CR, Friendster select Pixel for online sales

Pixel will act as the exclusive advertising sales rep for CR's online service at 881903.com. The online media sales company will also manage Friendster.com's sales and advertising campaigns in Hong Kong and Malaysia. Pixel CEO Kevin Huang said: "The challenges are not site-specific -- it is an industry challenge to educate and convince advertisers of the benefits of online advertising and how they can benefit from using it as part of their total media mix." The company has already signed on British Airways for the airline's first Hong Kong online ad campaign on Friendster.com, which claims 16 million users worldwide. "We worked with BA's ad agency M&C Saatchi to deploy this," noted Huang. "The campaign targeted the Friendster user base in Hong Kong using IP technology, reaching only Hong Kong users who logged on to Friendster.com." The sites will target local and regional advertisers seeking to include Hong Kong and Ma-laysia as part of regional marketing campaigns. US-based Joe Hurd, head of corporate development and international at Friendster, said the social networking service reaches the 18 to 34 age group. "It's really interactive word-of-mouth marketing. People have a network of friends and share information with their network. We did a campaign for Will Smith's film Hitch and Sony now has a definite base of 50,000 consumers that opted-in to get marketing information," he said. Hurd said the site works with Interactive Hub in Singapore and Indonesia, and with Post-Click in Australia and New Zealand. It is also seeking sales representatives in Korea, Indo-nesia, China, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines. CR, meanwhile, previously managed its online sales in-house. Monita Leung, general manager, Commercial Radio Productions, said the company's two Chinese-language channels -- FM881 for current affairs and FM903 for young listeners -- were seeking to take advantage of the "drastic media shift to online" with the appointment of Pixel. "Online usage is growing and it's encouraging good advertisers. With Pixel, we can focus on building advertising and have just started a relationship with PCCW as an advertiser," she said. According to Nielsen// Net-Ratings, the site reached more than 515,000 unique users in March.