Advertising Age is reporting that AliBaba, the Chinese B2B e-Commerce portal, has launched a $30 Million campaign to expand into the US, Europe and the Middle East.
If my memory serves me correctly, this must be the largest overseas campaign conducted by a Chinese based entity, especially in the e-Commerce world…. and the likes of Amazon and eBay should be a little worried. Despite some analysts claiming that this is the worst time to launch such a campaign, I disagree. Media and Advertising rates are very cheap these days, as TV and traditional printed mediums challenge the large-scale shift to Online that is happening. In addition it’s clear that AliBaba’s strategy is a long term one… and they’re banking on coming out of the economic situation with more global market share. It’ll be interesting to see how eBay responds to this, especially as they’ve been taking a pounding recently.
It’s great to see Asian brands pushing out globally… I believe Japan’s mega portal Rakuten is next, with a global expansion and is touted to take some market share from Amazon.
You know the importance of social media when the Singapore government starts using it. For the first time, the National Day Rally will be using social media to reach out to more people – especially targeting the youth. The National Day Rally will be available on ndr09.channelnewsasia.com and users will be able to engage in online discussions via Facebook integration. The site will also incorporate real-time Twitter updates of the announcement made during the Rally. The use of new media comes at no surprises with Singapore having and internet penetration of 67.4% (or 3,104,900 Internet users as of Nov/08) per ITU (Source: www.internetworldstats.com).
Yahoo announced that it is establishing direct sales team in Malaysia and Philippines to work on local and regional campaign. Is the online market finally starting to sprout and mature in these markets, requiring more support locally? The regional team is currently based in Singapore.
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This is the strangest news I’ve read today. TechCrunch is reporting that Dell is about to launch a mobile phone in China. Not only that, but the OS is rumored to be the open-source OS from Google, yes you guessed it: Android.
I find this strange for a number of reasons…
First, why is Dell even contemplating the notion of venturing into the Mobile space? There are already a number of formidable players fighting for market share whether it’s the iPhone, HTC (Android and Windows versions), Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Palm PRE… all the way through to the localised DoCoMo phones in Japan. Is this Dell’s late response to the iPhone?
Secondly, why China? Of course, it’s a huge market… but wouldn’t it be reverse engineered within minutes and sold for a quarter of the price? Anyone know anything about this? China recently allowed the launch of iPhones but has for some reason restricted them from having WiFi capability. I wonder if Dell’s phone will be?
Thirdly… Android? Dell’s been heavily intertwined with Microsoft Windows OS’s for a long time through it’s consumer and B2B PC business… will this move cause any dent in this?
Very strange news, and we’ll be watching carefully to see how things progress. Watch this space…
According to both Mumbrella and SmartCompany, PriceWaterHouse Coopers has just issued out a report commissioned by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)… that states Online Advertising spend has grown by 18.5%.
I don’t think it comes as much of a surprise that this is mainly due to a shift from traditional media to online advertising mediums… with search and directories accounting for 49% of total with display advertising and classifieds taking up the remaining 51%.
Finance seemed to be the dominant sector… but you can read more of the detail here and here.
Good to see this shift happening. Are Aussie advertisers finally realising they can measure the impact of advertising more on the web than TV or Billboard ads?
So… looks like Microsoft got a great deal from their latest spin-off. After acquiring the ad agency RazorFish several years ago, they are now in the process of finalising a deal with the mega agency group Publicis. The blogosphere has been buzzing with the rumored deal of Publicis buying RazorFish for 500-600 Million US$. However, it appears that there is another detail to the contract that was not apparent at first. The deal also includes Publicis agreeing to spend 100s of Millions of advertising spend on Microsoft’s latest Search Engine Bing.
This is probably quite easy for Publicis to fulfil considering their size and the number of agencies and clients they manage. Great idea for Microsoft to throw Bing into the mix… securing some revenue for it over the next few years. I wonder what this means for some of Publicis’ asia based agencies? What does WPP think of the deal?