Overview of WeChat
- WeChat is an app developed by Tencent in China for people to communicate through free text and voice massages. It provides a service called ‘Moments’ which can be used to share the photos and short videos with friends.
- As of August 2015, WeChat has over a billion registered accounts, 600 million active users;(Tencent,2015)
On January 21 2015, the Tencent start to do advertisement in Moments. This is the first official advertisement constitute by six pictures showed six sentences respectively: ‘It is everywhere; There is nowhere to hide; It is not hateful, but it does not know you; We try to make some changes.’
After that, several advertisements including BMW, Coca Cola appeared in Moments. However, more than half of WeChat users’ attitude is not negative, according to the research.(iiMediaResearchGroup,2015) Why? Personally, there are some reasons as followed.
- The advertisements on the WeChat were not as frequent as other platforms. For instance, users may receive the advertisements only once a month or even longer. Such low frequency makes the risk of annoying them become much lower.
- Not everyone can receive all the advertisements. The WeChat group will only send the ads to some specific users. The decision was made by the algorithm according to the data from users such as age, region and so on. This method used the so call ’Big Data’, it can not only try to send the ad to the correct audience but also to create a topic around the users at the beginning, because they are curious about why they received the different ads.
- For me, I think one of the reason why I am annoyed to receive the ads is that being interrupted, just like the ads on YouTube interrupt me to watch the video. But the ads on the Moments are different. Because people usually check the Moments when they are free to find something interesting. Furthermore, users can easily refuse to receive this ad through ‘not interest’ beside the ads. Also, the advertisement will start from being the fifth message in Moments and once you see it, it will fall behind along receiving other new moments. However, the Moments service has a feature that once the users has any interactive action on it, they will get the notification if their friends have any interaction. It is easy for the user who is interested to get more attention while the user who is not interested to ignore.
- The content of the Moments in WeChat is limited, it only allowed nine picture at most and several sentences. It is not easy for the advertiser to decide how to do the advertisement efficiently with low frequency and restriction of content. So, it can be easily ignored without influence if they do not click ‘check the detail’ . Therefore, the advertiser has to try their best to let their brief ad become more interesting and attractive to catch their audience’s eyes. Thats why these ads seems not so annoyed comparing those shoddy ads on other media.
Anyway, for the ads in Moments, there are not such many negative responses so far, let’s look forward to see if it will be success or not in the future.
References:
Tencent (2015) Tencent announces 2015 second quarter and interim results. Tencent, 12 August. Available from: http://tencent.com/en-us/content/ir/news/2015/attachments/20150812.pdf [Accessed 20 October 2015].
iiMedia Research Group (2015) The report of users’ perception about the advertisement in WeChat Moments, iiMedia Research Group, 27 January. Available from: http://www.iimedia.cn/38521.html [Accessed 20 October 2015].
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