MUMBAI: UC Ads, part of Alibaba Digital Media and Entertainment Group, has announced launch of a bouquet of content marketing services for brands. UC Ads, the mobile marketing platform under UC, takes advantage of UC's local resources. UC entered India in 2011 and UC browser overtook Opera, as the number one mobile browser in India within just two years, in August 2013. It surpassed Chrome as a popular browser among young people in 2018.
57% of B2C marketers expect their content marketing budget to increase in 2019, according to 2019 Content Marketing report by Content Marketing Institute (CMI). As one of the significant means of content marketing, influencer marketing perfectly bridges the gap between consumers and brands. Unlike real stars, these online celebrities are active online, supported by fans and they interact with fans frequently, thus becoming a good output channel of brand value.
According to Morden Chen, General Manager, UC Ads, “UC Ads provides multiple influencer marketing methods, including shopping recommendations, Product Review by vertical big shots, launch event live-streaming, constellation contest and other influencer engaging methods. These interactive influencer campaigns allow content to be represented by not only graphics and text, but engagement. In a recent campaign of a smartphone launch, influencers led the launch conference with live-streaming and interacting with fans. There are also product unboxing sessions, test and reviews and other activities to show three-dimensional and perceptible products for the brand.”
UC Ads is a pioneer in integrating the whole process into the influencer campaign. In sync with the marketing purposes of marketers, UC Ads develops marketing plans that conform to the characteristics of the media and helps brand shortlist appropriate influential celebrities from the UC Influencer Network. The UC Content Lab provides entire process instruction as well as tools of trends index to assist the influencer to create content, with UC keeping close control. The content is put into UC Distribution Platform, so as to conduct precise interest targeting, to be distributed to the right audiences.
Local Content Ecosystem of UC
UC now seeks to transform and actively establish a content ecosystem. UC News, released in June 2016, with embedded information flow push in UC Browser products, officially announced the transformation of UC from a tool to a content platform, driving a change from people-looking-for-information to information-finding-people in India. UC launched mobile marketing platform UC Ads in 2017. Since then, UC's ecological portfolio in the international market has been fully-formed. The three business sectors -content distribution platforms UC Browser and UC News, application and game distribution platform 9Apps, and advertising platform UC Ads, have respectively taken the role of content distribution, application distribution and mobile marketing platform in India.
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By attracting local content editing and operation talents, coupled with strong operations, UC has translated the success of utility product development to its content ecosystem. UC content editors often communicate repeatedly with Indian creators on UC We-Media to help them gradually build the "sense of the Internet." In addition, UC Media Lab is UC's index to help We-Media track trending news in a timely manner and produce content with "10,00,000+" views.
During the IPL Cricket Super League in India in 2018, the total content consumption of 2018 IPL on UC platform reached 21.3 billion with more than 2,50,000 related articles.The total amount of related content interaction reached 45 million with the per capita daily consumption lasted 20 minutes, surpassing the data of Twitter over the same period. During the season, more than 7000 Hindi content publishers and more than 2400 English content publishers provided UC browser users stories with unique perspective and interesting content, with many garnering over 1,00,000 views on UC.
Exploring the Content Ecosystem Methods
Given the current situation of Internet development in India, UC, as a forerunner, has also explored and established ecological methods. On one hand, UC Ads empower the advertisers and enriches the local mobile marketing solutions, while on the other hand, it gives creators a corresponding platform with profit sharing - encouraging and attracting more people to join in and continue the creation.
During Diwali last year, UC worked deeply with e-commerce platform Paytm and other brands. In a very short period of time, UC attracted 200,000 new users for Paytm. Through the integration of content and flow with e-commerce, UC has successfully exported Alibaba double 11 culture overseas, verified the interconnected path between content ecology and e-commerce ecology in India, becoming an important link of Ali India's ecological chain.
