[2014] Last Year's Hits: Handle With Care in 2015

We have rounded up six marketing fads to be wary of and four marketing trends worth watching. We hope you find them useful.

On the whole, marketing is a rear-view mirror. That is not to say the field lacks pioneers; it is that pioneers turn up so rarely.

Today, when WeChat Moments increasingly decides what we see, it is easy to mistake anything for headline news: whatever floods your Moments feed, you assume the whole world is talking about it. This is one reason a true "hit" is so hard to come by in marketing. A little over a year ago everyone was discussing the audience's fragmented time; now the talk is of fragmented audiences. To play it safe, many marketers simply follow the most obvious trends.

That is why 2014 brought a sudden glut of marketing pages built in HTML5 (not sure what that is? No matter. Remember those phone screens where you rub with a finger and words appear?). It is also why "Want to hook up?", "Shall we make a baby?" and "I'm speechless, like I'm drunk" stuck so firmly in your memory. Too many official accounts and media outlets used these supposedly fashionable phrases, believing they would make them seem approachable. In essence, it was no different from a Spring Festival Gala sketch chewing over last year's internet slang.

Looking back at 2014's hits, we kept feeling that something was more dangerous than blindly following them: believing in marketing chicken-soup articles. We may have coined the term ourselves. It fits scenes like this one: Vanke invited Ma Jiajia to explain why people born in the 1990s don't buy homes, her slide deck then spread wildly across social networks, and the episode was finally summed up as a real estate company's "internet thinking."

Whenever something gets summed up as a buzzword, it is probably time to be on guard. 2014 may have produced buzzwords more densely than any year before it (or perhaps my Moments feed exaggerated this). It was as if anything not tied to O2O, the entrepreneurial spirit, rapid iteration, lifestyle, craftsmanship and the like had no right to exist at all.

We have always shared good marketing work. Sainsbury's, one of Britain's three biggest supermarket chains, teamed up with the Royal British Legion on a 3-minute-40-second period ad, "Christmas Is for Sharing", set during the Christmas Truce of 1914. Beats made an ad about LeBron James coming home, with no blood-pumping heroics or cheering crowds, only warmth. Fisher-Price, Mattel's toy brand, made a New Year ad that shows no toys and instead celebrates new life. A Japanese toothpaste brand put silhouette installations on the street to encourage couples to kiss. IKEA swapped cinema seats for beds so you could watch a film in comfort...

You will notice that the good ideas that moved you still rest on insight into human nature and on discovering what consumers need. The adman William Bernbach once said: "One thing is unchangeable: if creative people can see into human nature and move people with the art of their craft, they will succeed." That still holds today.

1. Beware of celebrities

Celebrity endorsement is seen as a marketing shortcut. But in the year just ended, an unusually large number of entertainment names became linked to drugs. The news of Ko Chen-tung's drug use shook the industry: he had endorsement deals with as many as 19 brands, and their marketing teams and agencies were thrown into a scramble. For a while, celebrities had the advertising industry on edge.

On the other side, the runaway Korean drama My Love from the Star all but made Kim Soo-hyun the most valuable endorser of the year. By one incomplete count, he endorsed 35 brands in China, including Häagen-Dazs, Dove, Yili, Samsung, Evergrande Spring, Beijing Hyundai, Samsonite and Calvin Klein Jeans.

When brands look for an endorser, they generally want someone with the right image and temperament, whose fans resemble the brand's target consumers, and who has no bad habits. Finding such a person is far from easy. But the advertising industry's present rush to "sign whoever is hot" has probably forgotten why brands hire endorsers in the first place.

Internet celebrities have also caught brands' attention. Wang Dachui of the web series Surprise appeared in a Philips ad, and JD.com's "Double 11" ad featured Dapeng, the lead of Diors Man, and Yu Shasha, the lead of Jipin Ladies.

2. Beware of "hits"

2014 produced many phenomena that suddenly became hot topics and then just as quickly went quiet.

Early in the year Flappy Bird shot to fame and was then abruptly pulled from the app stores. Next the little game 2048 took off, ranking 10th on Google's list of China's top searches of 2014. Then everyone was playing Lianmeng (MYOTee), an app less than six months old that quickly went viral and passed 30 million downloads. Then the little game "Trap the Cat in Five Moves" flooded Moments, only to be displaced soon after by the Ice Bucket Challenge and its many celebrity participants...

"Hits" always get special attention. They spread easily and suit social sharing, but they rarely give a company or brand lasting appeal. And even when a company gathers a crowd quickly, without the depth to hold on to it, it ends up with nothing.

A typical case is Rovio, the Finnish mobile game company whose Angry Birds swept the world. With no further innovative products, its revenue stalled and it began laying off staff.

A "hit" is often an accident. The accident can indeed bring unexpected marketing results, but it creates real value only if you can turn it into a "classic."

3. Beware of O2O

This is not to deny the value of O2O (online-to-offline services). The point is not to slap the label on blindly where it doesn't belong.

The capital markets have gone mad for O2O. The food delivery app Ele.me raised US$80 million from Dianping; Didi Dache raised US$700 million; Uber, the private-car service, is only 5 years old and already valued at US$40 billion; the short-term rental company Airbnb took in a new round of US$475 million; Meituan raised a US$700 million Series D; and Wanda, Baidu and Tencent put up 5 billion yuan to found Wanda E-commerce... Hot money is pouring into the field.

Real estate and carmakers, long cautious, have piled in too. Vanke's cross-industry tie-up with Taobao was more of a marketing stunt, yet still prompted other developers to copy it. 8,000 4S car dealerships took part in Tmall's "Double 11", a third of all the 4S dealerships in the country. In March, SAIC also launched Chexiang, the Chinese auto industry's first O2O e-commerce platform.

Cases such as Huangtaiji and Diaoye Niunan have been dissected again and again. As more and more entrepreneurs rush headlong into O2O services, they would do well to look at the competition they face and at how many real problems their product solves for consumers.

4. Beware of over-reading young people

In April 2014 McDonald's, whose global sales were sliding, launched a worldwide series of nostalgia campaigns starring Ronald McDonald under the slogan "Fun makes great things happen." At the end of the year it also hired Xiaozaizi Theater in China to make stickers for it, and in Singapore it teamed up with Line to sell plush figures.

Coca-Cola, which isn't faring much better, began looking for ad ideas on creative outsourcing platforms and held an esports tournament at its Atlanta headquarters, streamed live on Twitch. You don't know what Twitch is? Well, then you are not the young person they are after.

Big companies have never stopped trying to win over young consumers, and in recent years the effort has grown more conspicuous. But look: the moment you start studying young people, you are no longer one of them. Big companies fall into this nightmare easily, pouncing on anything that touches youth. In the US and Chinese markets alike, these companies face a "generational turnover" among their target consumers. Just as brands in China find the post-90s generation hard to read, brands in the US are trying to decode "millennials."

Young consumers do decide how much room a brand has to grow. Still, we want to remind you to be wary of reports that over-read young people, and not to try to look young just for the sake of it.

5. Beware of social media

A recent report from the US research firm L2 shows that advertisers increasingly value social media: brands now run an average of 7.5 social media accounts. Adidas is the most active, present on 13 platforms (now think of Adidas's dismal results).

In May 2014 WeChat launched its advertising product, Guangdiantong, and began making money. Early in 2014 Instagram signed a US$40 million advertising deal with Omnicom Group, the world's third-largest advertising group, and later added 15-second video ads. Pinterest began testing ads in May, and its native ad system officially launched on January 1, 2015. Snapchat, the platform for self-destructing messages, also introduced ads in 2014; they can stay in a user's feed for up to 24 hours, with new content added at any time.

You may also have heard that the Apple Watch isn't even out yet, and ads for it have already followed.

This is a world that belongs to advertising and advertisers. No disrespect intended, but advertisers' marketing plans may well overstate the value of social media. On one hand, poor data tracking, widespread fake data (think of zombie followers) and loopholes in distribution give advertisers a hollow sense of satisfaction and hold more and more marketers hostage. On the other hand, social networks can magnify a company's management flaws: Victoria's Secret's "Perfect Body" ad provoked disgust from most people who saw it on social media.

6. Beware of fans

In 2014, fan marketing stood out in two fields: mobile phones and film. Xiaomi, Meizu, Smartisan, Samsung and the iPhone each cultivated a band of die-hard fans, and their "1799 incident" became one of the year's famously melodramatic marketing episodes.

In film, Han Han's The Continent, Guo Jingming's Tiny Times, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar and Jiang Wen's Gone with the Bullets each became a talking point.

The fan economy showed many brands a new direction in marketing. Xiaomi became a topic not just because of its phones but because of its fans. For a while everyone was copying Xiaomi and everyone was talking about fans. The frightening part is this: courting fans through a few celebrities and a few talking points, and talking about fans while neglecting product and service, is bound to end badly. Take getting Faye Wong to sing a theme song to lift a film's box office: Fleet of Time itself could hardly be called a good story.

Beyond these, we think there are some marketing directions where "everyone knows there's an opportunity, but nobody has made it work yet." You could also call them trends.

1. Mobile advertising

Money flows wherever consumers' attention and habits go.

According to eMarketer, China's mobile ad spending grew 600% in 2014 to nearly US$6.4 billion, overtaking the UK and Japan to become the world's second-largest mobile ad market. The US remains the largest, with mobile ad spending reaching US$19 billion in 2014.

Alibaba's share of mobile advertising, however, jumped from 1.6% in 2013 to 6.2%, and Baidu's share roughly doubled, from 2.6% to 5.1%, putting them third and fourth in the world. Google, in first place, saw its share fall from 46.6% in 2013 to 40.5%, while second-placed Facebook rose from 16.6% to 18.4%.

The consulting firm Gartner also predicts that the growing use of location data collected from users will benefit search and map ads, whether users' devices supply their location automatically or users actively post where they are through apps such as Dianping and Instagram. As a result, local advertisers will take more interest in sending ads through mobile channels.

2. Native advertising

If native advertising was still a trend to watch in 2013, in 2014 it became a popular advertising product outright. According to the market research firm eMarketer, advertisers spent US$3.2 billion on native ads in 2014, up 46.7% from 2013.

Native advertising means articles, videos and other content made specifically for an advertiser. Compared with traditional ads, it looks more like content itself, and it can still be found through search after the paid placement period ends. It first appeared in fashion media and later caught on through popular sites such as Quartz, BuzzFeed and Vice. Many traditional media outlets have also started treating it as their newest attempt at raising revenue, and pin high hopes on it.

The New York Times made native advertising one of its key strategies for 2014 and launched it alongside the site's first redesign in 8 years. It published its first native ad on January 4, for Dell, at a price reportedly in the six figures. A month later the Times set up T Brand, a studio devoted to producing native ads.

A native ad made by The New York Times for Netflix

Gerard Baker, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, who had once scorned the idea, announced 2 months later that the paper would launch a native ad product too, saying he "believes our readers can distinguish what is sponsored from what comes from our newsroom."

In May, Wired published an article on its site titled "TV Got Better", with interactive charts and video, and it got people talking. Many readers did not realize it was a native ad for Netflix, even though it carried a "Sponsor Content" label.

Spurred by native advertising, The New York Times' third-quarter results showed digital ad revenue up 16.5% year on year. Native advertising is really a form of content marketing, and advertisers will predictably pay more for it, because it is more flexible in form and easier for audiences to accept than traditional ads. To be fair, it is sometimes even creative. Take a look at this native ad from Wired.

3. Store marketing gets an upgrade

A store is the place where a brand can show itself most fully, provided the company has built some kind of brand rather than merely owning a logo. In future, the stores with real appeal will sell a style, not just products. In China in 2014, few stores met that standard. But you can see big companies pouring more and more capital into them.

First, flagship stores are multiplying. Most notable are the big-name flagships clustered in Chengdu's two new shopping centers, Chengdu IFS and Sino-Ocean Taikoo Li. Most of them work local Sichuan elements into their design, such as the Muji flagship store and the Starbucks flagship store that QDaily has covered.

Sports brands especially favor experiential themed stores. After Nike opened a running-themed store in Beijing's Sanlitun in 2013, New Balance, which has caught on over the past two years, opened the country's first running-themed store at Gaode Land Plaza in Guangzhou at the end of 2014. To promote its Energy Boost running shoes, Adidas's flagship store in Seoul's Myeongdong shopping district worked with the local architecture and design firm URBANTAINER to build the Boost Energy Lab, an experience space that heightens visitors' sensory stimulation to create a unified brand atmosphere.

Adidas Boost Energy Lab experience space

In October, Starbucks staged a one-hour classical music concert at its Renminfang store on Shanghai's Middle Huaihai Road, opening up new possibilities for in-store marketing.

4. New technology sparks new ideas

New technology did not start driving creative work in 2014, but technology and creativity have been this tightly bound for only two or three years.

In 2014 HTML5 pages became marketers' new favorite. Flexible, cheap to develop and quick to produce, they have become a standard tool in every marketer's kit. You probably remember the 10-year Alipay statement that flooded feeds in December; at heart it was an animated poster.

Microsoft XiaoIce showed people what robot marketing could do. The chatbot, developed by the Chinese team behind Microsoft's Bing search, first drew attention in WeChat groups. After Tencent blocked it, Microsoft struck a partnership with Sina Weibo. On October 22, the global English-training company EF Education First won the brand endorsement deal for "Microsoft XiaoIce" at a price of 7 million yuan, an astonishing record in technology and marketing.

The much-hyped wearables likewise open up more possibilities for marketing. Look: Apple has not even announced a release date for the Apple Watch, yet the mobile ad company TapSense has already launched an ad platform built on it.

Technology has made other ideas possible too. Microsoft and Virgin Atlantic teamed up to track Santa Claus through the sky; a supermarket played "Jingle Bells" with barcode scanners; Old Navy pieced together your selfie on a wall of smart balloons; Netflix ran ads on subway digital screens whose images changed with the world outside. These are all new forms of interactive marketing.