Digital Junkie Talk

Economy

2008-10-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

Everyone has been talking about how economy these days. I read something in one of the forums the other day. It pretty much pointed out the whole Chinese economic model was really messed up. Well, the stock was already down a lot. RMB appreciating, new labor law, squeezed out pretty much all the profits of small companies. according to some stats 30% of the SME on the coast have already closed.

That was before Wall Street crumbles. Now with america going into recession, maybe, import of Chinese goods will sharply decrease, which was how Chinese were making money before. companies are stopping manufactures. a lot of them, factory closing, layoffs. I doubt China has been full impacted by this downturn. wait until Q1, Q2 next year. What is going to happen?? no one know, but lets pray.

So how is digital market will be affected?? first clients have less budget, so media and agencies are going to suffer. But there will still be more people going online in China. so the online population will still increase. More mature netizens will seek for different things online, communities will still be hot. But there wont be any money... internet startups are gonna go through something really hard, especially the ones dont have a clear profit models like SNS and Videos. Their little ad revenue will be cut first by agencies & client. the web 2.0 bubble will fully burst. bad times for new media.

On the upside, marketers will probably pay more attention to the effect of the ads since now the budget is limited. better technology on performance marketing will probably be encouraged and paid attention to. maybe it is a time for Chinese digital market to cool down and really focus on building something nicely instead of blindly expand. Companies focuses on technology will eventually prevail.

When chaos spread, heros arise...

The Future of Sina

2008-06-28T07:51:00.000-07:00

Recognized as the most influential internet media in China, Sina has its magic wands. Its news channel, what it was famous for, offers reportedly the best editoral content online. Sports, dominating Chinese sports online media consumption with more than 50% of sports fans read sports news on sina. blog, the new channel quickly attracted some of the most influential bloggers in China, then raised to be top 3 traffic drivers. finance, reading, and woman channels also rank the top in their categories.

Sina is consistent the #1 choice of Chinese advertisers, especially for the high end industry like automobile and real estate. "CEOs read sina." has been the image that people say when they talk about sina. I also heard from quite a few people that sina has one of the best conversion rate among portals with any kind of campaign.

ummm... yum... with internet media changing rapidly, QQ and baidu surpassed sina's #1 traffic ranking in the past a couple of years. other portals are chasing behind it. So, what is the future for sina?

Sina is almost like yahoo, other than expanding to every single new thing there is, it couldn't do much. Sina does feel fatigue sometimes with these kind of endless expansion while competing with the leader of the category, giving up their iAsk search and striking a deal with google was a perfect example. UC instant messenger was also a complete failure.

Sina seems like not really favor acquisitions, other than some SP aquisitions, it failed to acquired some of the best vertical sites (arguably). However, itself was involved in quite a few rumors of being acquired, Google, Focus Media, Yahoo, including a hostel takeover attempt by SANDA, a freaking game company. Come on... ...

I spoke at one of sina's conferences for advertisers. Just out of curiousity i looked through their channels. I have to say, it is a bit messy. dead links, duplicated sections, outdated stuff are everywhere. yuck...

With nowhere else to expand to other than China, unlike Yahoo, Sina will have to think about something else other than catching the wave of internet booming in China. With the 40% year by year growth of Chinese internet users, Sina will stand on the top for another 5 years probably. but What is going to happen beyond that?

Make some bold moves, at least...

The Future of Social Network

2008-05-21T03:33:00.000-07:00

an analyst from some investment bank asked me during a consulting session, "what is the future of social network?"

"will there be an organic business model?? "

That is a good question...

that is a question for myspace, facebook, bebo, and gazillion of other Social networks.

is it really showing a KFC ad right next to your profile because your are african american and call it demographic targeting??

certainly not...

adidas Olympics

2008-03-28T07:49:00.000-07:00

http://2008.adidas.com

My New Year Thoughts on Online Video

2008-01-19T23:58:00.000-08:00

Follow my last thought on video, which is the cynical one as always. I thought about how video can turn out. I'm gonna check back in 3 years and see if i am right about this.

- Content is still the king. platform, yes, but in the end it is called platform, like you have a theater where people come to watch movies or shows or your brother trying to hurt himself by riding the bicyle backwards. eitherway, ur show gotta be good. But amatuers are just not. even reality tv shows are professionally editted. so all video sites gotta create their own content. professional content that is good enough for people to come and watch.

- Interactive, so what is the difference between online video and tv?? it better not be the same because i will never get a 42 inch screen latop. so interactivity or something, something creative, gotta come into the place to virtually separate online video and tv. i dont what it is. It will be fun and cool and magical.

- Live, what? how about viewing stuff in my control? i am gonna say no. you can watch different videos, but it will never beat live experience. why? because time only goes by once. creating live video programs put people together at the same time and do cool stuff together. just like u can buy cds but it will never be like concert experience.

- Business model, okay, serve ads. thats cool. but it doesnt generate enough money. so put ads on live programs, u get much high exposure at timely basis. better. but is interenet so limited within advertising? no there gotta be some more, internet is not only a medium but also a channel that can be used in a lot of business sense. For example i saw this company has video site where products in the site are being sold on the side of the program. nice video + ecommerce. fantastic.

The Future of Video Sharing

2007-08-24T03:40:00.000-07:00

Someone asked me what is the future of video sharing.

I mean what exactly is the business model here. is it really gonna be sharing some wacky video some 16 years old made on his handy cam and preroll an pepsi ad?

i doubt it.

Who's going to pay for the advertising technology made in China?

2007-01-03T00:44:00.000-08:00

so who is going to pay for the advertising technology made in China? that is my question after attending a couple of product meetings. It is common when people laugh at how shitty chinese technology company is. But if you think carefully, you might realize no matter how fancy it is, no one is willing to pay for it. No wonder there is not a single company that is solely standing with online advertising technology.

Not advertisers, they got money, but technology's too much trouble. they only want a 1 stop shopping center where everything they need is offered, packed and put into their trunk. All they need to do is give away the check. they are like fat men watching ESPN in rocking chairs, so far agencies are feeding them nice beer and fried chicken, the chair is rocking, they are happy.

Not agencies, they are too busy feeding fat men beer and fried chicken. With poorly trained & understaffed service teams, They really dont have time for another guy coming in tell them something no one understands. Plus, fat men is fine with beer and chicken in China, agency dont need to do that.

Not publishers, they don't wanna spend that kinda money. We are in China, so naturally dont expect much. All those expensive technology softwares really cut down their profits. Labor is cheap, your management system probably cost more than hiring 10 college grads to do it. Of course they might not be as good, but close enough in Chinese standards.

Not VCs, they know what makes money, what not. Chinese tech guys might be cheap, but there is nobody that's capable of leading a development team in China and compete with sophisticated western technology companies. On top of that, communication difficulties kill, not enough english speakers, "DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHATS COMING OUT OF MY MOUTH"

Not the governement, IT is new and lucritive, there are already a lot of capitals in it. Why do i need to do that while billions of farmers need food, millions miles of road need to be built, weapon need to be made etc etc

So who is going to pay for Chinese online advertising technology??

Is it really 2006?

2006-12-11T20:49:00.000-08:00

Met with Stephen, a financial analyst from RBC Captical Market. We were talking about a lot of online advertising related stuff. One thing came across our discussion is that technology provider seems to be only one that is trying to push the online advertising technology forward.

With influence from the western world, Chinese online advertising technology companies have been trying to catch up. Soon, they found out that their products arent going anywhere. I blame the media agencies, they are way to 'lazy' to adopt anything new, even there are tons of ideas that could increase efficiency of their campaigns. I am not sure what is the reason for that, but my guess is that these agency people werent educated to learn and adopt new technology, rather use old stuff and try to save pennies.

sad... people here wanna hire 20 college grads to do entry level work more than use a good software.

Rich Media to Mobile

2006-12-10T20:18:00.000-08:00

Saw this rich media ad with mobile functions.

http://www.smartcreative.cn/test/sina/sony_test1130.html

You can type in your mobile number and instantly get a text message with coupons on your mobile phone. Quite a neat incorporation beween Rich Media and Mobile technology.

Delivering ads through multiple media channels, i am not sure if it will be a trend, but worth it a try. How convenient would it be for advertisers if they can deliver all of their brand information to all media in one try...

Look it up!

2006-12-08T19:49:00.000-08:00

Personally i feel one of the biggest problem in China is how people react to things they don't know. Most of the techie people are acting like guys who's lost on the road but never bother to ask for directions.

When you are asking them something that they don't know, the first reaction is stunned, then followed by awkwardly trying to come up with something that sounds right. Please look it up!

For one instance, 'streaming media', an easy term to describe a media component(generally video) is delivered with streaming technology. no, not in china, people call all floating ad streaming media. I just don't freaking get it. so some guy saw 'streaming media' and they dont know what it means, so he is like, i dont need to look it up, i guess streaming media is just like floating ad. so he started to use it. Other people came along and be like what is streaming media. The guy would braggingly say i know it, its the floating ad. Those people didnt bother it to look it up. so everyone started to call floating ad streaming media.

something like this happens a lot here. people in china pass around wrong definitions, ambigueous concepts and underdeveloped technologies, but they think they are right.

Without knowing what is really right and good, without scientifically look up and prove. China will never be able to get rid of the tatoo that says low cost labor on her back.

Look it up!

Traditional to Internet

2006-12-07T19:19:00.000-08:00

Visited a couple of traditional media agencies in Shanghai, pretty big ones. It seems like with more and more demand by big brands, traditional media agencies are really trying to tap into the internet market.

However, sadly, all of their stuff have very poor knowledge of internet advertising, Pageview, impressions, clicks and CTR, basic terms, are like a 14 century russian poem to them. I mean these account managers are like 24, 25 years old who are barely educated for advertising now need to take on something that is even harder to understand.

Talents are greatly needed in China.

Crunch Time

2006-11-29T11:34:00.000-08:00

it's time of the year again... when agency start to work crazy hours try to convince advertisers that they got everything in control for the coming year. powerpoint, excel, word, microsoft office is really showering its power.

In between all the chaos, I wonder if this is actually the right time to make these proposals.