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MANILA – December 18, 2013 – As people spend more time online, the digital space is evolving from pure communications into transactional elements. Michael Palacios, incoming president of the Internet & Mobile Marketing Association of the Philippines (IMMAP), said there would be a lot more cross-marketing in elements such as stickers, as well as increasing collaboration for brands.
Palacios noted that in Thailand, the entire distributorship of the brand Maybelline was awarded to an e-commerce company. Meanwhile, the key platform they partnered with to push the product is LINE. "We’re quite excited because that means connecting digital properties even tighter," Palacios said.
In the Philippines, he said content creation is a strength. "We’re always going to have awesome videos. The recent Pantene campaign (by BBDO Guerrero) that’s been going around is one example of that," he said.
Apart from creative campaigns, Palacios said marketing programs have done well in the past year, with programs such as the Nestle Club and Smart’s online store platforms winning at the Boomerang Awards. "Activities like that go beyond content and tie great content with a good program to reach revenues," he said.
In 2014, Palacios said collaboration will be really big, noting that the tools – various digital platforms and communication services – were already in place. He added that there is also already an increased collaboration between publishers and brands.
"Every publisher and large media company is building out their platforms for what they call native advertising. Advertorial, a little bit more hybrid types of advertising so on twitter you have promoted tweets, on Facebook, you have boosted posts and you’re starting to see less and less of stuff that looks like a banner, smells like a banner. It’s something that’s more seamlessly integrated with content or the core value proposition," he said, noting the challenge that comes with this is that people still need to know it’s an ad.
Another big trend for next year, Palacios said, would be the use of data to create better customer experiences. While companies invested in content in 2013, the focus in 2014 would now be how to use environmental, locational, and social cues to determine what content to deliver to the customer.
The amount of content that is available can be overwhelming, thus there is the need to respond. While some choose to build better content to rise to the top, others are being more scientific. "How can we use what we know about our customers to talk to them at the right time?" Palacios said.
Apart from environment, location, and social media, emotion is also something that can help brands understand their customers. "Rappler now is doing really well with the mood meter. What if they start delivering content based on that mood meter? What if every person who visits that website sees a different site based on their mood?" he said, noting that companies such as Yahoo! and Amazon have already been doing the customized homepage. That discipline, which started in e-commerce practice, is now being taken into content, he said.
"We’re very good content creators, the question now is what do we do with it?" Palacios said.
