Until last year, General Motors (GM) marketers of China announced the Chevrolet Cruze sedan with spy thriller-themed spots featuring Wentworth Miller, star of the TV show Prison Break. After the cancellation of the series Fox (NWS), Shanghai GM decided he wanted a new approach to ad, with "real life, real people", explains Joan Ren, General Manager for marketing of Chevrolet.
If the company partners with Youku.com (YOKU), most popular online video operator China, to create a new campaign for the Web featuring young Chinese urban. So far Youku showed 10 videos, more than 10 to 20 minutes long and created by a professional filmmaker, and they understood a combined views of $ 84 million. Ren says that it is satisfied with the value of the production of the Youku and authentic tone of the campaign. "They only allow low quality," said Ren.
Anyone now Associates Youku with authenticity is a step in the right direction for Victor Koo, the site founder and Chief Executive Officer. Youku launched in 2006 a local version of YouTube (GOOG), China's censors, who have long banned and quickly became a place of Prime Minister to download pirated movies and television shows. (One of the most popular: Prison Break.) Now Koo focuses on working with GM, Procter & Gamble (PG) and other advertisers to create some Webisodes professionally produced as Crest Pro - Health II (a P & G serial set in a dentist's Office attracted $ 33.5 million viewers) that target 20-30 years deactivated by the programming offered by belonging to the State TV hokey entertainment varieties and melodramas. Youku has also cut deals with U.S. networks and studios to show the creation, the anatomy of gray and other content.
Koo legitimate figures of programming, accompanied by repairing the Youku reputation as a haven for piracy, will be attract advertisers and differentiate the company of many other YouTube imitations China. (Youku is no. 1, with 35% of the Chinese market for online video).
Its next challenges: a profit and appease the censors of Beijing. After livestock 203 million of its December initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange (NYX), Youku has lost $ 87 million since 2008 on sales of $ 86 million, and it is likely to lose $ 21 million on sales of $ 110 million this year, according to a report 1 March by Goldman Sachs (GS) analysts. Not to worry, Koo, explained: "We are on the road to profitability." Investors seem to buy this message. Price of the shares in Youku has almost quadrupled since the IPO. The real question, says Eric Wen, an analyst in Hong Kong with Mirae Active securities, is not whether Youku can move out of the red, but whatever it can obtain. Less than 4 per cent of Chinese advertising goes to online video, Wen said, to a third party for television, so there is plenty of room to grow. "The threshold of profitability is not a concern," said. "There is a huge amount of profit on the road."
Beijing, Youku must show the censors in China that he is free of material, that the Communist Party is subversive. Sites of the company and its rival "try to outdo each other in the effectiveness of their self-censoring mechanisms," says Duncan Clark, Chairman of the Board based in Beijing China BDA. With the dissidents inspired by the upheaval in the Arab world, try to use social networking sites to organize demonstrations in China, authorities are particularly nervous, he said, but the smooth talking Koo gives Youku advantage. The CEO is as"talk at ease with the bureaucrats as with venture capitalists," said Clark. "He is able to play very well on both sides."
The Chinese Government also began cracking down on illegal downloading, says Jeanette k. Chan, the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in Hong Kong. Operators, said, will be not able to survive unless "" they have good content - content pirated step.""
This means that competition for fact legit content rage. Site no. 2 China, Tudou, announced on March 3, an agreement with Walt Disney (DIS) to show Desperate Housewives, Lost, criminal minds and Cougar Town online, while the smaller rival Media Ku6 last year formed a partnership with Warner Bros. (TWC) and Sony (SNE) in the watch stream movies and TV. Koo, said that it will make you more deals with the studios while creating more exclusive content such as Web-GM series "We'll continue to invest in original Youku," said. Unauthorized downloads days are numbered, he added. "You cannot build a business of this", said Koo. "If you can't monetize it, what is the point?".
The bottom line: Youku tough competition and a review of Beijing. Its original content strategy is winning investors.
Einhorn is regional editor for Asia in the Office of Hong Kong for Bloomberg Businessweek.
没有评论:
发表评论