The Novelty Has Worn Off. Have You Thought About How to Advertise Well in WeChat Moments?

Mainstream marketing agencies give the same verdict: this worked as event marketing more than as brand marketing. Whether it turns out to be a passing fad depends on what brands and WeChat do next.

Brands know their consumers are "online," but where exactly? Every company knows it should advertise on social networks, but how does it find the "right people"? After nearly three months of talks with the WeChat team and creative agencies, BMW China put its long-standing brand idea of "Joy" into Moments, with the line "The longer you have waited, the more joyfully it arrives on schedule."

BMW was one of the first advertisers in WeChat Moments. Mei Xiaoqun, vice president of marketing at BMW (China) Automotive Trading, told QDaily that the company set some parameters for the audience it wanted to reach: region, age, phone operating system, gender and type of internet connection. "But this was really our first try at broad categories. It's like a TV ad: the people who see a BMW ad are not necessarily its target audience. This time we mainly wanted to spread the brand's most basic idea, not push a particular model to particular people."

The ad came from BMW's e-marketing department, which handles online partnerships such as BMW's Weibo and WeChat accounts. WeChat began trying out commercial partnerships last November. "At the time they approached brands they considered active in online marketing. There were more than 30 candidates, including other car brands," Mei said. BMW won the slot in the end, according to Mei, because of its "creative."

BMW may not have found its real consumers this time, but it got plenty of exposure. According to figures BMW gave QDaily, from the launch at 20:45 on the 25th to noon the next day, the first wave of the ad was directly visible to 46 million people. Clicks on the logo, likes, comments and other interactions reached 7 million, and BMW's official account gained 200,000 followers.

Coca-Cola and the smartphone brand vivo appeared in Moments at the same time as BMW. All three ads sat inside users' feeds, made up of text and images, with a link that opened a full HTML5 page. Many people never looked closely at what the ads were; they took screenshots and shared them at once. Before many users had seen a real ad, their feeds were already flooded with second-hand ones.

Just as quickly, a "pecking order of contempt" took shape: those who got the BMW ad looked down on those who got vivo, those who got vivo looked down on those who got Coca-Cola, and those who got nothing could only laugh at themselves.

The pecking order came from a rumored WeChat targeting rule. Moments ads, the story went, were based on big-data analysis: people earning more than 1 million yuan a year got the BMW ad; people who could not afford an iPhone but could afford a Xiaomi got the vivo ad; and people who could not afford a Xiaomi, or even a Redmi, got the Coca-Cola ad.

Everyone soon learned the rumor was false. Plenty of university students with no income at all were shown the BMW ad, so there was no need to frantically post iPhone 6 Plus selfies to prove your worth. Of course, many never took it seriously and joined in the griping mostly for the fun of watching.

Still, the episode showed that Moments has enough influence to make people imagine what else WeChat could become.

Many people had expected WeChat to launch this kind of ad; feed ads are already a mature model. They carried Facebook to second place in the global mobile advertising market, making it Google's strongest competitor, and its share is still rising. According to the market research firm eMarketer, Facebook's share rose from 5.4% in 2012 to 17.8% in 2013, and to 22.3% in 2014, the year just ended.

Like WeChat Moments, Facebook's first ads became a hot topic when they launched.

Facebook introduced feed ads in 2012, and soon afterward they were bringing in US$4 million a day. Facebook has since extended the format, adding, for example, feed ads aimed specifically at apps, which later grew fast.

When ads launched on Instagram, Facebook's photo-sharing app, in December 2012, the first partners included adidas, Ben & Jerry's, Burberry, General Electric, Lexus, Macy's, Michael Kors, PayPal, Starwood and Levi's. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said at the GigaOm Roadmap conference that the first photo ads in the feed drew a like rate of more than 5%. In other words, if your ad reached 100 million users, 5 million of them liked it.

But Twitter was in fact the first to launch this kind of ad. In September 2011 it began inserting ads among ordinary tweets in users' feeds. According to figures Twitter released in October 2011, these feed ads had an average engagement rate of 3-5%, also a considerable figure.

A debut ad's biggest advantage is novelty. "This WeChat campaign spread mainly because it was new. It set off a lot of discussion and attention, and even led some brands to piggyback on it with ads of their own in Moments. As event marketing, it was quite successful," said Xiong Chao, creative group director at Ogilvy Shanghai. The other advertising creatives QDaily interviewed for this story said much the same.

Coca-Cola used the slot for a Lunar New Year campaign, "For the taste of a family reunion, you need Coca-Cola," illustrated with its Fuwa mascots; shortly before, Coca-Cola and WeChat had jointly released this set of Fuwa New Year stickers. vivo's ad played up the phone's main selling point, music, under the theme "Enjoy Music Smartly, Salute to Music."

"In my view, there was nothing outstanding about the creative itself, but because it was the first wave of ads, it was a ready-made talking point," Li Lang, executive creative director at IM 2.0 Interactive Marketing, told QDaily. IM 2.0 is a digital marketing agency that VML, a digital agency owned by WPP, acquired in October 2013. Huang Feng, creative director at the French independent creative agency Fred & Farid, agrees: "As the first advertisers, they drew a lot of attention. Everyone talked about them, and nobody minded the ads, because they became something people could joke and grumble about. But the future is hard to call. It depends entirely on how often the ads appear and how good the creative is from the brands that come onto this platform." ADWEEK named Fred & Farid one of the world's best creative agencies of 2014; its clients have included Porsche, Audi and Diesel.

Mei Xiaoqun said WeChat placed some restrictions on the creative format, and BMW worked out with its agency and the WeChat team how to present the ad. "It was a first try for both WeChat and BMW, and we will keep exploring."

There is also plenty of speculation about price. A leaked internal PPT titled Introduction to the WeChat Advertising System shows that Moments ads are sold on a CPM basis (cost per thousand impressions), at 40-140 yuan per thousand impressions depending on region. Targeting by gender multiplies the price by 1.1, and an HTML5 external link adds 20%. At around 200 million impressions, a single campaign would cost more than 8 million yuan. Add links and regional targeting, and the fee of 10 million yuan or more circulating online looks fairly plausible.

The figure may not be accurate, but the ads are probably not cheap. "If you look purely at exposure, that is, CPM, and compare it with ordinary display ads, the price works out higher. Compared with video ads, though, it is lower. And as a way of creating buzz, it has many knock-on effects. Ordinary ads can't generate buzz like this.

"Taken together, counting both returns and buzz, brands will see value in this campaign," Chen Liangyi, executive vice president of digital development at Dentsu Aegis Network China, told QDaily. Most of the agency's clients have expressed interest in WeChat ads, he said; when to get in, with what message, and whether it is worth the budget are the questions brand clients will weigh.

"This time it was more about social buzz. The word-of-mouth value of all the sharing far exceeded the value of the ad buy itself, so I think it was worth it," said a senior director at Maxus, the communications agency owned by GroupM. As for willingness to advertise in Moments, "a big wave of clients is closing in." Local clients, including Lenovo, Huawei, Haier and Ping An Bank, account for 67% of Maxus's business. Li Lang also said some clients are interested, but because the entry price is high, only some big clients are truly keen.

The big-data targeting logic that circulated this time was unreliable, and QDaily was unable to interview WeChat's technical team about how WeChat actually does such analysis. But every advertising professional we interviewed said big data remains WeChat's greatest marketing advantage: its huge store of user data allows more precise targeting.

"It has a huge number of users and the information that goes with them, and targeting is a big advantage for them. But outside WeChat, other channels can be just as precise. Display ads and video ads can both be targeted now. So targeting is not unique to WeChat," Chen Liangyi said.

The novelty of a debut cannot be repeated. Once Moments ads become routine, advertisers will have to think about how to keep users from scrolling past them. "Ads need to become interesting and creative. Brands can't treat WeChat as just another place for hard-sell ads, or consumers will resent it," Xiong Chao said.

On ad volume, Li Lang believes WeChat is, for users, a relatively closed environment, their own private space, and not really suited to heavy advertising. A small number of precisely targeted ads, made possible by big-data analysis, would be acceptable to users, he said.

"If a client needs a campaign with reach requirements, WeChat is still a very valuable media channel. But if the client cares about conversion, its value has to be judged against the performance of ordinary ads. The choice depends on what the client wants from the campaign," Chen Liangyi said.

Coca-Cola China told QDaily it will keep watching and evaluating Moments ads as a brand-new medium, and that it has seen a lot of joking and guesswork online about which users the ads were aimed at. The brand may become more cautious.

For grabbing eyeballs, vivo's ad may have been the best value for money. Sandwiched between two super-brands, BMW and Coca-Cola, it spread remarkably well. According to figures published by Tencent, by 9:00 the next morning the ads launched in the same time slot had reached nearly 155 million total impressions; clicks on the "vivo smartphone" logo, likes, comments and other actions exceeded 7.2 million; and vivo's official account gained 220,000 followers. On the Baidu search index, too, vivo's rise was more pronounced.

As for Coca-Cola, its emailed reply to QDaily may say it all: "The relevant department is still evaluating."

For WeChat, whether consumers accept the ads or find them a nuisance depends on the advertising rules it sets. Those rules matter to advertisers too: whether WeChat proves a passing infatuation or a channel of lasting value turns on them. WeChat will have to balance commercial interest against user experience.