Category: Interactive Marketing

Chinese Site Design and Display Ad Models

Let’s begin this lesson by my pointing out the obvious, and that is I am pompously attempting to sweepingly discuss the design of websites written in a language I have no hope of ever learning how to read.

 

That said, I must also confess to have a grand total of ten days inside of China, time enough to see one major city, a village, some suburbs, the usual tourist spots, and the airport. Therefore, I have no sense of the rich cultural gestalt that drives Chinese design, assuming most of my Jungian design insights from the decor of bad American Chinese restaurants which serve food that is about as related to real Chinese food as a can of Chef Boyardee Spaghetti-O’s is to a good tagliatelle con ragu in a trattoria in Porto Ceresio.

When I was at IDG, one of the world’s few truly global online publishers, with master brands such as Computerworld, Infoworld, and PC World translated independently at the country level in dozens and dozens of languages, I arrived with the misbegotten notion that brand hygeine demanded a templated design across all sites. Then I met the folks from IDG China, who were delivering traffic numbers that essentially blew the original US brand sites out of the water, and who were following an ad model completely unlike the CPM, impression-based, lead generation dog fight we all have come to know and hate in the US and West.

In other words, the Chinese sites were kicking ass in terms of traffic and money and not spending a lot of time worrying about eye-tracking, heat maps, golden triangles, and audience development.

To the Western eye, they are an utter hash. What Steve Gillmor at ZDNET calls the “Las Vegas” approach to online publishing, where everything blinks, slides, pops-up, takes over, and otherwise — to plagarize from my own earlier post — induces epilepsy to someone enamored of the stripped down Web 2.0 design gestalt pioneered by Google and exemplified by Fiickr, del.icio.us (neither of which has much if any in the way of ads) and the user interface genius of the iPod (of which I saw none in ten days in Beijing).

There are some rules of thumb in U.S. online publishing models which say that two ad impressions per page is great, three is acceptable, four is pushing it, and five is insane. Some Chinese sites are throwing off ten to 14 impressions on their homepage. The skyscraper unit — the vertical “tower” that runs in the margins (and which I claim to have invented at Forbes.com in ’95 when I had the insight in the shower that the first thing to vanish during a scroll-down was the 468×68 horizontal banner pioneered by Hotwired) — on Chinese sites the things follow you down the page, skipping along, and, in some cases, there are units that float all over the page, impossible to kill or stop.

If you want to read a good explanation of the chaos, I suggest you check out Virtual China and it’s post on the aesthetics of abundance. They write:

Hans Juergen-Bucher (Media Studies, University of Trier) has a provocative 2004 paper titled Is There a Chinese Internet? which reports the results of user studies he conducted in Germany with Chinese Internet users. One of his most interesting points is about what he calls an “aesthetics of abundance” that shapes Chinese website design and interface.

In Chinese culture we can find two different kinds of aesthetical systems: the “aesthetics of abundance” and the “aesthetics of emptiness” (see Pohl 2004). Websites in China are usually designed along the principles of the “aesthetics of abundance” which refers to the Chinese popular culture and what can be seen in New Years pictures, calendars or paintings on dishes. The “aesthetics of emptiness” is part of the Chinese high culture and heavily influence by Zen and Chan Buddhism. The principles of this kind of aesthetics did not influence web design up to now in a significant way. The attractiveness of the “aesthetics of abundance” not only relies on its integration into popular culture but also on its symbolic meanings: strong and rich colour, density, and opulent presentation symbolize happiness and wealth.

I’ll add some links later. It’s past midnight in Durham and I need to be up in 6 hours.

Sohu.com – “The Search Fox”

I spent the morning with Philip Zhang, sales director at Sohu.com at his offices in the Science Park near the Academy of Sciences in Haidan. Through an interpreter, I learned some pretty cool stuff about Chinese web publishing, interactive networks, and wireless content strategies.

Sohu — which translates as “Search Fox” — is the grand-daddy of the Chinese Internet, and having listed on NASDAQ in March of this year, is one of the better known Chinese internet brands. It also helps that it is one of the few Chinese sites to have an English version, which at the very least allows inquiring Western browsers to check out what all the fuss is about. Soho is a site, but also a 1,700 employee networks that has a search engine engaged in a battle with Baidu (Baidu is the Chinese king of search. No one seems at all concerned with Google nor Yahoo) for dominance, has Chinaren — an “alumni” or social networking site; Focus, for real estate, and 17173 for gamers.

About 65% of the company’s revenue is from advertising revenues and the most profitable segments are IT, Auto, and telecomm (which includes wireless). Real estate is the most profitable segment for Sohu (not surprising, as I would say building materials is a bigger growth business than Internet, at least in Beijing). 10% of the income comes from wireless advertising — SMS, MMS.

According to Zhang, the primary online activities for Chinese users is pretty much the same as it is the world around:

  • Email
  • Search
  • News

The demographic for online users, vs mobile users, is 18-35 years old. Mobile skews to the 16 through 25 year old segment.

Sohu is big on blogs and claims to host over 4,000,000 blogs, where users can do the usual blog thing and upload to their hearts content. There are 40 million registered users in the overall Sohu “community” and the intention is to migrate that mob to the blog model over time.

Ads are sold on a day basis, let me repeat, a day basis. Not CPM or CPC. Day.

The killer for Sohu is the Sogu toolbar, this is their search play, and as I understand it, this browser plug in allows them to serve popups on other publishers’ site. This sort of freaked me out, and remember, this discussion was via interpreter so I may have misinterpreted it, but what I heard was this: the toolbar provides Sogu with the ability to “push” (I kept thinking Pointcast, but whatever) pop ups onto other sites.

Sounds positively Gatorish to me.

Rich media advertising is the hottest thing they have going. There is so much clutter on the typical page that it stands to reason that video based adverts are going to stand out. Sohu does offer a channel sponsorship model as well for exclusive ownership of specific “channels.”

On keywords, one cool thing they do is mash up maps with advertiser’s logos. Search for “Peking Duck” around Hohai, and bang, you will see the map with the Peking duck shops that paid for the right to be there appear.

Very cool stuff and further reinforcement that if you want to see the future of online advertising in large dollar volumes, go to China. If you want to make Jakob Nielsen have a seizure, ask him to critique any Chinese website. My favorite is http://www.it168.com — an IT site. I think I could count 14 ad impressions on the homepage, and some of them will induce epilepsy like that weird Japanese cartoon did to six-year old kids a few years ago.

More in a future post on Chinese page design and online clutter.

My thanks to Philip Zhang for his time. Very instructive. It’s a total battle of the bands over here and Philip says they have their hands full at Sohu dealing with the China market let alone consider exporting the model internationally.

Very few Chinese interactive media brands are operating internationally. Oak Pacific is looking for a US country manager. Sina has offices in the US. But so far, no hot interactive model has crossed out of the country. Give it time.

Breaking through the clutter in Beijing

I’ve been keeping an eagle’s eye out in the chaos and confusion of moving through Beijing for marketing impressions from Western Brands and comparing them to how Chinese brands represent themselves. To keep the discussion simple, I’ll first look at outdoor advertising and then in a second essay, look at online.

Outdoor advertising — and by this I mean bus shelters to buses, billboards to storefronts — really should be separated into nighttime and daytime effects. Nighttime is a battle of neon. Not a lot of it, saturated Vegas style, but islands of it that really stick out. Daytime is a war for space. The Baidaling Expressway, which runs north out of Beijing up to the Great Wall, has its share of billboards, but only once one gets inside of the fourth ring road (Beijing is defined by concentric circles of ring roads, like Washington D.C.’s Beltway). Then things get interesting. No Western brands appear until one gets into the heart of the city, and the most effective ones are actually building brands — IBM, Ericsson, Microsoft — which interestingly enough are not out in the main technology park in the Shandi district where Lenovo is based and one can see Western companies like Peoplesoft and Nordisk.

Once in the city proper, the advertising starts going nuts.

Here’s a few photos:

Then, one starts to notice some familiar brands, but still competing for attention:

And right around the corner ….

The situation in the stores is even more chaotic, according to my colleagues who visited a tech mall last night (which I need to do before the week is over.) Lots of machines competing for attention — like your average 42nd St. electronic store in NYC.

Bus shelters and sidewalk displays seem focused on mobile phones. Lots and lots of Lenovo impressions for our handheld business. This one is for a Lenovo PC.

And finally, my favorite impression of the day. From lunch:

Next up, online advertising for PCs in China. This is mindblowing stuff.

Jim Forbes: Waiting For Break Out Notebook Marketing

My Weblog: Waiting For Break Out Notebook Marketing

“Notebook makers are going to need to step up to the plate and differentiate their machines on their own. Some are already working on this. The best example I can think of is a ThinkPad ad that creates an image of ThinkPad as being a tough platform that protects data. This is a tremendous start but I hope Lenovo goes farther and creates messaging highlighting how emerging features are based on valuable DNA that’s still a part of the product line.”

Jim Forbes once again proves why he is one of the smartest guys observing the notebook market.

Mop.com

I spent the morning with Xiaoxin Chen, CFO of Oak Pacific Interactive, one of the largest interactive networks in China. Mindblowing discussion about the Internet in China, the explosion of wireless, file sharing, consumer willingness to buy online, Google, Baidu, and his hot company — one of the top ten in terms of traffic with 30 million visits per day and about 15 million registered visitors.

Mop.com — which translates into “cat rushing forward” — is primarily a site aimed at the younger market. This is a MySpace type of model for China. All Ajaxy and Web 2.0-ish but more.

You register and basically get your own place, your social network, your file sharing network, etc. This is where the two viral sensations of China — the guys in Yao Ming shirts lip synching (who have since been signed to corporate sponsorships) — got their start before they viralled over to Youtube.

Mop is a broadband network, and their TV site — itv.mop.com — is total video, from movie trailers to user uploaded content. The model is advertising based — I counted a dozen impressions on the home page, the design is crazed — and there is a premium model where users can buy more space, and services.
Chen, a Stanford MBA, is riding a tiger. An hour with him and you want to move to China and set up shop. This is Wild West stuff, volumes of users and ad dollars that no SOMA or Silicon Alley dot.com could have dreamed of in the late 90s. His partner, the founder, Joseph Chen, a Stanford classmate, sold his first company to Sohu, hung around for a while, left, went optical before that bubble burst, then got back into interactive media with ChinaInteractiveCorp — which is now Oak Pacific Interactive, a network which includes pcast, dudu.com, uume, and DoNews.

I need a month here. Too much to absorb in a week.

China Internet thoughts

Things are too chaotic on the morning of day two to compose a reasoned essay on what the situation is regarding computing, Internet, mobile telephony, and branding opportunities in China. and I need to get outside and explore more on one of my precious days off in the country before a week of meetings.
So here’s a random list:

  • Right off the bat I saw a Yahoo ad on a bus. I love bus ads. CNET used them to great effect in Manhattan in the mid-90s. Yahoo was the only U.S. internet brand to make an impression yesterday and this one was sighted outside of the northern entrance to the Forbidden City.
  • Internet access in the two hotels I’ve visited is hardwired and fairly fast. I moved a ton of images up to Flickr without any problem. I’ve been googling with no hiccups and have seen no examples of censorship. There may be different “zones” for hotel access, but I can’t say I have seen any blocked messages or sites.Wikipedia is not loading, but running a politically sensitive search on Google permitted click throughs to sites critical of the government. I have not looked for any porn or other objectionable content. In no way have I felt that any online activities are being delayed, blocked or impeded in the four hours I’ve spent online.
  • There aren’t a lot of American brands in evidence. Microsoft has a large office building with their logo on it. But it seems to be European brands such as Lufthansa, Nestle, Volkswagen, Audi, and Mercedes in the highest abundance. This history plaque in the Forbidden City was sponsored by American Express. And on every plaque carrying this, there appeared to be smears of mud or clay where someone tried to obscure the tagline.
  • I have seen no Internet cafes yet.
  • Wireless phones tend to be either local brands, Nokia, or Motorolas. People use them incessantly. My step-sister, who is a film executive, has one glued to her head at all times. No one appears to be using them for email (I have not seen a Blackberry in use) and I don’t see many people texting SMS nor any advertising calls to action that use SMS codes.
  • I saw the word “Mashup” on a poster at this Beijing art gallery. The art here is amazing and the gallery district in a former factory in the 7-9-8 district is right out of San Francisco’s SOMA.
  • Blogging is big. I am going to meet some bloggers later this week, but I understand from my step-sister that a lot of business people blog here in Beijing. My China blogroll only now holds:
  • Virtual China: “Virtual China is an exploration of virtual experiences and environments in and about China. The topic is also the primary research area for the Institute for the Future’s Asia Focus Program in 2006. IFTF is an independent, nonprofit strategic research group with more than 35 years of forecasting experience based in Palo Alto, CA.”
  • ChinaTechStory: which isn’t working at the time of this post.
  • ChinaTechNews.com: a good frequent news feed.
  • There is a Starbucks inside the Forbidden City. Of course. The other big American brand is, of course, McDonald’s. While eating gyoza in an awesome little cafe, the family at the table next to us was tucking into a great meal while Junior ate a Big Mac and fried from the Golden Arches. The world isn’t flat, but it sure will be fat.
  • Chinese “OOH” — Marketing lingo for Out Of Home — billboards to you and me, is big. Like really big. The stuff is huge. It screams. We whisper. I’ll get some pictures of how we advertise Lenovo here. I got tons of Lenovo impressions yesterday. Big billboards at a convention/tech center and those mechanical rolling ads. All such brands are in English and Chinese.
  • The entire city is under construction. The locals blame a lot of the dust and air quality problems on construction. Apparently a construction moratorium is going into effect along with a coal ban inside of the third ring road to try to clean things up in time for the Olympics. Tons of Olympic branding everywhere and a big countdown clock of the days remaining before they open in ’08 at Tianamen Square.
  • That’s all for now. Time to lace on the hiking shoes and start exploring after a congee breakfast.

    • Musings on media, advertising, measurement, and optimization

    The tracking of an advertising spend has traditionally been the personification of a lost cause, with everyone harking back to the old cliche that half of advertising works, no one knows which half.

    I’ve blogged my anger over the high degree of precision which agencies and vendors hold internet advertising to, when print publishers and other traditional media have no idea other than specious reader surveys, fudged circulation numbers, newstand sales, and that ultimate in fuzzy logic: “pass along” figures to base their efficiency case. When I was an online publisher I basically wanted to tell the advertisers and their agencies to go take a flying leap at a rolling donut, and made a good initial kick off to the Forbes Digital Tool by selling flat day-sponsorships with competitor blocks and no guarantees of impressions, and certainly not click-throughs.

    Move ahead a decade and now I’m the buyer of the impressions, not the seller. And you know what? It’s the measurement and precision, the promise of optimization that is exactly why internet advertising is the fast form of advertising in the world today. I’ve been looking at the results of some recent campaigns we’ve run in the general, business, and IT press and it is truly astonishing the variance in click-throughs (the diminutive number of click-throughs, measured in basis points), and the lack of measurement on our end of what happens to the click-through once it lands on our pages.

    This will change and it will change soon. We should be able to track the life-time value of a visitor from first arrival via a search term or banner clickthrough, across multiple sessions and repeat visits. I’m not marketing impulse buys — no gums and cigarettes — but serious durable goods that the user expects to hang onto for at least three years. That means my marketing spend — if measured only against initial action — can’t show a true ROI or expense to revenue ratio if I don’t keep tracking that user from first click to checkout.

    This is basic stuff, it falls on me, not the publishers, and …. it means I need to get much better at getting my messages in front of those people who are in the market for my stuff at that particular point in time. This is where Battelle’s theory of the “database of intentions” and search engine marketing comes in. This is where the chimera of behavioral targeting comes in. This is why the smart people at Yahoo know that the most valuable impression in the world is a car ad at that point in time every four years when the average American turns to the web to help them decide what four-wheeled vehicle they will buy next.

    It’s statistical chess and it’s hard. But the people who are good at are few and far between. This is going to be an education as we reform our spending, our measurement, and our optimization.

    Genuine VC: Where Mobile Advertisements Roam

    Genuine VC: Where Mobile Advertisements Roam

    Good post by David Beisel at Masthead Ventures on the impact of mobile advertising on operations, he’s riffing off of Rafat Ali’s observation that mobile advertising will need mobile friendly landing pages.

    “All advertising eventually leads to some type of commerce transaction. However, there’s a spectrum along which advertisers fall that covers how immediate the transaction occurs. On one end, there’s metric-driven performance-based advertising which measures it success directly by whether or not commerce happens immediately (or in the trackable near-future). On the opposite end is brand advertising, which supports the general perspective and attributes of a brand, so that eventually a constituent who sees an ad influences a future purchasing decision, either individually or as part of an organization. And then there’s everything in between, where the ad isn’t direct response per se, but is still aiming towards a transaction sometime in future, to varying degrees.”

    David is referring to the need for commerce advertisers to track, from first click through, the lifetime value of a visitor from consideration to commerce conversion across multiple sessions. For large ticket purchases (like notebook PCs), the customer is generally flipping in and out of the vendor site multiple times, seeking prices, reviews, and competitor information before ultimately committing to the sale. This is a matter of persistent cookies and smart metrics.

    Helicopter Blogging

    Now I can say I have blogged from a helicopter. Dang. on my way to the Masters. Fotos to follow.

    Whirly-birdWhirly-Bird

    Helicopters are loud, vibrate till your teeth hurt, but are eminently cool craft. I got the window seat and put the old Treo phone to good use. Blogging on the Treo was less fun, but I pulled it off and announced over lunch that I had blogged in a helicopter, an announcement that was met with blank stares, but which I think has to put me in a pantheon of stupid blogger tricks.

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