The Gravitas Group took home with the LOCAL HERO, GOLD & SILVER awards for Mobile Marketing at the Agency of the Year Awards 2013, held at JW Marriott Hotel, Hong Kong.

The Gravitas Group has been the most awarded mobile marketing agency in Agency of the Year since 2010. This year, both the Gravitas Group and its mobile advertising arm AMAZE Mobile Media won Gold and Silver Awards respectively. The Gravitas Group also named Local Hero in the Mobile Marketing category at the same night.

“2013 is the year of 10th anniversary of the Gravitas Group. Winning the awards means so much to us. It affirms the Gravitas Group and all our group companies’ accomplishment and contribution in mobile marketing industry and the glory we made also encourages everyone in the team to work even better to reward our clients in the future.” said Ricky Chu, CEO of the Gravitas Group.

“I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank my teams in our group who always turn innovative ideas into actionable campaigns with results.” Ricky added.

The winners of the Agency of the Year Awards 2013 were determined by the combination of a nation-wide survey on marketers’ agency preferences, and a thorough evaluation of agency performances during a specified time-period (1 January 2012 – 31 December 2012).

Entries were judged with equal weight going to business performance, staff development and management, contributions to the industry and community at large and, of course, work carried out over the previous year.

Congratulations to all other winners at the AOTY 2013.

For the full list of winners, please visit
http://aotyawards.com/HK/?page_id=993

More than 70 marketers gathered at agnes b. Cubus to join Mobile Friday Social on May 24. We’re sorry that the attendees were much more than we expected, so some of them had to stand throughout the event.

The theme of Mobile Friday in May was about “SoLoMo”.

Keith Lee, Strategic Planning Director of Inspire Digital Asia kicked off the event by bringing in the SoLoMo Scorecard?, which assesses and compares a brand’s presences and activities across social media and mobile, and how well the integrated social and mobile strategy help the brands to build their loyal customers.

During the gathering, the SoLoMo Scorecard? for popular shopping malls in Hong Kong was shared. Keith suggested 4 best practices from their findings:

1. Brand Relevant Message – Extending the mall’s positioning to social media platforms can help to reinforce customer loyalty through social community;
2. 360 Campaign – Integrating social media as a part of the campaign with aligned theme and enriching it through different activities can gain more engagement from followers;
3. Focus on Customer Experience – Instead of mall directory, treating mobile as a tool that provides pertinent services can sustain relationship with loyal customers and increase their repeated purchase;
4. Integrated with location – Driving foot traffic through social media with frequent updates, like Weibo, can be easier to be discovered by the customers.

That made a lead-in to the next part by Salina Ghafur, Head of Marketing of SINA Hong Kong.

Salina began her topic “Weibo-Revolutionary channel of communication” with some statistics of the social networking platform. Then she dived deeper into the topic by sharing tips with marketers that helps them to manage Corporate Weibo efficiently and to break through the boundaries of 140 words. There are apps for marketers to engage followers with photos and videos, together with data analytics for marketers to evaluate their efforts on Weibo.

Salina also introduced the newly launched Weibo page. The Weibo page on mobile platform enrich a company’s content and enhance user experience by gathering all information about places and interests of individual users /audiences.

Before Salina concluded her presentation, she showed some successful cases of brands on using Weibo’s various ad formats to extend brand exposure.

Then we had an expert in mobile advertising – Penny Wong, General Manager of AMAZE Mobile Media shared 3 factors that help marketers to win in mobile advertising.

Penny explained there are 3 key factors (time, location and context) would help to uplift the effectiveness of mobile advertising as the message relevancy increased. One example is Location Based messaging, which works by geo-targeting at specific time. This tactics has been proved to be very effective to drive the right traffic for retail stores.

On the other hand, Penny also pointed out context, especially weather would affect people’s mood, need and purchase decision. At the same time, weather is ranked number 3 among all apps downloaded in Hong Kong, which shows it is a key concern of Hong Kong people.
He showed a few campaigns ran in America and got impressive results. He strongly recommended Hong Kong advertisers to try Contextual Targeting on Hong Kong Weather. By choosing one in the 4 criteria, advertisers can show more relevant ads that are triggered by specific weather conditions.
The relevant ad will effectively induce buying impulse for audiences.

Missed out the last Mobile Friday? Don’t worry! Make sure you keep an eye on Mobile Marketing Snap, we will be posting the latest news on the next Mobile Friday event!

Photos of the event can be viewed on Mobile Friday Facebook page.

Inspiration is a very abstract and yet interesting thing. It can be derived from everything, but you can never master it. You can say that inspirations are always around us but they are hard to be discovered.

Recently, Create Hong Kong launched a campaign – “Inspiration Sparks HK”, aimed at driving the creative atmosphere by providing a platform for all of us to save and share the inspirations when they suddenly come to our mind.

Since inspiration will appear anytime, anywhere. Mobile is the core platform for this campaign. With integration with other media including online ad, print ad, outdoor ad, social media and microfilms, the campaign is now running to inspire everyone in Hong Kong.

With “Inspiration Sparks HK”, we can share the inspirations through photos and discover the sources of inspiration around us. We can also bookmark our favourite inspiration and keep it as our own database of creativity.

In order to encourage us to share our inspirations, Create Hong Kong invited the awarded creative talents to share their inspirations, as well as their awarded-winning entries and unique creative processes. Every one of them has their own professional achievements. Their sharing could definitely inspire us a lot.

Moreover, there is “My Favourite Inspiration” award program to recognize the best inspiration.

Let’s start to share our inspirations now!

Microfilm: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK-dchRgFBE
“My Favourite Inspiration” Awards: http://www.inspirationsparkshk.hk

The first Asia Smartphone Apps Contest was held on 7th of March at Cyberport in order to recognize the excellence of innovative smartphone apps in the region, including Japan, Korea, Macau, Mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The Gravitas Group stood out from over 200 entries among the region and won big at the contest.

Advertising & Marketing Sliver Award
– Mall Without Boundary
“Mall Without Boundary” is a long-term mobile strategy for New Town Plaza to enable seamless communication between customers and the mall through the newly designed “always-on” platform. The first ever mobile table booking function created a big echo to the market and already swept many remarkable awards in the industry last year. This successful mobile marketing campaign helped New Town Plaza drive customer loyalty and sales.

Advertising & Marketing Certificate of Merits
– ECCO Scandinavian Stories
“ECCO Scandinavian Stories” was a mobile marketing campaign which aimed to promote ECCO Shoe’s latest A/W collection. With the interactive and nicely designed storybook, audience could interact with the brand by visuals, video, sound and touch. The campaign also conveyed efficiently with synergy among various media and truly enabled customers to experience the Scandinavian style and drove traffic to ECCO retail stores.

Advertising & Marketing Certificate of Merits
– Get, Set, Tap!
“Get, Set, Tap!” was the mobile campaign of Skechers which aimed at introducing “GOrun” – the lightest trainers to the targeted customers. The campaign featured a running contest among players and the ranking was shown in the social media. This strategy created great viral effect and it successfully increased the awareness of Skechers and “GOrun”. The mobile campaign was so effective and thus Skechers extended it to other markets in Asia, such as Singapore and Malaysia.

All these awards gave recognition to the success of the Gravitas Group in mobile marketing. “Thank you for recognizing us with all these awards again! Our passion is fueled by these accolades and we assure you of further innovations that help building your successful business the mobile way. We promise to strive for further excellence and stay tune for more awards in the near future,” said Ricky Chu, CEO of the Gravitas Group.

In order to celebrate the launch of Inspire Digital Asia, the Launch Party was held at Central last Friday evening. Apart from delicious serving with sumptuous canapes and beverage, the sharing by the key members also inspired the guests a lot.

Ricky Chu, CEO of the Gravitas Group, shared the evolution of mobile marketing and the change of media landscape in the last decade. As we are now living in a multi-screen, mobile and socially connected world, there will be no more so-called “above the line”, “below the line” or “through the line” communication.

In addition, he highlighted the importance of Paid-Owned-Earned (POE) in marketers’ media strategy and a gradual shift away from paid media into owned and earned is forecasted in the coming years. That’s why the Gravitas Group launched Inspire Digital to inspire their clients to drive brand engagement, customer loyalty and profitability through integrated use of social, mobile and other emerging media.

Napoleon Biggs, Managing Director of Inspire Digital Asia, introduced two new approaches, SoLoMo Scorecard™ and Dynamic Direct Marketing™, to assist marketers to market in a mobile and socially connected world.

SoLoMo Scorecard™ – benchmarking the brand presence and activity in social media, loyalty marketing and mobile channels. Inspire will use this to advise the brands how to best leverage earned and owned media to achieve deeper loyalty.

Dynamic Direct Marketing™ – a new approach to highly relevant, timely and individual way of direct marketing. Inspire will assess brands existing direct marketing activities and advise the best strategy and executable creative solution in order to maximise the campaign results.

With refreshing canapes and taking crazy photos in Photobox, marketers across different industries exchanged their ideas on possible collaboration in the future, and enjoyed a fun and meaningful evening.

Photos of the launch event can be viewed on Inspire Facebook page.

Mobile Friday holds regular gatherings that provide an indispensible platform for marketers to meet up and share their thoughts on mobile marketing across Asia.

On 1st Feb, the first Mobile Friday Social in 2013 themed “How can a local amusement park hit new records in world rankings by investing in digital marketing” was held at Agnes b. Cubus.

Ms. Vivian Lee, Marketing Director of Ocean Park Hong Kong, shared their difficulties and solutions when they started to invest in digital marketing 10 years ago. Recently, the campaign “Take You to the Poles” won big at Mob-Ex Awards 2012, including Gold in Best Mobile Site and Gold in Best Use of Multiple Mobile Channels. This mobile campaign successfully helped Ocean Park to promote their brand new Polar Adventure and draw tremendous public attention to the environmental pollution through social media.

While most of the brands spent less than 10% of their marketing budget in digital marketing, Ocean Park has already spent more than 30%. Among multiple digital marketing channels, Ocean Park also put their focus on social media. Vivian shared some tips on how Ocean Park created viral effect during campaign by making good use of different social media channels.

Afterward, Mr. Stephen Hung, Head of Innovation at AMAZE Mobile Media, introduced the newly launched product – MobPass to us. MobPass is far beyond an electronic form of coupons. Practically, It can be an entry tickets and other forms of passes. It can remind your customers to come to you when they are nearby your shop location or which offers are going to be expired. It is available for users across different popular mobile platforms. Stephen also demonstrated how MobPass works in a retail store. He pointed out that the frontline staff did not need to have extra training. All the attendees were impressed, as the redemption process only required one tap.

Missed out the last Mobile Friday? Don’t worry! Make sure you keep an eye on Mobile Marketing Snap, we will be posting the latest news on the next Mobile Friday event!

Photos of the event can be viewed on Mobile Friday Facebook page.

The fast-growing social media network on the Chinese mainland is proving to be one of the most effective vehicles for companies to enter this dynamic market. According to Chinese online payment platform Alipay, nearly Rmb3 million worth of online transactions in the country occur every 60 seconds.

Napoleon Biggs, Chief Strategy Officer for Hong Kong-based mobile marketing company Gravitas, spoke at a recent HKTDC seminar on “eMarketing in China.” He offers some insights into breaking into the mainland using local social media networks.

How has social media on the Chinese mainland become more competitive?
Actually, it used to be more competitive because there were more start-ups. Some of them have been merged or bought; others died. What has happened now is big companies have started to dominate, such as Tencent, Alibaba, Sina, Sohu and Baidu. Many entrepreneurs in or outside China think, “China has so many people – 500 million online.” But to run a business in China is very challenging.

What are some of the challenges for SMEs building an online business on the mainland?
First is making their content relevant for Chinese audience. What you see is a lot of Western concepts that have worked in the United States, France or the United Kingdom, even Japan. They would say “let’s expand to China,” and they think things that have worked in another culture can work in China. But they don’t really localise. To them, localisation means creating their site in Chinese, which is not enough.

The second challenge is regulations. What they don’t do is understand what kinds of licenses are needed to set up a website – an ICP (Internet Content Provider) license is what you need. Or what is your board, director structure, money and tax regime, so they don’t think about those logistics.

Another challenge is which part of China do you tackle because many people would always go to Shanghai, Beijing or Guangzhou. They don’t consider second-tier cities, where there’s less competition and therefore a greater chance of building a following. Sometimes if you are new to that city, you could build a following among that audience.

Is the mainland social media market nearly saturated?
Not really because it is constantly evolving. Three years ago, it was Xiaonei and Kaixin, they were the two competitors. Then along came Weibo. Upon leaving school, users migrate to Weibo because it’s mobile. Just when you thought that the mainland social media is saturated, out comes WeChat. And people started to think “Weibo is too crowded and I want to do something simpler and communicate with my real friends.” So suddenly Weixin takes over. People are always thinking about what’s the next thing, people are very open to trying something new. The reason why Weixin took off is because it’s simpler, it’s your circle of friends and it’s free SMS.

Some of these social platforms in China have borrowed an original concept (such as Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter) and adapted it to better fit the culture. For instance, Weibo realised very early on that they needed to change the way people interacted on Weibo. From the moment they started, there was a VIP category. You can get a “V” on your profile picture, so you have these hierarchies of celebrities or thought leaders. So immediately it’s very Chinese – someone to respect through fame, success or power. That didn’t exist with Twitter. They also launched the idea that you could sign up through your mobile phone.

What’s interesting is that many people still prefer anonymity whereas Westerners, particularly Americans, are proud to say what they think. Also, Weibo was set up like a Bulletin Board System (BBS), which is now broadly regarded as an online forum or chat room. Chinese people are used to the idea – somebody has a topic and you respond to that topic, and you get a response, then the conversations form a thread. Twitter wasn’t like that.

How can social media platforms help SMEs build their brands on the mainland?
If you are a start-up or a business trying to get into China, your biggest challenge is to stand out from others who are doing the same thing. Up until the Internet and social media came along, you would need to invest a lot in marketing and advertising. What it means is it lowers the threshold. If you want to find your audience, you could find them more rapidly because you have the tools at hand to be able to find the niche group of people, without necessarily being in that country. As long as you have the manpower, you could do your market-entry research through social media or search engine. With Baidu, you could find out hot topics in each province, and city. Before, you needed to hire a consulting firm to do your focus-group analysis, so automatically, your cost will be cheaper.

What can SMEs do to keep up with a fast-moving social media world?
It’s a generation thing. For Xiaonei and Kaixin, which is a student or schoolmate site, you don’t feel any ties after you graduate and become part of the workforce, and you need a professional platform, which is Weibo. As a generation grows, they move on to a new platform that arises from a need. But I do believe this is a generation born with technology, as they move up, the people behind them will just fit into it. People at school would still use Xiaonei and Kaixin. People at work would use Weibo, and people who want to use more funky stuff are on WeChat.

SMEs don’t need to keep changing their platform. All they need to do is to identify which group of people they need to talk to. I have a friend who is selling contact lens. Their research found that students don’t buy their own contact lens; their parents buy that for them. But as soon as they leave school or enter work, they buy their own contact lens. So the question is should they target students or should they wait so they maintain the relationships. There is a long-term goal.

Is social media a must for SMEs?
Yes. In China, social media has a mass element to it as well. In the West, Facebook and Twitter are stand-alone businesses. In China, the social media is owned by the big portals – Sina and Tecent. In the US, if you want to do online advertising, you would buy display ads from the Yahoo news site, and have a Facebook account and a Twitter account – three different platforms. In China, for example Sina, you could use all the different tools they have – you can do mass advertising via their portal and niche advertising on Weibo, which belongs to Sina. If you want to do game advertising, you could do it on Sina or Tencent, they all have their gaming pages. Basically these are giant conglomerates that can address different needs under one umbrella.

In addition to being just a tool for promotion, mobile applications can be a critical component in the Paid-Owned-Earned (POE) roadmap for brands. As the core of an owned platform strategy, a mobile application is an excellent tool for brands to communicate with their customers for promotion, CRM and loyalty marketing.

Grand Century Place, a popular shopping mall located in Mongkok, launched its smartphone apps in September last year with motion-detecting games that successfully caught its shoppers’ attention and received exceptionally encouraging feedbacks.

In order to continue riding on the momentum, Grand Century Place recently added a new game “Get the Wheel Movin’ ” to celebrate the coming Lunar New Year with the shoppers.

Inside the game, visitors are waiting outside the Ferris Wheel, but it is out of service at this critical moment. Players are required to tackle all the challenges in order to make it run again. All these challenges are full of festive atmosphere and players need to complete the assigned tasks to get the Ferris Wheel moving again.

After completing the challenges, the festival gifts are ready at the mall for players to redeem. This gives a solid reason for players to visit the mall. Also, players have to give simple information including mobile number to join the game and this enables Grand Century Place to collect a database for future communication with their shoppers.