Welcome to the Digital Marketing Inner Circle

In his keynote opener, Shaun Rein, Founder & CEO, China Market Research Group, talked about how at last year's Ad Tech in Shanghai, there was fear that we were entering "Great Depression 2"; concern and worry about budgets, job security, and company survival was expressed by many. Today, Shaun exhorted the audience to reflect on how far we've come from those dark days of doom and gloom. But he stressed the importance of companies in the digital marketing space to adopt winning strategies for success. He cautioned that last year, some companies got scared and overreacted. By drastically cutting their prices, they effectively undermined their brands.

Encouraging all attending Ad Tech, Shaun remarked that coming out of the economic downturn is one of the best times to earn profits. As a prime example, he highlighted the quadrupling of Baidu's stock price this year. Further underscoring the idea that now is a time of increased opportunity in China, Mr. Rein predicted a 20% growth in digital in China. Key drivers include the fact that the Chinese consumer is spending big; retail grew 20% YOY Sept-Oct. Moreover, recent CMR survey results show that 80% of consumers 18-32 years old in China say they will spend more in the next 6 months than in the previous 6 months. Female consumers under 35 years of age said they are becoming more value driven in their purchase decisions (i.e. doing a lot more product research online through search and SNS sites). Many consumers in 2nd and 3rd tier cities confirm they haven't lost their jobs in the downturn and they are benefiting from stimulus spending by the Chinese government. Consumer confidence in China is strong, and CMR expects we’ll see a lot more mobile phone marketing in the coming year.

While it is clear that youth are the key demographic as they are the heaviest users of the Internet, they are fickle and change sites a lot. So, alongside this great opportunity remain challenges. Key among them is figuring out effective ROI measurement and smart marketers will know that eyeballs alone are not a guarantee for increased revenue.

Shaun closed his remarks by emphasizing that the challenges include:

• deciding how to integrate online/offline marketing (often these are separate)
• developing strategies to get brands to understand the benefits of digital marketing
• deciding how to achieve ROI KPIs that go beyond simply driving traffic and eyeballs to the advertiser landing page.

So an interesting opening talk. Looking forward to the next sessions.