Alibaba's UC Ads launches short video ads platform

Alibaba’s UC Ads has unveiled its short video ads platform in an attempt to become the largest one-stop content marketing provider.

Morden Chen, General Manager of Alibaba UC Ads, said, “We've noticed that people in India are used to watching TV together with their families while more and more young people prefer to be with their phones and browse what they like, no longer confined to TV programmes.”

It has been reported that UC Ads has maintained long-term relations with Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm Mall, Tokopedia, Lazada and other top e-commerce platforms in India and Indonesia. Other important partners include mobile phone brands, operators and FMCG brands, etc.

“With the popularity of mobile devices and declining mobile internet service charges, people are more accustomed to diverse contents on their mobile phones and reading is becoming fragmented. Short video can be viewed on the move and in short time, which is getting more and more popular. Many short video platforms have emerged against this backdrop, with information consumption upgrading from pure image-text to image-text + video,” added Morden.

He continued, “People's attention span is reducing. According to a survey by Microsoft in 2015, after a habit of using mobile devices is developed, people's attention span dropped from 12 seconds in 2,000 to eight seconds, which is shorter than that of a goldfish. This calls for the digital content on mobile devices to be more refined with more selling points.”

For brands, the short video ads not only cater to the consumers’ new habit of favouring fragmented contents on the mobile phone over long videos but also coincide with the memory pattern of users in the mobile phone era. The short video ads are well-received by mature markets. However, their potential has been underestimated by brand marketers in India where mobile device ownership has skyrocketed.

UC Ads offers a variety of short video ads solutions, including splash video, in-feeds video and in-article video, and has facilitated brand marketers to implement the mobile-first strategy for short video marketing, rendering more opportunities to effectively reach users.

The existing platforms providing buzz marketing solutions with limited resources either focus on content creation of We-Media or targeted content releases. Advertisers need to reach We-Media on platform A to complete content creation, and then search for the appropriate media depending on the attributes of TA and media to issue ads. The problem is that content and platform do not match during the process.

By directly connecting We-Media resources with technology platform of UC, UC Ads establishes a smart integrated content marketing lab providing one-stop buzz marketing solutions.

In India and Indonesia, UC Influencer Pool is home to more than 100,000 We-Media from a dozen fields such as fashion, 3C, automobile and sports, etc., capable of creating buzz contents for brands. Through operating its information flow, UC understands the users' interest so that the brand content matches with the most relevant users according to their interests on UC platform and push the relevant buzz created by the internet celebrities.

UC has completed the whole process from organising We-Media to content creation, crowd matching and targeted content releases, avoiding the resource mismatch of each link.