Shanghai Expo 2010 in Online Display Advertising

The Expo held in Shanghai is one of the greatest events in China as well as the world in 2010. Reference to it can be found not only in the news, but also in online display advertising campaigns. From our statistics, there were altogether 30 Shanghai Expo related display advertising campaigns, with a total ad spend of 1.5 million, involving 20 advertisers. The top industry by ad spend was travel/accomodation, followed by accounting/finance/insurance and household.The majority of the campaigns was launched in May, the month which marks the grand opening of the Expo, while the earliest campaign was the promotion of Expo ticket reservation launched by China Travel Service in April 2009.

Chart 1: No. of Campaign and Ad Spend by Industry



Chart 2: No. of New-Start Campaign by Date



The top 3 advertisers in terms of ad spend were Cathay Pacific Holidays & Dragon Holidays, Master Card X Priceline (joint promotion) and Bank of Communications. Their total ad spend on Shanghai Expo related display advertising campaigns makes up 60% of the ad spend of all the advertisers involved.

 Chart 3: Top 10 Advertiser by Ad Spend

The top 3 publishers of Expo related campaigns were Yahoo!HK, South China Morning Post and MSN HK, indicating that the campaigns were targeted mainly to the mass market. Besides, the nature of most of the campaigns was sales promotion, advertising events such as special offers for Shanghai Expo travel packages, free Shanghai Expo souvenirs and customer engagement activities like free Shanghai Expo travel package for the winner of a competition.

With reference to the above statistics, despite its worldwide popularity and the national celebration of it in China, the Shanghai Expo was not a very attractive gimmick for marketers, except those from the travel/accomodation industry, who are major beneficiaries of the tourist boom in Shanghai and thus took advantage of the trend to start campaigns promoting travel products. The limited number of advertising campaigns related to the Expo and lack of variety of advertisers shows that this event drew relatively less attention from local marketers in comparison to other global events, for example, the 2010 World Cup (for more details, please refer to the article “2010 World Cup Related Online Campaigns” published in July 2010), illustrating a sharp contrast between its perceived popularity among the general public and the advertisers' expectations of its effectiveness in achieving advertising goals. 

(Source from Admomo.com)