Assessing Halloween Campaigns of Theme Parks by Online Ad Word-of-Mouth

The annual Halloween events in Hong Kong’s two theme parks, namely Ocean Park Halloween Bash and Hong Kong Disneyland Dark World, are some of the most popular events in the city. Indeed, the two parks are keen rivalries, and Halloween is a major platform of their competition. In 2010, Ocean Park launched 6 online display ad campaigns with 50+ creative used, and the ad spend was approximately $850 thousand, while Disneyland run 4 online display ad campaigns, including a Halloween Special buffet promotion, with 30+ creative and the ad spend was around $600 thousand.

Chart 1: Halloween Online Display Ad Campaigns by Theme Parks

Graph 1: Disney and Ocean Park Halloween Online Display Ad Campaign List

Both theme parks were more focus on the mass market that revealed in their selections on publishers for their Halloween display ad campaigns. Disneyland was comparatively target to families, and it spent the most on TVB.com for their campaigns. Whilst Ocean Park were keen in young mass market; therefore, on the top 5 publisher list by ad spend, apart from Yahoo!HK, Discuss.com.hk, Uwants and MSN Buddy List were found.

Chart 2: Top 10 Publishers for Halloween Display Ad Campaigns by Theme Parks

To discover the prompt and proactive opinions of the consumers on these major events on Consumer Generated Media (CGM, including forums, blogs, newsgroup and online instant news), a comparison between the two parks was made with digital word-of-mouth (WOM) monitoring, covering the period from 1 September to 5 November in Hong Kong and Macau.

Chart 3: Online Ad Word-of-Mouth on Halloween Campaign by Theme Parks

In this case of the Halloween campaigns, Ocean Park had a larger campaign exposure among netizens. Around 700 topics with 1,500 posts related to Disneyland Dark World were found on 30 websites, viewed by more than 800 thousand people, while 3,000 topics with 13,000 posts about Ocean Park Halloween Bash were found on 50 websites, viewed by over 2.3 million people.

An overall view of the period shows that the peak of online discussions about the Halloween events appeared during the weekends. The average sentiment indexes, generated from the comments in the discussions, were positive of both theme parks’. It fluctuated from -10.5% to 81.6% for Disneyland; while that was from neutral (0.00%) to 43.5% for Ocean Park.

About half of the CGM was found in Uwants and HKGolden, in which two out of the top 3 websites by post count, were considered as a hub of discussions/ opinions from juveniles and young adults, i.e. Uwants and 3boys2girls. The top 10 websites also showed the potential market in Macau for the Halloween promotions.

Chart 4: Top 10 Websites of CGM from Theme Parks Halloween Promotions by Post Count

The discussions mainly focused on experience sharing, including topics such as compliments of the night show in Disneyland and comparisons between the two parks. For Disneyland, the most discussed topics were positive opinions of the Halloween night show and the costumes of the Disney characters, and ways to deal with Mainland visitors in the park. On the other hand, the top topics concerning Ocean Park were comparisons of scariness of the amusements with that of Disneyland, comments on the new haunted houses, and ways to visit all the haunted houses in a limited time.

The popularity of the Halloween events held by the two theme parks in Hong Kong was affirmed. Netizens discussed a lot about the events and their comments were generally positive. Moreover, by comparing the data concerning Ocean Park Halloween Bash and Disneyland Dark World, it was found that the event of Ocean Park was more preferable to the netizens than that of Disneyland. As a matter of fact, the topics and posts on CGM serve as revealing evidence of consumers’ preference and feedback, for people are able to express their views and opinion freely and instantly on these sites.

Notes:

1. Figures rounded to the nearest digit

2. Source from Admomo and K-Matrix

(adWOM is a competitive monitoring tool for experienced marketers powered by Admomo and K-Matrix. It monitors online display ad campaigns, as well as online noise with consumers’ instant feedbacks towards the promotions and advertised products. For more details, please email to sales@admomo.com )

McDonald's Purchasing with Free Coca Cola Glass Promotions 2009/2010. Which year achieved greater impact on the market?

McDonald's launched purchasing with free Coca Cola Glass Promotions in 2009 and 2010 respectively. We will compare these two years' marketing strategies, online exposure and achieved results in terms of online advertising, website traffics and e-buzz.

A. Comparison on Online Advertising

2009/10 Campaign Creative

The scale of 2010's promotion is comparatively larger than the previous one in 2009 in terms of number of creative and number of publishers. Both 2009's and 2010's strategies focused on the mass market that revealed in the selections of publishers. In comparison, 2009's marketing strategy also targeted on the young generation that included some online games and sports related websites like NBA, HK RGOAL and Sun Zone in the media plan. In 2010, it extended the focus on the mass market by adding Discuss.com.hk and ON.CC on the publisher list.

B. Comparison on Website Traffic

After launching 2009's campaign, Alexa's statistics shown that the promotion triggered a peak of daily reach in the official website. Compared to the one in 2010, there was no significant change on website traffic during the promotion period.

C. Comparison on E-Buzz

2009's campaign aroused a tremendous e-buzz on the campaign launch day. It recorded 750 posts in one single day in numerous forums and blogs. During the campaign period, 576 topics and 3,586 posts were shown in 37 portals. There were totally 1,877 visitors involved in the discussions and 940,000 people who read the posts. In the period of the two campaigns in 2010, online posts cannot even reach one-fourth of the previous promotion whenever compared to the number of related topics, number of posts and people who involved in discussions. In terms of online coverage, although it is better than 2009's one that related posts were traced in more forums, 40 in total. Only 150,000 people recorded who read the related posts and it greatly decreased by 84%.

Conclusion

It is no doubt that the scale of 2010's campaign is relatively larger than 2009's. However, in terms of website traffic and e-buzz, the result of campaign does not perform as well as 2009's. McDonald's re-launched “Purchase with free Coca Cola Glass” campaign, yet it cannot alter the fact in lack of freshness and excitement even when repackaging as 2010 FIFA Coca Cola Glass. Utilising the boom of FIFA as strategy, but it ultimately resulted in a competition on gaining market interests and disperses mass focus on the campaigns.

(Source by Admomo & K-matrix)