Mathew McDougall, group CEO of Beijing-based digital marketing firm SinoTech is mulling some interesting new revenue streams his company can plug into in 2009.
Merger with the Chinese digital business of Swiss sales house Publicitas, announced mid-February, has given SinoTech some pieces of technology that are well suited to publishers’ needs, he feels. These include a customer-relationship management (CRM) system to help formalize client relationships based on personal networks or guanxi, a common framework for conducting business in China, as well as a tool that converts print content into digitally-friendly formats.
“CRM, I believe, will be absolutely critical for ad operations in China,” McDougall says, arguing that customer-relationship management can help publishers build up a corporate memory that tends to get eroded whenever sales staff, with their own network of personal contacts, move on.
The software, which also helps manage everything in the ad process from ratecards to the ad insertion order, will be offered as part of a bigger consultancy package from SinoTech, though the firm will continue to service the CRM system’s existing clients.
| The transformation of classifieds
Another tool McDougall has an eye on is ASAAP, a content extraction technology which the SinoTech CEO wants to use making newspaper classifieds more widely available online. Classifieds are essentially a proxy for paid search, and digitizing lists from local newspapers can help publishers extend their reach and how much revenue they can make.Conversations with newspaper publishers, facilitated by Publicitas’ own Chinese sales network, are taking place with some deals potentially imminent, McDougall says, though he declines to go into specifics. “There are a whole variety of options that we have got now, with this technology,” he says. “I think when Publicitas had it, they didn’t use it in this way.” |
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March 2, 2009
source: asiamediajournal.com