Luxury banned in Beijing
Luxury ads will be banned in the Chinese capital. Chinese authorities judged that public notices exposed by the biggest luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Dior, Chanel, Gucci, reflect an “unhealthy" way of life and encourage Chinese people to a “foreign lifestyle”. In that case, a new law has been passed to censure words like royal, classy, luxury, supreme out of street announcements. Luxury brands have till April 15th to remove those words from billboards or face an RMB30,000 (around USD4,700) fine. All-in-all, considering the spendings of advertising companies, this amount should be easily affordable.
Chongqing city, in the south of China, already issued the same regulations a few days ago by banning advertisers from including the words “best, unique, irreplaceable” on their new blocks of apartment or gated housing compounds.
The government considers that the excessive consumption of luxury products imported by economical elites would disturb the harmony in the middle-class. Objectively speaking, let us be reminded that the importation of such products are no good for the Chinese economic balance. The government also recorded last year that the average income in a Chinese city is now three times that of a person living in the countryside. More surprisingly still, is that the party members who declare that China is really concerned about the social gap between rich and poor people are probably the ones who consume the most of such luxury products.
Lastly, this step may not be approved in the lavish city of Shanghai, which is much more inclined to luxury and bling-bling.
Location-based marketing on the rise
As the consumer markets are becoming more fragmented, marketers are continuously working towards new methods of reaching their relevant consumer groups.
An interesting technology that has been made available by the increasing rate of smart phones integrated with a GPS chip is geo-fencing. A geo-fence is a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area, thus making location-based services very attractive to the ever-striving marketers.
One way marketers can use location-based services is to send customized marketing and advertising messages, and other information, to mobile subscribers based on their current location.
An example of a currently successful location-based service is Starbucks’ discounted coupons. In Great Britain, Starbucks, together with the mobile carrier O2, is sending subscribers, which have geo-fencing activated on their smart phones, a digital coupon with a discount on selected products when consumers are located within a close proximity to the store. There are also examples of restaurants pushing the same type of coupons to subscribers when the time closes in on lunch break.
A number of marketing news sites, amongst them, ClickZ.asia, has recently predicted that location-based marketing would be one of the big mobile trends in China in the year of 2011. As the latest data from Analysys International anticipates that smart phone sales in China will exceed 40 million pieces in 2011 alone, it will be interesting to see how many Chinese businesses that will attempt to capitalize on the advantages of the geo-fencing technology.
JiWire, which is a leading mobile audience media company, recently released their Mobile Audience Insights Report for Q4 2010. The report showed evidence that 53 per cent of mobile users believed location-based sales, such as discount coupons, would attract them to the vendor where it originated.
However, as pushed messages from location-based marketing will increase, it is yet to be seen how marketers will offer incentives to mobile subscribers without having the consumers feeling that they continuously receive monotonous information from multiple vendors.
Online Advertising Revenue in China
From sinotechblog, here's a small post on online ad spends in China as compiled by iResearch. Here's the link.
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