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The post-Olympic drumbeat of expectations has already started. Now that China has produced a brilliant Olympics, allowed 3,000 foreign journalists into Beijing without too much of a hassle, and walked away with a ton of medals, the country must be ready and confident enough to open up in the fullest sense of the word. In respect to media this would mean a foreign entity could enter China without government approval and have direct control over internal content.
While this is a consummation, as the saying goes, devoutly to be wished, the above scenario will probably not happen any time soon. After all the hoopla about whether NBC would be allowed to film from Tiananmen Square, the network coverage settled into the same comfortable format that could not have caused Chinese government officials any concern. Don’t get me wrong; I thought the coverage was wonderful and was glad for the weighty contribution of veteran sportscaster Jim Lampley who brought unfettered gravitas to the occasion, absent the frivolous cultural overlays. No doubt about it: from a global and domestic Chinese perspective, television worked. But there is a big difference between sports content and the type of content that worries government censors.
The 2008 Beijing Olympics was different than earlier Games in a number of important ways. The Games have historically been used as a “coming out party” for countries, such as Japan, South Korea, and Russia, to celebrate their recovery from war or a repressive form of government. The Beijing Games were certainly China’s “coming out party” but never has an Olympics had so much at stake domestically. The primary reason for this is that the 400 million middle-class domestic Chinese consumers were as much the target for sponsors as the international televisions audience. For Coke, Adidas, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Visa and others, these domestic consumers are really their end game. All indications suggest this time Olympic sponsorships are paying off big time. Lenova, the Chinese company that took over IBM’s personal computing business in 2005 was an exception and one sponsor with a global audience in mind. Well-positioned in China, Lenova’s objective was to build a world-class image for the brand.
And this brand-building was largely through television. NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol was quoted in the New York Times about not trading analog (television) dollars for Internet dimes. David Wolf writes in Ad Age (http://adage.com/Olympics) that “Ebersol’s point is a sobering reminder that pre-roll ads, screen rolls and banners aren’t enough. We still have a long way to go”.
The relative value of analog versus digital dollars at a time when digital is all the rage has been well known to media executives for years. And in some respects is the defining business issue of the day. But China must have missed that caution, particularly in terms of mobile.
China Mobile, which has its own pavilion at the Olympics, with 407 million subscribers, is certainly the number one mobile service provider in the world. At the pavilion China Mobile teamed up with MyClick, which is a leader in image-recognition mobile marketing in China, to let visitors build a “wishing wall”. This is hardly experimental: Pepsi, Adidas, Nokia and Estée Lauder have developed mobile marketing programs through MyClick. These programs might present digital dimes but when there is scale the size of China, it is not surprising that traditional global marketers are going mobile.
In this context it is somewhat quaint to talk about the role of traditional print media in post-Olympic China. That’s not the best measure of what is really going on in the media and technology spaces; investment patterns offer more clues. Here are some items courtesy of the China Business Review (www.chinabusinessreview.com), September/October, 2008:
These investments represent a fraction of the activity over a three-month period in 2008. The Olympics were not a technological “one-off”; they were testimony to the dizzying adoption of new technologies in China. And the investment curve simply underscores that China is wired, mobile and fully preparing for a technological future. Traditional media will certainly not disappear in China but there seems little doubt that mobile will play a huge role in their media mix.
The sound soon to be coming out of China will be that of digital dollars.
Charles McCullagh
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