They sit at their computers for hours on end, assembling their Cyworld minihompy or drawing graffiti on their best friends’ Facebook walls. They break to upload music videos and television shows to slim smartphones, which they immediately beam across the world via SMS.
Nearly all of Asia’s ‘Generation Y’ - today’s 15- to 24-year-old boomers - are on social networking sites and own multi-functional phones, enticing advertisers with still-nascent marketing possibilities. Traditional modes of advertising, of course, are proving increasingly redundant, unable to reach moving targets that are zipping through new forms of media at bullet speed, glazing over everything that does not directly affect them.
Ian Stewart, senior vice-president for MTV Asia, says that understanding why social networking sites are popular allows marketers to keep their fingers on Gen-Y’s pulse. “The sites that are doing the best right now are the ones that provide functionality for users to upload their own content,” he says.
Through their computers and mobile telephones, users add lists of their interests, music MP3s, video clips, photo albums and widget applications to the sites, some of which have second-life capabilities.
Social networking usage in Asia exploded in 2007, led by CyWorld, Mixi, Facebook, Friendster and MySpace. Facebook, Cyworld and Mixi. Most of this growth has come, largely, through completely word-of-mouth movements, most evident in Facebook’s success in China, where it gained significant growth in a land where only half the country’s internet users speak English.
According to Stewart, Asia’s Gen-Y regularly checks eight core websites: an email server, news and shopping pages and no less than four social networking sites. This group makes up 75 per cent of MTV Asia viewers, he adds.
“I think Asia was slow to catch onto blogging because the way Americans express emotions on their full-text daily diaries is not necessarily applicable to the way Asians want to be seen,” Stewart says, adding that many Asian youth prefer Cyworld to a blog page, which includes network connectivity and second-life applications. “Cyworld is launching in the US, so the trend is backwards because it took the initial trend and fed it back to where it started from.”
Stewart points out that these sites pose problems for marketers. Wary of bombardment, Gen-Y is now conditioned to tune out superfluous advertisements. Advertisers must create campaigns that entice their audiences to choose them, by tapping into the relevant mode of expression.
“These technology platforms have changed the world we live in and have opened up people's creativity in ways we probably never imagined,” explains Proximity regional director Simon Bond. “This is why we are seeing the huge rise of these channels in markets like Korea and China as people can all of sudden express themselves creatively, whereas before there was only monologue via TV, print and radio.”
Bond points to two examples of brands that have got it right. Pepsi China ran a competition across several networks and community sites, resulting in over 2.5 million people sending in their photos for its Creative Challenge campaign. In Korea, meanwhile, the Black Eyed Peas challenged people to upload their own versions of the group’s songs, for a chance to perform on stage with the group.
“This competition was promoted across popular social networks, communities and video streaming sites in Korea and proved extremely popular as it entertained the youth audience and allowed them to create compelling content which they could send around to their friends,” explains Bond.
But the brand successes, it appears, are not necessarily all that common. Robert Campbell, regional creative planning director at Y&R in Singapore, which has managed campaigns for the Discovery Channel, Sony and Tiger Beer, said that with all the new avenues to advertise on, “companies have quite an incredible habit of getting it wrong”.
“Companies try to get into channels instead of getting talk. It pisses me off to see a company just throw an advertisement onto YouTube and think they’ve penetrated their audience,” he says. “If I look at Facebook, I see wall-to-wall ads and it’s destroying the whole fabric of why all the users like it. Companies still think that everything they say is interesting and useful, but they don’t know audiences’ wants and needs, and so they alienate them because they don’t do the work and they aren’t creative.”
Stewart says there are key advertising practices that are working: widgets and other internet applications users can download. They serve precise functions and are easily displayed on users’ sites, seen by their entire network of friends. Whether they sponsor music countdowns, alert users of promotions, help organise photo albums or provide games, more are springing up daily.
RippleVox for thought
Ian McKee says the grand idea hit him while he was in the shower: create a virtual forum where Gen-Y can talk about their favourite products, the hippest artists, the hottest trends.
“Why it works is because friends trust each other, and when one friend recommends a brand or product, they’re doing it because it has your best interest at heart,” McKee says, who created the online forum RippleVox.com in October 2006. “It does not pass through the media. It’s trusted communication between friends, and of course good news travels fast. The iPhone is an example.”
Vocanic specialises in advertising generated by word-of-mouth promotion, and RippleVox is a full-fledged reincarnate of Vocanic’s vision. Businesses enlist McKee’s help to introduce products onto RippleVox, and though he is coy to release how successful some of his clients have been through the site, he does admit that word-of-mouth is potentially the most potent form of advertising in the post-millennium.
McKee ran a recent campaign for Citibank via RippleVox. The corporate giant enlisted the platform to help popularize a new credit card distinctly designed for Singapore’s Gen-Y demographic. Citi introduced the product shortly after the government lifted a minimum income requirement for obtaining a card. Through RippleVox, McKee says the news travelled rapid-fire as youths who were previously ineligible for a card could now apply for one. While he cannot release specific statistics about the campaign, he says Citi reached its target well before schedule.
“Young people want the utility and want to be involved in brands. They want to be involved instead of marketed at,” he notes. “They’re passionistas for a particular brand, and with this, RippleVox was born as a meeting place so they can get involved with brands they adore.”
A team in transition
While Campbell, McKee and Stewart agree communicating with their audience on networking sites is imperative for companies’ future success, there are some that are still in transition, and Nokia is one of them.
Frederique Covington, regional executive planning director for Bates Asia in Singapore, which manages Nokia’s ‘Music Connects’ campaign, says the company is promoting its new 5700 XPressMusic phone to Gen-Y on both traditional and digital platforms. Just as in other Nokia campaigns, there are television spots, billboard images and bus ads, but Covington says the team also posted videos on YouTube, advertised on blog pages and reached out to social network users.
The team merged static ads with digital channels by signing a little-known indie music band to promote the phone, which launched them into success because Nokia thoroughly researched its target demographic.
Covington says that after last year’s ‘Asia for Asia’ campaign, which jumpstarted regional youth pride across the continent, signing a global pop band would not achieve the team’s goal because they needed something out of the mainstream to compete with the local music youths had been drawn to.
According to Nokia research for the ‘Music Connects’ campaign, global sensations are popular in Malaysia and Singapore; pop is popular in China, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Taiwan; rock is popular in Indonesia and Thailand; and boy bands are popular in South Korea. Signing a group that immediately discounted other countries’ trends would be detrimental to the campaign, Covington says, and Nokia’s phones are about connecting youths through music.
“It’s not the most progressive case study where it’s not a fully digital launch, but it’s very much where the mainstream of advertisers are,” she says. “We’ll engage in new formats more and more and make the progressive shift online. With this project, we eventually want our own music library that will compete with the best out there, the iTunes of the world.”
