,

Chris

Imagine my surprise today when I was reading an article on Marketing Interactive on MySpace’s diminishing relevance, when I saw an advertisement for Yahoo Vietnam being run off of Google Banner Ad network? The banner is in Vietnamese, and says quite simply “How do you like your Yahoo? Check out the new home page” and directs users to the Singapore homepage http://sg.yahoo.com/bin/set which is also weird. I would have thought that a banner in Vietnamese would redirect to the homepage of Yahoo Vietnam.

I would hope that this banner is IP-targeted to Vietnam, so people outside of Vietnam wouldn’t see this.

Besides that though, Yahoo has over 90% penetration with the online population in Vietnam through Yahoo! Messenger. They do not need the additional reach that running on Google might give them, nor should they be running Vietnamese banners on them. Here in Vietnam, Google’s sites are still largely in English.

Yahoo! must have a compelling reason to send money to their competitor and strengthen their ad network. Heck, if Yahoo! really wanted to do expand their reach, they should get in touch with Admax Network!

Admax Network has a much better reach in Vietnam than Google. :)

Saying “No” to Speculative Work

Posted by Chris Tran 29 Aug 2010 No Comments »

To those outside the advertising world, speculative work is the bane of agency life. It is the act of producing a finished(or almost) product for a client before the client agrees to proceed with the work. Let me reiterate, it’s the bane of agency life.

For digital advertising, it goes double. We call it “the mockup.”

Here in Vietnam, the competition is fierce between half a dozen small agencies fighting over a tiny market. Online adex in Vietnam is roughly 2.5% of the 500 million USD that was spent on advertising in Vietnam in 2009.

In fighting for such a small market, the agencies have endeavored to show more and more the finished product to clients, in attempts to show their sincerity and commitment to winning the business. For the client, this gives them some evidence that the agency can execute the campaign well.

However, advertising should be an idea-driven marketplace. Agencies with the best ideas should win the most campaigns, whereas with the flood of speculative work out there, the quality of the idea is drowned out by the quality of the execution. In layman’s terms, this means pretty pictures trump things like strategy, media plans and understanding of consumer needs.

Besides which, speculative work locks in the campaign at the beginning of the campaign process. This gives agencies little flexibility to work with the advertiser to fine tune the message for the product, create additional value as well as establish genuine long term relationships between advertisers and agencies.

Looking at the Vietnam market, it is rare that digital agencies have the long term relationships that traditional agencies have. I cannot help but imagine that this is because of the flood of mockups and spec work out there (and I myself am guilty of this).

I also cannot be grateful that I have a couple long term relationships with clients, where we have been able to prove the strength of our ideas as well as the additional value adds that long term agency-advertiser relationships make possible.