Fan Ng, a veteran advertising artist in China, started his career at Ogilvy & Mather in Hong Kong, and later became one of the "Four Kings of Ogilvy" in the industry. In 2008, Fan Wu joined Publicis Groupe's Shengshi Great Wall, and in just one year, the company was named one of the top 50 agencies in Asia by Campaign Brief. In 2019, he took over the creative businesses of Leo Burnett and Publicis Shanghai, and served as Chief Creative Officer of Publicis Greater China, establishing a culture of "creativity is priceless" for the rapidly growing Chinese advertising industry. In 2021, he officially joined BlueFocus and was appointed as the Chief Creative Officer (CCO) of BlueFocus Media, responsible for the overall creative strategy deployment of BlueFocus Media, and led the team to actively promote the integration of creativity with data and technology (such as AIGC, digital human, xR, etc.), so as to create more and greater value for Chinese brands going overseas and domestic marketing with continuously iterative and evolving marketing services.
On the evening of April 21, BlueFocus released its 2023 annual report, and the company achieved an operating income of 52.616 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 43.44%, becoming the first marketing company in China with a revenue of more than 50 billion yuan. On the same day, BlueFocus released its performance report for the first quarter of 2024, showing that the operating income in the first quarter of 2024 was 15.782 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 61.47%.
"In 2024, our revenue is expected to continue to grow significantly, moving towards 10 billion US dollars." In a letter to investors, Pan Fei, CEO of BlueFocus, said, "AI will undoubtedly reshape the future of the marketing industry, and will also reconstruct the new BlueFocus. ”
AI is unstoppable, and in April last year, BlueFocus proposed the "All in AI" strategy, taking advantage of the subversive wave of artificial intelligence to fully promote BlueFocus's innovation and transformation in the era of intelligent marketing. For BlueFocus, this is a big, long-term company decision. The industry has its own interpretation of this deafening declaration of BlueFocus, but they have all given a positive response.
In the past year, BlueFocus has maintained the endurance and courage to continue to promote whether it is the integration of internal organizations, the innovation of new marketing methods, or the cooperation with platforms. "AI has been fully integrated into our daily work, and 100% of all employees apply AI, including the evaluation of employees. Regardless of the role, you must use AI tools to link jobs, including customer service, creative, HR, finance, sales, operations, and more. From a business perspective, whether it is China's local marketing business or an international global overseas business, we must deeply think about how to integrate with AI in order to change and upgrade our business model. In a closed-door sharing session, Pan Fei explained the deep integration relationship between AI and Blue Cursor in this way.
So, at the creative level, what innovations and advancements has BlueFocus made? Wu Fan, chief creative officer of Blue Label Media, gave his interpretation.
Is AI rolling up ideas, or is it empowering ideas?
"More than 90% of our work, whether it's a company or a creative, is related to content generation, so there's no doubt that AI brings a huge new imagination to content generation and creative presentation." Wu Fan said. How creatives can use generative AI technology to improve their company's creative and advertising services in innovative ways requires continuous exploration and learning.
The first is a shift in mindset: teams need to break the limitations of traditional thinking, embrace AI in an all-round way, and re-examine the creative process from the perspective of AI, so as to achieve more efficient and accurate creative output. The second is the integration of tools and technologies: actively explore and apply AI tools and technologies, and try to develop some small models by yourself. For example, with the help of AI's image and audio processing capabilities, it is possible to create richer and more diverse visual and auditory expressions, bringing a more unique and appealing image to brands and products. Finally, innovation in processes and methods: continuously optimize the creative process, and use AI-assisted data analysis to guide strategies and creative directions, ensuring that creativity is closer to the market and consumer needs, and can also respond more quickly to customer needs.
Under the AI strategy, BlueFocus's creative team uses AI to work with customers at home and abroad to bring many exciting and interesting experiences to consumers. Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Pika, Vega, Wenxin Yiyan, Kimi, ChatGPT, etc., these endless tools and applications seem to give wings to creativity, and creatives don't have to worry about those seemingly fanciful ideas not being realized. For example, some time ago, with the help of AIGC technology, the team erected an AI-powered winter arbitrary door on the streets of Chengdu for the client Under Armour, which was wrapped in an iceberg. As soon as the consumer enters the relevant information in front of the door, a tailored winter scene is generated inside the iceberg, and the AI will write a unique winter letter on the spot to encourage the passerby. With the help of a variety of AI technologies, from images to animations to physical text, each participant can get a unique winter romance.
Through the application of AIGC technology, it not only improves the efficiency of creative output, but also increases the diversity and personalization of creative expression, and also improves the user and consumer experience, which was unimaginable in the past. AI-empowered marketing cases allow brands to more accurately touch users' personal emotions, and also greatly increase user engagement and the depth of brand interaction.
Wu Fan said: "CEO Pan Fei has made the future direction clear for everyone. Every employee is confident about the future, and this stems from the fact that we see the possibility of rapid improvement in real business growth. In the past year, the revenue generated by AI-driven marketing models that are different from traditional marketing models is about 100 million yuan. In 2024, the Group's AI-driven revenue is expected to grow by about 5-1 billion yuan, achieving a growth of about 10 times. ”
AI Native和AI First，有望诞生AI原生组织？
Unlike traditional advertising agencies, BlueFocus' creative and technical departments have been firmly bound and deeply integrated over the past many years. Under the strategy of "globalization" and "intelligence", BlueFocus cooperates with the top large model manufacturers at home and abroad to rapidly develop its own industry model Blue AI, and move rapidly towards building real AI native capabilities.
"This allows us to embrace AI more calmly, reduce the communication cost between different functional teams, and quickly invest in 'All in AI' to achieve transformation." "BlueFocus has no cap on the budget investment in new technologies, so that everyone can try out various tools on the market without worries and make full use of AI for creative development," Wu said. “
He believes that in this process, the challenge to creatives is still quite large. For example, in the change of culture and mentality: he hopes that creative colleagues will be on the same page, be determined, encourage innovation, and tolerate failure. As Mr. Pan said, we will pursue "AI First" on the basis of all employees in AI.
In the renewal of creative working methods, creatives need to learn and adapt to new ways of working with AI as a partner, combining traditional intuition and experience with AI's analysis and efficiency.
The biggest change brought about by the maturing AI ecosystem is the change in organizational form. From now to the future, AI-native organizations are even more important. In 2024, BlueFocus will launch a new attempt to create the first AI-native organization. This team can abandon all traditional work forms and tools in the past, and use AI Native as the core to structure processes and drive business. Encourage more AI-native emergence, whether it's AI-native organizations or AI-native content.
Iterating with the platform, where are the marketing giants headed?
BlueFocus is a leader in the advertising industry, and the customers it serves are a very large matrix. Especially with big platforms such as Douyin has a long-term cooperative relationship. Not only domestic giant engines, Tencent Advertising, Xiaohongshu, Weibo and other leading media platforms, but also overseas Meta, Google, TikTok for Business, Snapchat and Kwai for Business, etc., also maintain a close relationship with BlueFocus. The cooperation between the two parties not only focuses on advertising, content creation, influencer buying, etc., but also deepens the connection in terms of technical docking.
In particular, with the continuous advancement of the All in AI strategy, we have also seen some good feedback in customer practice and marketing. Wu Fan said: "In terms of content paradigm innovation, we have used AI technology and tool iteration to drive the explosion of creative new gameplay, and also achieved the improvement of content creation efficiency and the reduction of material production costs. In terms of interaction paradigm innovation, the user experience scenarios are enriched with the help of powerful AI model functions, bringing unique user communication and communication effects. In addition, in terms of content middle office innovation, we carry out full fragmented data distillation based on LLM (large language model) to quickly complete more accurate and appropriate content preferences and user insights. We're all working towards 'leveraging AI to deliver more efficient, smarter, and more innovative marketing solutions for businesses.'" “
"Brand Confidence" in My Eyes
From 2015 to 2024, BlueFocus has been working on brand marketing, effect marketing, integrated marketing and other business systems to help Chinese brands go abroad. "BlueFocus has actually grown into a great marketing technology company in many senses," says Wu.
In the past ten years, we can see a lot of changes in the thinking of overseas marketing. At the beginning, the brand went overseas in the short term to pursue a simple and crude effect, as long as the product is sold first, it is the first step to the success of going overseas. Now, the overall social environment has changed from "Made in China" to "Created in China", and many companies are gradually realizing the importance of brand value and user experience to international consumers.
At present, after generative AI is integrated into all aspects of marketing, it can also be seen to improve the efficiency of customer service. For example, in the part of global overseas marketing, the efficiency improvement can be achieved by up to 1000%, that is, what used to take ten days to do, today only needs one day to do; What used to take 10 hours to complete is now done in almost an hour, and the efficiency is amazing. In the domestic marketing business, most of the business efficiency is between 35% and 200%.
In Wu Fan's view, "brand confidence" refers to the brand's clear understanding of its own value and positioning, as well as the firmness and confidence reflected in the market performance. This is not only an expression of the external market, but also a reflection of the brand's internal core values. For BlueFocus, this brand confidence comes from the company's ability to innovate and its corporate culture of continuous improvement and common aspirations. In the ever-changing field of the advertising industry, the ability to constantly adapt to new technologies, new media and new ideas to provide customers with cutting-edge services reflects BlueFocus's confidence and ability to not only follow the market, but also have the courage to lead the industry, which has also won the respect of customers and peers. This is the best interpretation of "brand confidence".