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September 3, 2013

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Home » Business » Biz Special

Mobile marketing an opportunity and a challenge, says Carat CEO

By Ding Yining | September 3, 2013, Tuesday | Print Edition

Adil Zaim is chief executive officer of Carat China, an independent media agency affiliated to UK-based Aegis Media.

In 15 years in the media industry, Zaim has worked across the Asia-Pacific and has been in China’s mainland for the past six years. He joined Aegis Media China in 2010 and two years later became the first executive under the age of 40 to be promoted to a CEO position in Carat.

Shanghai Daily talked to him about China’s advertising industry, digital marketing and consolidation trends.

Q: What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in the Chinese advertising market?

 China is the second-largest advertising market in the world and continues to be the fastest growing.

The biggest change in the past five years is the turn from television-dominated advertising to multiple forms, including PCs, tablets and smartphones.

Consumers are very selective about what they read and watch. In the past, much nationwide media strategy relied on national TV channels or newspapers, but that’s not true anymore. We are moving into more localized marketing campaigns, and we have to cater to the consumption habits in lower-tier cities as international brands market there. Different regions demand distinct and unique strategies.

There has also been a shift in the consumer mindset. People born in the 1980s have become an influential group of consumers and the target of marketers. They have grown more attracted to international brands and prefer more premium products.

 

Q: What about digital advertising? How is Carat taking advantage of the digital explosion?

 Some of new media, especially the digital platform, are still limited to first-tier cities so there’s no single mobile marketing platform to reach a mass audience. That requires a mixture of mobile marketing tools, including applications, mobile games, banner advertising or even short messages.

China’s mobile infrastructure is already well developed but the mobile marketing infrastructure hasn’t kept pace. It’s both a challenge as well as an opportunity.

Some of the difficulties result from lack of measurement standards, and we're working with third-party partners to measure the effectiveness of our digital campaigns, where we attach a unique tag on the advertisement to measure the number of viewers or clicks.

Digital currently make up a little less than 20 percent of our media investment in China, but it’s growing very fast. It could reach 30 percent very soon.

 

Q: What special characteristics do you see in China’s social media realm, and can you give us some examples of how you tap into it?

 Chinese web users are very keen social media users, and many topics are discussed in the online realm voluntarily.

The April Fool’s Day topic drew a lot of discussion in the social realm, although nobody actually celebrates that day. 

Earlier this year, we leveraged the popular topic of “April Fool’s Day” among social media users to launch a digital campaign called “Don’t Be Too Serious, Just Have Fun” for the cookie brand Chips Ahoy. Viewers can see the cartoon image of Chips Ahoy across all major microblogging platforms and on Baidu, China’s largest search engine. Our strategy to connect the April Fool’s Day with Chis Ahoy’s brand image turned out to be very successful.

 

Q: The recent merger of Publicis and Omnicom in the advertising industry drew a lot of attention. In an era when advertisers have to be agile and move more quickly to cater to specific groups of consumers, does the creation of bigger conglomerates make sense?

 If it’s on the creative and advertising campaign production side, I think it’s beneficial to remain relatively small because creativity needs to be very agile and there needs to be the ability to come up with something unique. It would be nice to see small creative shops instead of their creativity being eaten up by big institutions.

However, for agencies that need to invest in different forms of media, scale matters a lot. Media buying still accounts for a big proportion of spending in terms of marketing expenses.

Big agencies usually have more negotiating power over content production, and they can also lower costs and achieve the biggest effect through a mixture of different sorts of media. In my view, consolidation on the media agency side is a good thing.

 

Q: The print media industry has seen a flattening of subscription income. What do you think that industry needs to do? What are your personal reading habits?

 I pick up some newspapers or industry magazines in the morning for half an hour or so, and then I switch to iPhone and Blackberry for the rest of the day.

It’s not entirely correct to say newspapers or print media are in decline. The old distribution model is in decline, and new forms of distribution models, such as smartphones, are emerging.

Subscription-based and limited, tailor-made news can be very successful. In my opinion, print media could take content, put it in the smartphone-friendly format and make sure it’s subscription-based. Because of the digital distribution platform, publishers can get stories to potentially very large groups of readers at relatively low unit prices.

With the advance of technology, readers may also be willing to pay for specific pieces of news that they particularly want.

For example, I may not want to pay for a full subscription to a whole newspaper, but I might pay for some specific stories on the advertising industry.

 

Biz Special


 

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