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Tag: UC Ads

  • UC Ads Offers New Content Methods with the Rise of UC Content Ecology

    UC Ads Offers New Content Methods with the Rise of UC Content Ecology

    MUMBAI: UC Ads, part of Alibaba Digital Media and Entertainment Group, has announced launch of a bouquet of content marketing services for brands. UC Ads, the mobile marketing platform under UC, takes advantage of UC's local resources. UC entered India in 2011 and UC browser overtook Opera, as the number one mobile browser in India within just two years, in August 2013. It surpassed Chrome as a popular browser among young people in 2018.

    57% of B2C marketers expect their content marketing budget to increase in 2019, according to 2019 Content Marketing report by Content Marketing Institute (CMI). As one of the significant means of content marketing, influencer marketing perfectly bridges the gap between consumers and brands. Unlike real stars, these online celebrities are active online, supported by fans and they interact with fans frequently, thus becoming a good output channel of brand value.

    According to Morden Chen, General Manager, UC Ads, “UC Ads provides multiple influencer marketing methods, including shopping recommendations, Product Review by vertical big shots, launch event live-streaming, constellation contest and other influencer engaging methods. These interactive influencer campaigns allow content to be represented by not only graphics and text, but engagement. In a recent campaign of a smartphone launch, influencers led the launch conference with live-streaming and interacting with fans. There are also product unboxing sessions, test and reviews and other activities to show three-dimensional and perceptible products for the brand.”

    UC Ads is a pioneer in integrating the whole process into the influencer campaign. In sync with the marketing purposes of marketers, UC Ads develops marketing plans that conform to the characteristics of the media and helps brand shortlist appropriate influential celebrities from the UC Influencer Network. The UC Content Lab provides entire process instruction as well as tools of trends index to assist the influencer to create content, with UC keeping close control. The content is put into UC Distribution Platform, so as to conduct precise interest targeting, to be distributed to the right audiences.

    Local Content Ecosystem of UC

    UC now seeks to transform and actively establish a content ecosystem. UC News, released in June 2016, with embedded information flow push in UC Browser products, officially announced the transformation of UC from a tool to a content platform, driving a change from people-looking-for-information to information-finding-people in India. UC launched mobile marketing platform UC Ads in 2017. Since then, UC's ecological portfolio in the international market has been fully-formed. The three business sectors -content distribution platforms UC Browser and UC News, application and game distribution platform 9Apps, and advertising platform UC Ads, have respectively taken the role of content distribution, application distribution and mobile marketing platform in India.

    UcAds logo horizon without slogan

    By attracting local content editing and operation talents, coupled with strong operations, UC has translated the success of utility product development to its content ecosystem. UC content editors often communicate repeatedly with Indian creators on UC We-Media to help them gradually build the "sense of the Internet." In addition, UC Media Lab is UC's index to help We-Media track trending news in a timely manner and produce content with "10,00,000+" views.

    During the IPL Cricket Super League in India in 2018, the total content consumption of 2018 IPL on UC platform reached 21.3 billion with more than 2,50,000 related articles.The total amount of related content interaction reached 45 million with the per capita daily consumption lasted 20 minutes, surpassing the data of Twitter over the same period. During the season, more than 7000 Hindi content publishers and more than 2400 English content publishers provided UC browser users stories with unique perspective and interesting content, with many garnering over 1,00,000 views on UC.

    Exploring the Content Ecosystem Methods

    Given the current situation of Internet development in India, UC, as a forerunner, has also explored and established ecological methods. On one hand, UC Ads empower the advertisers and enriches the local mobile marketing solutions, while on the other hand, it gives creators a corresponding platform with profit sharing – encouraging and attracting more people to join in and continue the creation.

    During Diwali last year, UC worked deeply with e-commerce platform Paytm and other brands. In a very short period of time, UC attracted 200,000 new users for Paytm. Through the integration of content and flow with e-commerce, UC has successfully exported Alibaba double 11 culture overseas, verified the interconnected path between content ecology and e-commerce ecology in India, becoming an important link of Ali India's ecological chain.

  • UC Ads lends a hand to individual content creators in India

    UC Ads lends a hand to individual content creators in India

    MUMBAI: Mobile marketing in India is no longer a side dish. It’s the entree.  Brands know today that they need to invest a good chunk of their marketing budget to mobile ads. Sensing the opportunities in the evolving market, Alibaba Mobile Business group’s UCWeb launched innovative mobile marketing platform, UC Ads, last year. Alibaba UC Ads general manager Morden Chen, in an interaction with Indiantelevision.com spoke about business strategy and differentiated features of the platform.

    While UCWeb is an integral part of the Jack Ma led e-commerce giant’s strategy, it offers three core products including UC Browser, UC News, 9 Apps. Explaining how UC Ads is increasing its reach in India, Chen mentioned that it’s correlated with its overall product strategy.

    “Our product strategy is to serve another half of the global users who are just getting started for mobile internet. Users who just got their new Android phone, who just started mobile internet, can explore this interesting mobile world through our browser, a product with newsfeed and app store,” he said.  On the back of huge consumer base it has already created with existing products, UC Ads can help brands with the insights for targeted advertising.

    Talking about the clients, Chen said almost every e-commerce player and phone manufacturer are currently working with them including Amazon, Oppo, Vivo, Honor and Lava.

    After being in the Indian market for almost one year Chen says, “This market is rapidly growing. From my perspective, it will grow even faster due to new phone adaptations. It’s a booming market which I think will continue to boom in the next 10 years.” Interestingly, according to KMPG 2018 annual report, mobile advertisements are expected to grow from Rs 34.5 billion in FY17 to 304.5 billion in 2023 at a 43.8 per cent CAGR.

    “Before 2013-14, it was small. Around 2015, it’s getting more and more attention. Advertisers also want to invest, try and experiment in the sector. With more resources coming in it will get better. Mobile has many advantages that traditional players lack. Location-based, device based tracking is super easy compared to TVC. It has huge potential,” he added further.

    According to him, Indian online video space is full of long-form ads which are similar to TVC. On a different line, it is focusing more on short-form video created by individuals or small studios or individuals who want to have a studio and individual bloggers. It will mix official media content with articles from bloggers who have a deep understanding of something particular. “We want to let their articles also be viewed by users,” he added.

    While Chen was asked about competitors, he said everyone would mention those “two big guys” but he would not do so. According to him, the ever-interesting advertisement space is full of “feminies” (friends and enemies). If someone does better in one front, a competitor can do in another. According to him, working together will help everyone. The real challenges are fast adaptation, better infrastructure and 4G quality for seamless user experience.

    Talking about the Indian market, Chen also highlighted the necessity of good market research. Many internet startups came into India thinking it would be easy to monetise the product with the huge population. While getting users is not difficult, making the venture profitable is the real challenge.

    “We want to stay here, grow with the market and align with the local players,” Chen concluded. Currently, while UC Ads is present in India, Indonesia, Russia, the product may be available soon in Vietnam.

  • UC Ads under Alibaba Group initiates a revolution of content marketing

    UC Ads under Alibaba Group initiates a revolution of content marketing

    New Delhi, September 27, 2018: On September 28, Morden Chen, General Manager of Alibaba UC Ads, will reveal their short video ads platform at The MMA Forum being held at Taj Santa Cruz in Mumbai. This is an initiative by Alibaba UC Ads to start the revolution of short video ads in India and strive to become the largest one-stop content marketing platform. It is reported that UC Ads has maintained long-term co-operations with Amazon, Flipkart, PayTM Mall, Tokopedia, Lazada and other top e-commerce platforms in India and Indonesia. Other important partners include mobile phone brands, operators and FMCG brands, etc.
    UC Ads will launch a revolution of short video ads in the Indian market.
    "We've noticed that people in India were used to watching TV together with their families while more and more young people prefer to be with their phones and browse what they like, no longer confined to TV programs," Morden said. “With the popularity of mobile devices and declining mobile internet service charges, people are more accustomed to diverse contents on their mobile phones and reading is becoming fragmented. Short video features short time and can be viewed on the move, which is getting more and more popular. Many short video platforms have emerged against this backdrop, with information consumption upgrading from pure image-text to image-text + video.”
    He continued, “People's attention span is reducing. According to a survey by Microsoft in 2015, after a habit of using mobile devices is developed, people's attention span dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds which is shorter than that of a goldfish. This calls for the digital content on mobile devices to be more refined with more selling points.”
    For brands, the short video ads not only cater to the consumers’ new habit of favoring fragmented contents on the mobile phone over long videos but also coincide with the memory pattern of users in the mobile phone era. The short video ads are well received by mature markets, however, their potentials have been underestimated by brand marketers in India where mobile device ownership has skyrocketed. Tomorrow at the MMA Forum, Morden Chen will introduce the practices of marketers in mature markets. They replace the strategy of brand videos with mobile first strategies and determine the presentation of video ads based on the demand of mobile clients to make ads more suitable for the application scenarios of mobile devices. UC Ads offers a variety of short video ads solutions, including the pioneering splash video, in-feeds video and in-article video and has facilitated brand marketers to implement the mobile first strategy for short video marketing, rendering more opportunities to effectively reach users.

    The first one-stop content marketing platform
    With hard-sell advertising flooding the marketplace, brands need new ways to reach consumers. A brand with a good reputation is more likely to be chosen by consumers, overshadowing its counterparts. The value of internet celebrity marketing has been verified as internet celebrities have stable followers and are able to generate much more data consumption. The products promoted under the celebrity halo are easily accepted by followers and quickly converted into orders. Internet celebrities can spark discussions in the community, creating a ripple effect of getting the consumers’ attention to a brand.
    However, existing platforms providing buzz marketing solutions with limited resources either focus on content creation of We-Media or targeted content releases. Advertisers need to reach We-Media on platform A to complete content creation, and then search for the appropriate media depending on the attributes of TA and media to issue ads. The problem is that content and platform do not match during the process.
    By directly connecting We-Media resources with technology platform of UC, UC Ads establishes a smart integrated content marketing lab providing one-stop buzz marketing solutions. In India and Indonesia, UC Influencer Pool is home to more than 100,000 We-Media from a dozen fields such as fashion, 3C, automobile and sports, etc., capable of creating buzz contents for brands. Through operating its information flow, UC understands the users’ interest so that the brand content matches with the most relevant users according to their interests on UC platform and push the relevant buzz created by the internet celebrities. UC has completed the whole process from organizing We-Media to content creation, crowd matching and targeted content releases, avoiding the resource mismatch of each link.
    The competition for users in the Indian market gradually expands from the first-tier cities to the second, third and fourth tier cities and rural areas. All applications and brands are trying to attract the increasing number of emerging class in these places as the newly-arisen users start to have the internet access. UC Ads resources are from UC browser, UC News and 9Apps with the information flow of browser reaching 130 million monthly active users in first-tier to second, third and fourth tier cities in India. This is conducive to the country’s consumption upgrading.