豆瓣发布了一支动画宣传视频Douban Releases an Animated Promo Video

Douban has released an animated promotional video. Beyond an in-depth introduction to Douban, its users, and its various product lines, the video puts special emphasis on Douban’s identity as an interest-based marketing platform. According to the video, as of September 2013 Douban had reached 75 million registered users, 200 million unique users covered per month, and an average of over 200 million page views a day. No longer a niche site, Douban has run advertising partnerships with more than 200 first-tier brands from home and abroad. Douban’s advertising has always enjoyed a solid reputation in the industry, held up as a model of “principled yet effective,” and “interest marketing” is precisely the winning formula behind that reputation and popularity. How do you do interest marketing on Douban? Is it really so hard to get users to produce quality UGC of their own accord? Perhaps, in the video Douban has released, we can find the answers.

On Douban, Everything Begins with Interest

Unlike other social media built on real-world acquaintance, Douban is a non-real-name network of strangers. Users follow one another and interact, online and offline, on the basis of shared interests and hobbies; what carries the exchange is common interests, taste in life, mutually recognized values, and so on, not classmate ties, family ties, colleague ties, fame, titles, or social status.

The social relationships of Douban users show the following traits:

1. Genuinely decentralized social media: an atmosphere of exchange that is more open, equal, and diverse;

2. Following a person grows out of endorsing their content: quality content is king;

3. The threshold and cost of a “follow” are higher: winning fans is not so easy;

4. A stronger sense of identification with and trust in one’s neighbors: their recommendations are trusted more, and, by the same token, made more carefully.

At the same time, this social character defines how things spread on Douban:

1. Interest hotspots are more scattered and long-tail: marketing needs to combine multiple points of interest;

2. The spread cycle is longer: quality content stays hot for a month, and may well still be surfaced by users’ recommendations even a year later;

3. Only the same kind of people gather together: word-of-mouth travels with greater precision.

So the right way to do brand mini-site marketing on Douban is: “sustained, deep, immersive interest marketing.”

{ Sustained, Deep, Immersive Interest Marketing on Douban }

Start from the target group’s interest data and insight, find the points of interest that can radiate precisely to that group, and use interest-driven ad design and formats to bring them into the brand mini-site. Then, speaking their language, matching their visual preferences, and riding Douban’s trending topics, convey the core messages of the brand and the product’s selling points softly and experientially through interactive campaigns. After interacting, users produce UGC, and the high-quality, in-depth UGC among it brings added value to the brand’s reach. How this UGC is put to use in the closing stage matters just as much, so as to achieve long-tail spread within Douban and diffusion across media platforms, and in turn maximize the effect. Sustained, deep, immersive interest marketing not only raises brand awareness with a deft touch; it also effectively raises the target group’s goodwill toward the brand.

On Douban, Make Ads That Users Like

Douban formally launched its advertising business at the end of 2009; four years on, it has kept up a pattern of steady growth. Brand advertising is currently one of Douban’s important business models. That’s right: Douban does ads, ads that users like. Douban’s secret is “turning ads into content”:

1. A clean, friendly ad environment: there are no pop-ups, floating layers, couplet ads, skyscraper ads, jumbo screens, or other formats that damage the user experience; a page carries at most 3 ad slots, the great majority of them static banners. In both the quantity and the form of its ads, the various disturbances an ad causes in reaching users are kept to the absolute minimum.

2. Banner design and copy as content: the ad creatives Douban produces have long been praised across the industry for their visual beauty; in design and copy they lean toward interest and content, not naked selling points and data displays but design and copy tied to the target group’s interests. No user can remember all of a product’s selling points, so each Douban ad image presents a single appeal rather than trying to be big and all-encompassing; scattered points of interest help reach a precise audience. Compared with official creatives in the same slots, the creatives Douban produces average click-through rates 2-5 times higher.

3. Deep content partnerships with its product lines: Douban’s exploration of deeply content-driven advertising across its UGC product lines, Books, Movies, Music, Events, and Stuff, deserves the industry’s praise all the more. The content-based ad placement Douban tailored for Tiffany let users admire exquisite stills from The Great Gatsby while, entirely naturally, satisfying their curiosity about the Tiffany jewelry in the film: click the banner and you entered a richly stocked interest mini-site to get to the bottom of the stories behind the Tiffany pieces in the movie.

Raising the Quality of Life of 200 Million Urban Youth

The sense of quality that Douban advertising strives so hard for is cut from the same cloth as the Douban site itself, and it has won broad recognition from brand clients. By the end of November 2013, more than 200 first-tier brand clients from home and abroad had set up Douban brand mini-sites for interactive marketing partnerships, and another 40-plus brand clients were simply running display ads on Douban.

The industries span a wide range, led by automotive, fashion, FMCG, and IT, and also covering travel, alcohol, home appliances, cosmetics, luxury goods, and more, taking in essentially all the mainstream first- and second-tier brands at home and abroad. In brand character they run from international first-tier names like Burberry, Tiffany, Land Rover, and Jaguar to down-to-earth homegrown originals like Forever C, Liushen, and the Panjiayuan flea market, all of them closely bound up with raising users’ quality of life.

We let users discover, naturally and accurately, the brands they might come to like on Douban, and, through deep and immersive interest-based interaction, listen to brand stories and experience product selling points, thereby raising both their awareness of and their goodwill toward the brand; in the end, users discover, experience, and share the products and services that suit them best, and the aim of raising users’ quality of life is achieved. (Click here to learn more about Douban advertising)