Corporates on the Net

Saturday September 19, 2009
Corporates on the Net
By LEE KIAN SEONG

AirAsia Bhd
LOW-cost budget carrier AirAsia Bhd has pioneered e-commerce and online business when it began operations eight years ago.
Currently 75% of its business transactions are done online. It has an average of 16 million unique visitors a month.

According to an AirAsia spokesman, advertising and promotion (A&P) budget for major campaigns is divided between offline media (70%) and online (30%).
“For smaller campaigns or campaigns targeted at niche markets, we might do the other way around to leverage heavily on online only,” he says.
AirAsia has online ads at Google, Yahoo!, MSN and online portals of publications such as The Star, Sin Chew Daily and Malaysiakini.
“We are mostly targeting the mass market and inform customers about our latest offers. Recently, we launched our “2 days 20% off all flights” banner ads on MSN and The Star Online.
“We gained tremendous increase in click-through rates and linked traffic flow to AirAsia’s website which led to a conversion in sales,” the spokesman says.
He adds that AirAsia aims to build its market share through digital advertising and leverage different dimensions of this medium from brand building to customer engagement, analyse traffic flow for the website and mix both offline and online advertising campaigns.
DiGi Telecommunications Sdn Bhd
DiGi Telecommunications Sdn Bhd marketing services head Lau Sulin says the growing Internet penetration has spurred the growth of digital advertising in the country, making it an integral component in all communications directed to three of DiGi’s most important customer segments – youth, young professionals and enterprise.
“For campaigns targeting any of these segments, we usually aim to spend between 10% and 20% of the respective campaign media budgets on online media,” she says.
She adds that the budget will be distributed across different online media options, including search, display, affiliate marketing, social media, e-CRM, user-generated content and viral content.
For the Love to Save campaign that organised by the company, she says a lot of Malaysians rushing to click on their chosen charity and spreading news of the campaign through word-of-mouth.
“It also attracted the attention of online social networkers and were circulated virally through Facebook, Twitter, blogs and online forums. Over the 30 days’ campaign, the website attracted 86,615 visits with 589 personal groups created over the 30 days campaign,” she says.
Lau says the media landscape in Malaysia has changed dramatically in the last few years and the Internet now commands a greater share of time among youth and young professionals than any other media except television.
She says online media are also unique in that they allow much more personalisation in terms of message, offer more two-way interactivity and, more importantly, are extremely measurable.
McDonald’s Malaysia
McDonald’s Malaysia marketing, corporate communications and consumer/business insights vice-president Stephen Chew says McDonald’s acknowledges the importance of digital advertising in the marketplace and it has introduced McDonald’s Facebook, which has a fan base of more than 30,000 now.
At present, the company has invested close to RM1mil out of this year’s total A&P budget.
He says McValue Lunch is a prime example of the usage of digital advertising where it utilised Facebook to run a five-week blogger contest.
Its target markets for digital advertising are young adults (20-25 years old) and working adults (25-39 years old).
“McDonald’s is a brand that connects with people. It is fun, engaging and relevant. Digital advertising is an extension of how we want to stay connected with our customers. It helps us build not only brand affinity, but also brand loyalty,” he says.

http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2009/9/19/business/4693600&sec=business