Last year an airline little known outside of its market, Cebu Pacific, tried an experiment. It had its flight attendants dance to pop songs by Lady Gaga and Katy Perry while demonstrating to passengers how to use their seat belts, life vests and oxygen masks.
As for the airline, it is now known as a fun and friendly carrier, Flight Global notes – which, in this cost-cutting, budget-conscious airline travel economy, is indeed something.
Building Brand Awareness
A budget airline based in the Philippines, Cebu Pacific, fell into a medium that global firms are carefully incorporating into their cross-border brand and advertising strategies: online videos. Certainly the numbers support this channel. Up significantly since the middle of 2008, spending on Internet video advertising will continue to grow in the years to come, iDate recently predicted, propelled by technical advances in the field combined with the tremendous explosion of online video consumption.
Video advertising has become a powerful growth engine for the display market in particular, it says, as it can be adapted to advertisers’ branding concerns as well as allow advertisers to repurpose the commercials they develop for television.i Date predicts video will be the largest of the three emerging markets in the US and Europe in 2014, although the mobile Web will dominate globally.
The China Market
In some markets an online video play is almost mandatory. China’s consumers, for example, are more likely to be searching for online content than watching TV with the family, according to a report in Advertising Age. As a result branded drama series and entertainment programs have become very popular in the country, funded by companies like Unilever, Burger King, General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co., Kraft Foods, Beiersdorf, Nokia and Anheuser-Busch InBev.
Branded online programming “helps create connections for brands by making them relevant in environments where consumers have already chosen to visit,” said Seth Grossman, Carat’s Shanghai-based managing director, China via Ad Age.
Not surprisingly ad spending in China’s online video category is projected to grow 60% to 80% annually over the next few years, according to iResearch figures.
CMM-Intelligence, according to Onscreen Asia, finds that online video ranks as the fifth most popular online diversion for China’s internet population and is China’s fastest growing entertainment medium. Onscreen Asia also cites statistics from the China National Network Information Center (CNNIC), which found that more than 65% of China’s 338 million Internet users spent a portion of their time watching videos online as of July 2009.
A New Focus
At the same time some brands are finding an intangible value add to a cross-border global video campaign: a greater sense of integration among its many moving corporate parts. Consider Ford and its campaign for its new Focus. Before 2007, Ford marketing execs around the world spent huge sums in the millions every year shooting their own film and photography for dozens of ad campaigns and catalogues, Brandweek says. The European ads for the Focus were as Brandweek describes it, “cinematic, highlighting the car’s kinetic design. Ads in Brazil featured Ford engineers and designers and the 1967 Turtles hit song, “Happy Together.”
A new marketing executive and mandate from on high to become more efficient has yielded the global “Drive One” as a slogan and video strategy in which the video clips invariably feature customers and local employees.
The company also urged the various global divisions to cooperate on film, photography and other assets, promising them that any savings would be placed in local media rather than Ford’s profit.
