EARLIER this year BMW advertised on WeChat,a popular messaging app in China with around 550m monthly users. But its ads were shown only to those whose profiles suggested they were potential buyers of expensive cars. Others were shown ads for more affordable stuff, such as smartphones. The campaign bruised a few egos. Some of those not shown the BMW ad complained, referring to themselves as diao, or (putting it politely) losers.
今年早些时候，宝马公司在拥有5.5亿用户的中国大众信息软件平台微信上打起了广告。但是宝马的广告只对那些资料上显示有购买豪车可能的用户可见，而其他人看到的则是一些他们能负担得起的商品，例如智能手机。这样的行为伤到了一些人的自尊。有些没有看到宝马广告的人抱怨宝马把他们当成了“屌丝”，或者用文雅一点的说法——“撸sir”。
The carmaker’s experience shows the complexities of advertising today, when it is so easy for dissatisfied customers to make their voices heard. But it was also an example of how marketing chiefs are struggling to find the right way to reach consumers on new digital platforms, where they are spending ever more of their time.
宝马的遭遇很好地告诉我们现在打广告的难处，一个不小心就会因为急于求成而冒犯消费者。但这个案例也很好地说明现在广告部的负责人们怎么费尽心思想在人们越来越频繁光顾的电子平台上与消费者互通。
Not long ago social-media marketing was something that brand managers might ask their summer interns to deal with.Today it has become a pillar of the advertising industry. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have cultivated vast audiences: 2 billion people worldwide use them, says eMarketer, a research firm. Online advertising of all sorts continues to grow, and within that category, spending on social-media ads has gone from virtually nothing a few years ago to perhaps $20 billion this year .
不久前，在社交媒体上的营销是那些品牌经理吩咐他们的假期实习生做的事；但现在者变成了广告业中的起支柱作用的一个部分。类似脸书、推特和领英这样的社交网络有着庞大的使用人数，根据调查公司eMarketer数据显示，全球使用社交网络的人数高达20亿。各式各样的网络广告不断发展，在这样的趋势下，花费在社交媒体上的广告费用从几年前的近乎为零到今年将近200亿美元之巨。
Advertisers like social-media platforms because they gather all sorts of data on each user’s age, consumption patterns, interests and so on. This means ads can be aimed at them with an accuracy that is unthinkable with analogue media. For example, Chevrolet, an American car brand, has sent ads to the Facebook pages and Twitter feeds of people who had expressed an interest in, or signed up to test-drive, a competitor’s vehicle.
广告商偏爱社交媒体平台的原因是他们能够再上面收集每一个用户的各种信息，包括年龄、消费方式、兴趣偏好等等。这就意味着广告能够以大众传媒无法企及的精确程度投放给消费者。举个例子，美国汽车制造厂商雪佛兰公司在脸书和推特网上投放广告的对象是一些曾经对他们竞争对手的车辆表现出购买兴趣甚至对其预约试驾的用户。
Such fine-tuned targeting means that the distinction between advertising ande-commerce is becoming blurred. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and otherplatforms are selling ads containing “buy now” buttons, which let users complete a sale on the spot. It is too early to tell how many consumers wantsuch a convenience, but the social platforms foresee a future in which they getpaid by advertisers to provide instant-shopping services that make the platforms more useful to their members, and get them to spend more time on them.
这种对症下药的投放方式使得广告和电子商务间的界线变得愈渐模糊。脸书、推特、照片分享和其他的平台上的广告都附带有“立即购买”的按钮，方便用户即时完成交易。现在说有很多消费者享受这种快捷带来的方便似乎为时尚早，但社交平台预见到了未来的发展方向：社交平台从广告商获得资金并为用户提供即时购物服务，这样平台对用户来说更加方便实用，用户就会花费更多时间在这些平台上，据此社交平台就可以吸引更多广告商。
Towring the most out of the ability to target consumers precisely on socialmedia, ad agencies are making big changes to their campaigns. Instead ofcreating a single, broad-brush message that will run across television, radio, print and outdoor, they are producing many variations on a theme, matching eachto the subset of consumers they judge most likely to respond to it. Last month Lowe’s, an American home-improvement retailer, ran a campaign on Facebook in which users were sent one of several dozen versions of its ad, depending on which part of their homes they had mentioned on social media.
为了尽最大可能在社交媒体上精确定位用户，广告商们在策略上做出巨大改变。和以往投放在电视、电台、印刷品和户外广告上单一笼统的信息不同，广告商们依据一个主题做出许多不同的样式，再根据用户最有兴趣的类别进行匹配。上个月，美国家政零售商劳氏公司在脸书网上投放了几十个不同样式的广告，根据用户在社交媒体上提及到他们房子的某部分进行针对性广告。
The iterative nature of digital marketing has meant lots of work for ad agencies and public-relations firms. However, the brands that hire them must weigh the “production-cost trade-offs” that come with personalisation on social media, says Pete Blackshaw of Nestlé, a food manufacturer. “You can target too much.”
电子营销不断变化的特性让广告和公关公司的工作负担不轻。但食品生产商雀巢的皮特布莱克肖认为，雇用这些公司的品牌领导人们也要权衡在社交媒体上私人定制背后的“生产成本”。他说：“他们的目标用户有可能超过他们能承受的范围。”
Marketing chiefs also need to think through efforts to give their brands “online personalities”. Twitter has been the mainplace where brands try to sound authentic and clever. When Apple announced its gold iPhone in 2013, Denny’s, a restaurant chain, sent out a gently mocking tweet showing a photo of its pancakes, which are “always available in golden”.It seemed to go down well with consumers.
营销负责人也要思考怎么样才能赋予他们品牌一个“网络特点”。推特变成这些品牌希望表现出可信度和创意的主战场。2013年苹果发布土豪金iPhone时，食品连锁公司丹尼公司发了一条稍带嘲弄的推文，其中图片是它们生产的一款班戟，内容是“我们什么时候都是土豪金”。这条推文在消费者中间似乎引起了不错的反响。
But in attempting to ride social-media trends, companies can easily fall flat on their faces. DiGiorno, a frozen-pizzamaker, noticed that a number of people were using the hashtag “#WhyIStayed” on Twitter and sent out a jocular tweet that they had stayed for the pizza. It turnedout that the comment thread was about domestic violence and why women remained in abusive relationships. DiGiorno took to social media again—this time to apologise.
但在企图搭上社交媒体这趟快车的时候，有些公司可能很容易就会摔一跤。冷冻披萨制造商DiGiorno注意到很多人都在推特中涉及到话题“WhyIStay（为什么我待着）”，所以它们发了一条调笑的推文称，那些人待着的原因是在等披萨。但其实这个话题的内容都是关于家庭暴力以及遭受家庭暴力的妇女默不作声的问题。DiGiorno再一次在社交媒体上开口，但这次是为前面一条推文道歉。
In spite of such pitfalls, social platform sare likely to receive an ever larger part of marketers’ budgets. But the digital-media business is still young and volatile, and it is hard to predict which social networks are destined to become the new-media equivalents of America’s big four broadcast-TV networks. For a time, Twitter seemed to be the place to be for advertisers; more recently it has been dogged by management turnover and slowing user growth. Now Facebook is the favourite among marketing folk: it claims nearly five times as many users and nine times as much revenue as Twitter. Facebook has bought several nascent social-media services that might have grown to become challengers, such as Instagram, a photo-sharing app, and WhatsApp, a messaging app. It has been rolling out ads cautiously on Instagram, to see how users react, but has yet to start doing so on WhatsApp.
虽然有着这样的问题，社交平台在营销人员的预算中占得比例越来越重。但数字媒体商业依然处于不成熟和不稳定的状态，同时我们也很难去预测那家社交网络公司最会成长为美国四大电视广播公司那样级别的新媒体巨头。推特一度是广告商比较钟爱的地方，但最近却受到管理周转问题和用户增长减缓问题的困扰。由于脸书是推特用户量的五倍而是其收入九倍，所以现在脸书成为营销人员最为青睐的地方。脸书网公司已经收购了一些有可能成长为有力竞争对手的新生社交媒体服务公司，例如图片分享软件Instagram和即时聊天软件WhatsApp。脸书网公司谨慎地在Instagram上放入广告，来测试一下用户的反应；而最近WhatsApp上也出现了广告。
Someold media have yet to feel much pain from the loss of ad revenue to digitalrivals. TV advertising has until now kept growing. But as time goes on, and asTV audiences both decline and shift to services that do not have ads, such asNetflix, the competition will be more keenly felt. However, social networks,and TV advertisers interested in switching to them, have yet to work out whatis the optimal format for video ads. In 2012 Twitter acquired Vine, which lets people post six-second videos; several months ago Periscope, an app for livevideo also owned by Twitter, was all the rage. Advertisers have experimentedwith both services, but as yet neither has taken off as a marketing medium.
一些传统媒体也开始为流失到电子媒体对手的广告费用感到痛心。到目前为止，电视广告一直保持增长态势。但随着时间推移，电视观众因为向类似于网飞公司这样无广告的服务公司转移而减少，竞争就变得愈发激烈。但是，社交网络和希望向这些平台转移的电视广告商都还没有研究出视频广告的最好方式。2012年，推特收购了能发布六秒微视频软件Vine；而几个月前，推特还收购了能够进行现场直播的Periscope，而这款软件大受欢迎。广告商在这两款软件上都开始进行试验，但都没有取用任何一个作为其营销媒体。
It still makes sense for marketers to try these new services out, because there is something of a first-mover advantage in digital advertising. Brands that areearly to use new platforms benefit disproportionately, explains Linda Boff, amarketing chief at General Electric, because their users have not yet become saturated with marketing messages.
对于营销人员来说，在这些新媒体服务平台尝试还是很有必要，因为数字广告中所谓先动优势还是存在的。通用电气公司的营销总裁琳达·波弗认为，那些早就开始使用新平台的公司品牌能从中获得巨大收益，因为这些用户对营销广告的忍耐没到达极限。
The latest social platforms to get the attention of marketing types are a bunch of messaging apps, such as Snapchat, WeChat and Kik, where young users send messages, photos and videos directly to friends. Brands are also starting to do more with Pinterest,where users can “pin up” images of things that appeal to them. It seems a fair assumption that users may want to buy the things they are pinning up, although the platform, which has 70m users, may never achieve the scale of Twitter(300m), let alone Facebook (1.5 billion).
现在，那些最能让人注目的营销类型是一大堆的聊天软件，例如snapchat、微信、kik等，年轻消费者能够用这些软件直接给朋友发送信息、照片和视频。那些公司也开始在“虚拟看板”软件上做文章，而用户能够将他们喜好的照片“钉”在虚拟看板上。尽管这个平台的用户人数可能永远也达不到推特（3亿）那个程度——脸书（15亿）就更别说了——但这些用户大概都会对他们订在看板上的东西有购买欲望。
Evenif marketers master social media without coming across as clumsy, grating or intrusive, there will surely be a limit to how much advertising will shift tothe platforms. Television ads are still great for reaching big audiences withsimple messages. Print ads can lend brands an air of credibility (we would say that, wouldn’t we?). Like fundmanagers, advertisers will always want a balanced portfolio.
即使营销在没有遇到任何困难的情况下入驻了社交媒体，从传统媒体转向这些平台的广告数量肯定有些限制。电视广告由于信息明确、受众面广的特点依然会占有巨大份额，而印刷广告能够让产品更具可信度（我们一般都这么认为的，对吧？）。和资金管理人一样，广告商也总是在寻找均衡投资组合。
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