CultureFish: Your China Adwords (Baidu) Friend
There are certain businesses I always have trouble understanding.
I remember many years ago my firm was representing a Korean internet company in its U.S. venture capital deals. Money was flowing in to this company from the Korea, the United States and Japan and everyone was telling me I was crazy to allow them to pay us by the hour, rather than requiring they give us an equity stake. “Equity stake,” I would tell people, I still do not understand what their product does or how it will ever make any money. The dot.com bubble burst and this company very quickly ran through its millions and is no more.
My friend Lonnie Hodges (you all know Lonnie, he’s the guy behind the late great China Bandwidth blog) had been telling me for months about his China internet business, CultureFish, and I just was not getting it. Then when he told me of one huge American technology company that had retained Culture and how another was on the verge of doing so, I decided I had to know. So instead of asking him to explain his business again, I sought an explanation of what the massive technology company had retained CultureFish to do. Now I get it.
CultureFish is helping this company set up its adwords account at Baidu.
Now that probably does not sound like much to those of you who have gone online and bought keywords at Google in English, but it is. It is because Baidu is not yet where it should be in terms of ease of use, particularly for foreigners and it is because the choice of Chinese keywords is critical, and very few people have experience with that and with working with foreigners. This big company hired CultureFish after having tried on its own for months.
CultureFish’s success in helping foreign companies with their Baidu keyword marketing was based so much on CultureFish establishing close relations with Baidu that Baidu turned around and is now sending all international business clients that want to do work with Baidu in China to CultureFish.
CultureFish has established similar relationships with other internet and mobile phone advertising companies as well.
Interesting stuff and I think I even understand it.
Source: China Law Blog
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