By Yann Lombard-Platet
Failed online advertising campaigns in China? There have been a few through the years. Some were due to the client's brief, some due to us. But what is a campaign really? It's an idea, a communication idea that should be relevant to the big picture, to the context in which the brand is evolving online and offline.

The campaign should be relevant to the audience, particularly so in an online campaign since we expect the audience to take the time to interact, to click, to leave a message, to register, apply for coupon, for more information and so on. Relevancy is the key word.

Essentially, what often causes failure in a campaign is that whatever was executed online was not relevant at all to the targeted audience. It could be the choice of media, choice of incentives, call for action or the way a call for action was written.

Take for example, three campaigns we did for Siemens Mobile within the same brief and the same objective. Two were successful, but one failed miserably.

Siemens Mobile "Live Football" Campaign
In 2004, Siemens Mobile was the major sponsor of football in China. They had the whole sponsorship rights of all the China National Football teams, including the women and teen teams as well as all league games. The brief was to come up with a strategy to leverage this sponsorship to bring awareness to the brand, to make football synonymous with Siemens Mobile.

The campaign was called "Live Football" and launched in April 2004. The concept was simple. We will build an online football community and recruit as many members as possible. We created an online website with all the contents expected by football fans such as team descriptions, game planning, and matches. We also created lots of interactive entertainment like quizzes, games and competitions. It was free of charge and each time someone participated in these they would score points. We even had a virtual football league where users could create their own virtual football team. There was a competition for the team that scored the most points. We launched this on China's QQ for the mass audience. This was a great success and the people acted and registered almost immediately, generating nearly 40,000 members in less than a month. This recruitment strategy continued on for the whole football season.

The Auction Campaign
Two months down the line, we launched phase two, the Auction Campaign aiming at existing users as well as to continue the recruitment drive. Our target was to have 150,000 members. It was a very strong concept as a follow-up. We had very attractive and fantastic items for the redemption of points in our auction. At that time, Real Madrid was the most famous team in the world and China was crazy about them. We had autographed T-shirts by Beckham, Ronaldo and others from the Real Madrid team. We had the possibility of a trip to Madrid. We had it all: the passion for football, the football community that was signing up, we had people scoring lots of points and we had fantastic prizes… or so we thought.

Once the Auction Campaign was launched, we realized very quickly it was a failure! The campaign was on for a short period, and by the time we got the first results, it was too late to turn around. The auction itself went well with existing members redeeming their points, but in those two weeks we got only a few hundred additional members. So what happened?

Why It Failed
The client and I were blinded by the tremendous success of the first campaign in China and chose to launch the Auction Campaign on the same media platform, QQ. It became obvious that we did not choose the right media. The media was not relevant to the targeted audience. I believe the reason for the failure was that we had already recruited as many of the audience that we could from QQ with the first campaign. We failed to realize this and we failed to realize that true football fans, those who really are interested in such fantastic prizes, will be the ones who really ‘live football'. For them, football is their passion, their life, their breath. To take the trouble to score the number of points needed to redeem some of these prizes, one has to be an absolute passionate fan. These would not be found in the mass media where the message would be completely drowned. They would not take the trouble. The first campaign worked for general fans because it was easy to participate and to win small gifts.

I do think we had 4 out of 5 elements that were extremely relevant and just one wrong one brought the campaign to a failure: the wrong choice of media. Going to the mass media was a mistake for such unique prizes. Even with such expensive and fantastic gifts we still missed as we were driven by the objective of just recruiting more members. These prizes were relevant to die hard fans but the mass media was not relevant to them. We had not identified the right football communities, the right sports sections, the right portals. We should have targeted much more niche sites, talking to die hard fans, recruiting die hard fans rather than trying to spread it across.
We had to basically rework our media plan, going on specific media for the general fans and more targeted media for the die hard fans.

The Asian Football Cup Finals
We did have one amazingly successful campaign for Seimens during the football season. Against all odds, China made it to the finals of the Asian Football Cup 2004. From the day China qualified for the finals and the actual final match day, there was about a week. In that week we created a very exciting, very relevant and successful campaign. The main objective was still to recruit new members to our football community. We used the context of China being in the finals with Japan. The campaign was executed for just one day, the day before the finals. It was simple, just about sending support messages to the China team.

We launched the campaign on QQ telling the audience "Today you get a chance to send a support message to the China Team for the finals of the Asian Cup!" All the messages were sent to the China Football Association so that they can share them with the team players. In one day we had over 10,000 messages and registrations!

So once again, why a campaign succeeds or why it fails is all about relevancy. In this particular campaign, everything was relevant and we went mass media just for one day. So why the mass media again? Because at that time in China, to be in the finals of a regional tournament against Japan, all the forces were behind China and against Japan. In a short turnaround time, we were able to come up with the right campaign to encourage users to interact, to express their support and nationalism to the China team.

Out of three campaigns, two were very successful but we learned a hard lesson through the failure of one. We no longer get swept away by earlier successes but are very aware of the pitfalls of the obvious and the irrelevant. So relevancy is everything that happens online. If you fail to be relevant, the Internet may not be so forgiving.

About the author:
Yann Lombard-Platet is Nurun's President, Asia. Yann was previously CEO of the Shanghai-based interactive marketing agency he co-founded in 1998. During his years as head of China Interactive, Yann engaged in many leading interactive marketing campaigns for international clients established in China, such as L'Oréal, Fiat, Pepsi, Standard Chartered Bank, Citibank and Siemens.

Nurun China is part of the global Nurun Inc. with offices in Canada, US, France, Italy, Spain, and now China. Nurun Inc., founded in 1985 is the world's second independent Interactive Agency with 11 offices in 6 countries. It is also well established as No.1 in Canada, No. 2 in Europe and in the top 15 in the US, with over 750 employees worldwide. Nurun is 58% owned by the Canadian media giant, Quebecor Media and is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). Website: www.nurun.com