"We are not just an e-com platform." - Chris Tung, CMO, Alibaba Group

The Chinese internet giant's chief marketing officer went on to elaborate on the company's model while speaking at a recent ad-marketing event at Kochi.

While the company started out as an e-commerce platform for international trade, today, Alibaba has branched out into many other areas. "We are like the combination of an Amazon, a Facebook and a Google in China and are uniquely positioned to have a single data source that is sourced from the different touch-points including e-commerce, social media and internet services," Tung says.

Chris Tung

He reveals that Alibaba, a few years back, invested in creating a data hub that would collect information from all available touch-points and use the behavioural data to create real people identities. "With the use of AI we are able to attribute behavioural data into individual ids. Today, more than just selling products on Alibaba, it's about translating the data with AI to insights for optimising marketing efforts," Tung explains.

He points out that while advertisers measure the effectiveness of campaigns with sales, they miss out on the list of people showing interest in the brand because of the campaign. He claims that the data structure would help in categorising all relevant consumers that have shown interest and put them under four different parts - awareness, interest, purchase, and loyalty.

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"We send all related data to a data bank which can enable marketers to measure and analyse what campaigns work better and use them effectively. That can help shift an interested consumer from the bucket of awareness to the bucket of purchase," he explains.

Tung goes on to mention that individual screens, like mobile phones, are the new, most effective destination for advertising. "Having data will help label each of these individual screens and effectively talk to each individual separately, with tailor-made advertising. This is, perhaps, the best time for creative people as it will create a demand for more and more creative, unlike previous single briefs for a few limited mediums," Tung says.

Alibaba's Luxury Pavillion (Source - Alizilla)
Click on the image to enlarge

Tung further elaborates how Alibaba created a limited, premium marketplace within its platform for high-end luxury brands that didn't want to put themselves on mass e-commerce platforms. They wanted to target a premium consumer base instead. "We recently launched the platform called Luxury Pavilion (an invite-only platform for select brands) and only 14 million luxury profiles (one per cent of China's population) have access to that. It is like visiting a luxury store on 5th Avenue (American luxury departmental store)," Tung adds.

He further goes on with a few more examples before urging marketers to work harder towards monetising data as an asset.