For as long as I'd care to remember, I've been hearing about China and the range of crazy things happening there. Just today, a friend of mine Prof. Jing Wang at MIT sent me a piece she had written on a new Viral Marketing Group that just launched a few weeks ago in China.
She writes:
The Internet is considered the fastest-growing advertising medium for Generation Y in China. But online advertising made up only 1.5% of the national ad revenue in 2004. Successful viral campaigns were far and few in between even in 2005. I was naturally thrilled to find out that DynoMedia—China’s first viral communication company—was launched three weeks ago in Beijing.
The first time I ever heard of Viral Marketing was
here. Supposedly, after 1 day, the site had already received 1
MILLION hits. To me that almost sounds disgusting. This is what Prof. Wang had to say about DynoMedia -
The company’s self-adaptive profiling engine offers segmentation-on-demand and well integrated online/offline metrics service to enable advertisers to test the market, launch campaigns, and measure ROI accurately. Service charge is determined by CPM, CPC, coupon redemption rate, media `watch-through’ rate, and `pass-along’ referral rate...
It remains to be seen if this fascinating viral business model will be attractive enough for end-users to heavily engage in building the DynoMedia community site. Will they contribute their own creative materials while being targeted with advertising up front? There is no immediate answer to this. But it seems clear that social network media and web 2.0 technology is engendering more and more business concepts integrating grass-roots creative communications with commercial communications in China.
The architects behind this venture are Cheng Han and Vincent Wang, both MBA's from MIT. If you are asking yourself, "Why is this MIT kid talking about advertising and marketing, and not some kind of complex scientific or engineering thing-a-majig?" I present you, the
answer.
The hard part has already been laid down by techies. Social networks, blogs, podCasting tools, aggregators, trackers, wikis all had nerds, much like MIT nerds, hacking away building the infrastructure. And when they work well, they are things of beauty. Now is the time when those same nerds, or similar ones, look at all these tools available to us, and say: "Hey, this is a goldmine."
Social networks,
smart mobs, and everything nice are here. Let's make some money from it. There are companies doing this in the U.S., now China too.
