GroupM bolsters partnership with Tencent on Smart Marketing
GroupM, the world's leading media investment management group, and Chinese major Tencent signed a strategic agreement for data management on December 18, 2015. The extended partnership followed the September signing of a multiple collaboration agreement between GroupM’s programmatic media buying and technology platform Xaxis and Tencent on data sharing and media resources.
The agreement was signed by Patrick Xu, CEO of GroupM China and Steven Chang, Vice President of Tencent. Now advertisers can effectively reach audiences and maximize the efficiency of brand marketing in an open-data ecosystem with the all-round cooperation of the two companies.
Patrick Xu, CEO of GroupM China (right), Steven Chang, VP of Tencent, at the signing ceremony
The partnership mainly focuses on four areas, namely programmatic buying, data insight, marketing innovation and media investment efficiency. A combination of Tencent’s huge user base and GroupM’s data management capabilities will bring marketers accurate audience portraits and data insights which are needed in media investment.
Xaxis’proprietary data management platform (DMP), Turbine, and client DMPs managed by GroupM will also benefit from more comprehensive data partnership via better cross-platform audience identification and integration. This will improve the irmedia planning, buying and operation efficiency. All of these will lead toin-depth collaboration between Tencent Online Media Group (OMG) and GroupM’s agencies.
Patrick Xu, CEO of GroupM China
"We need to have expert data partners since insightful data is the corner stone of media planning. This partnership will enhance both parties’ capabilities in data synchronization and application. It will also give them consumer and industry insights to further drive innovation and bring greater benefits to advertisers,” said Patrick Xu, CEO of GroupM China, on the signing of the agreement. “The process will at the same time enable use of huge volume of data for media planning and optimization of overall norms. This will encourage amore open cooperation in the industry,” he added.
More importantly, there are more favorable and far-reaching impacts with this alliance between GroupM and Tencent on China’s advertising industry. "In the era of Internet Plus, mass data is the most important brand asset. Data mining and smart application determine present and future of the brand, but the data value can only be maximized with complete linking in a totally open environment,“said Steven Chang, Vice President of Tencent. “Therefore Tencent is more than willing to work with more professional partners like GroupM on smart data so as to build a new ecosystem for open marketing collaboration to serve advertisers better."
Group photo of top executives from GroupM and Tencent
GroupM has maintained a sound relationship with Tencent. Referring to the Septemberstart of partnership between Xaxis and Tencent. Mickey Zhang, Managing Directorof Xaxis China, said “Following the Xaxis-Tencent agreement reached in September on data sharing and media resources, we have both refined our cooperation needs in programmatic buying, audience labelling and consumer insight. We have also boosted our big data-driven marketing solution effectively. The enhanced cooperation that we have forged today will further integrate our strengths as we look forward to setting up a new industry benchmark,” she added.
Tagging, dynamism, diversity, openness and security are five prime attributes of Tencent OMG. For advertisers, Tencent’s data emphasize real connections and full access rather than just sampling. It has an extremely important role in influencing consumer decision-making. Advertisers can gain real-time insight into consumer trends and thus be guided accurately in marketing strategies, which may be adjusted in time as well with the ability to produce real-time measurable advertisement results. Through multi-dimensional integration, insights into user behavior on cross-media,cross-device, cross-platform and cross-scenes can be found out.
By deepening bilateral cooperation, Tencent will expand scope of smart data transfer in future and will also absorb industry data more extensively with more partners. This will lead to creation of higher data values. To meet different demands of advertisers, unique data services will be opened. This will cater to diverse needs of various industries including smart interpretation and accurate data delivery.