Reflecting on marketing effectiveness has once again become a hot topic in the marketing circle. There are two main schools of thought in media placement: one is the 'brand advertising' school, which focuses on 'brand building', with the direct goal of establishing product brand image and increasing brand market share. The other is the 'performance advertising' school, which focuses on 'traffic chasing', where the amount spent, clicks, downloads, and registrations can be monitored and demonstrated with data, and you only pay for measurable results. The debate between these two approaches has been long-standing, and the 'Adidas 3 billion lesson' has sparked extensive discussion and reflection in the industry—Adidas' Global Media Director Simon Peel pointed out that Adidas allocated 77% of its budget to performance and 23% to brand, over-investing in digital and performance channels at the expense of brand building. So, how should brands formulate their media strategies and spend money to maximize marketing effectiveness? Below, we open up some ideas through four questions. First, what is the essence of corporate profitability?—It is sales revenue brought about by the transformation of consumer cognition. What is the biggest cost in the future of this society? The cost of customer cognition. Brand is the fundamental unit for enterprises to participate in market competition and win consumers. Brands are based on customer mind, starting from customer psychology and emotions, and are the most important method to establish customer cognition, as well as an extremely important intangible asset for enterprises. The latest BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Chinese Brands report confirms this: over the past decade, the top 100 most valuable Chinese brands have performed 3.8 times better in the capital market than ordinary brands, and the 20 brands with the highest loyalty have performed 6.5 times better than the China MSCI Index. Especially after this year's pandemic, when the China MSCI benchmark index rebounded 19% from March to May, the top 100 most valuable brands rebounded 29%, and those with the highest loyalty rebounded 50%. Pure online advertising has limited impact on consumer cognition. Especially in the current era of information explosion, consumers have seen more, so their threshold has increased. Content that once attracted widespread attention may now be ignored, and leveraging content for low-cost dissemination will become increasingly difficult. Therefore, the main problems brands face in online social media communication are: harder dissemination, weakened reach, and fragmented audiences. Online, consumers can easily skip brand-preset information, turning the various advertising and marketing activities that companies painstakingly arrange into 'water off a duck's back'. Second, what is the essence of advertising?—Reaching consumers and completing cognitive education for them. From this perspective, the debate between online and offline is meaningless; the key lies in the ability to 'find people' and the efficiency of communication. The rise of the internet and mobile internet has brought information into an era of dust. In the three to four hours of mobile phone time that mainstream people spend daily, brands all want a piece of the pie. But now, people are close to their phones but increasingly far from ads. Because everyone is selective on their phones, and selective consumers mainly focus on content, they do not leave a deep impression on ads. QuestMobile shows that in the first quarter of 2020, the number of mobile internet users nationwide grew by only 0.41%, but the number of enterprises and individuals investing in traffic wars increased by nearly 80%, indicating that online traffic competition has become intense. As a result, many companies have shifted large marketing budgets from offline to online, hoping to solve sales problems through video e-commerce and social media, but for companies without internet genes, this is like putting the cart before the horse. Due to the fragmented nature of communication and audiences, online channels are just a superficial solution for many brands; social fission, private domain operations, and live streaming e-commerce cannot fundamentally solve the problem. The correct approach should be 'precisely analyze user data and reasonably plan placement strategies.' For example, after its brand renewal, Aunties (formerly 58 Daojia) chose to advertise on Focus Media. Focus Media's Galaxy big data system provided data on the concentration and heat of target audiences. By comparing and matching home service data with Galaxy data, Aunties could further place ads according to city heat maps, delivering ad content that directly hits consumer pain points to target audiences more precisely. Elevator media is located in the living spaces that mainstream urban people pass through daily, such as apartment buildings and office buildings. In the low-disturbance elevator scenario, ads reach users frequently and forcibly, making users who wait for and ride elevators at least 4-6 times a day remember the repeatedly played ad slogans more deeply. These advantages make it one of the few communication channels that maintain growth in this era, with the ability to strongly reach mainstream consumer groups and ignite brands. After Aunties placed ads on Focus Media, the effect was very significant: basically, investing 1 yuan in advertising could yield a return of more than 1.5 yuan. KANTAR's global research on 220 campaigns also confirms that the medium- to long-term sales pull brought by brand is more significant. Taking Aunties' effect of investing 1 yuan on Focus Media and recovering 1.5 yuan as an example, the 0.5 yuan is the short-term ROI, and 0.5 yuan times 3 is the medium- to long-term ROI that Aunties obtains. Adding the two together can more accurately reflect the overall pull of the placement on sales and brand building in the medium to long term. After more and more brands lay out online media, they continue to choose offline elevator media like Focus Media to concentrate and ignite, to seize consumers' minds first; on this basis, they then do long-term operations to accumulate brand reputation. Among these, outdoor media represented by Focus Media shows its prowess in influencing consumer minds. Data from Ipsos' '2019 China Domestic Popular Advertising Slogan Audience Research Report' shows that popular advertising slogans are more easily remembered when spread through mainstream media such as elevators, the internet, and television. Indeed, in 2019, 81% of domestic brand popular advertising slogans came from Focus Media's elevator media. Slogans like Guazi Used Car's 'No middleman to earn the difference', Feihe's 'More suitable for Chinese babies', and Xibei Youmian Village's 'Order with eyes closed, every dish is delicious' all came from Focus Media's elevator media. Similarly, in the 15-second elevator ad for 'Aunties', Deng Chao emphasized the brand information of 'brand name change', 'platform value', and 'discount benefits', using a compelling 'announcement style' and a one-shot filming technique, leaving a deep impression and strengthening user brand awareness. Third, what is the boundary between online and offline?—It is increasingly blurred; in the future, there will only be digital and non-digital. In the past, people read newspapers and watched TV, seeing the same ads; this was 'people looking for ads'. Now, when people open apps, each person sees different ads, pushed based on their shopping interests, lifestyle habits, social habits, etc.; this is 'ads looking for people'. Today, the boundary between online and offline is already very blurred; in the future, there will only be digital and non-digital. Under the digital wave, building and elevator media like Focus Media have also acquired internet genes. Since September this year, Focus Media has gradually opened its DSP system to authorized agents in the smart screen field. This move will help agents achieve precise online selection of buildings and time slots, as well as online placement and monitoring, opening location-based online LBS screen advertising services for life service physical terminals. Marketing is all about planting grass in different scenarios and then cutting grass to complete conversion. In the current environment where TV, internet, and other traffic are facing bottlenecks, Focus Media is a medium that can quickly improve reach. In the past, we paid too much attention to online audiences, but Focus Media is a medium that can truly bring people from online to offline and from offline to online; it is a true digital offline medium. The development of offline traffic is a very good traffic entrance for the entire marketing, and it is also a very efficient grass-cutting closed loop, providing brands with a high ROI guarantee. 'Whoever is useful, I invest in them.' Today, when advertisers use budgets, they have changed their previous method of sprinkling pepper and salt, instead choosing media that are more effective for their brand building, market promotion, and product sales. CTR's '2020 Advertiser Marketing Survey Report' shows that advertisers' budget growth for commercial building elevator advertising exceeds 30%. From CTR's monitoring data, although the market experienced a stress decline in the early stage of the pandemic, after April, as the pandemic gradually stabilized, the market slowly turned around. Elevator TV and elevator poster advertising spending both showed double-digit growth, with many industries seeing triple-digit growth in elevator TV and elevator poster placement. Outdoor digital media rebounded quickly after the pandemic, becoming a barometer for sustained market recovery. Fourth, which is more important: brand or traffic?—Media investment should have a long-term mindset and build core brand assets. The effect of media placement is like the effect of medicine: some take longer to work, some take shorter. Take current brand advertising and performance advertising as examples: doing brand is like strengthening the foundation, while doing performance is like taking strong medicine. Without prior brand accumulation, once various effect-driven methods like new media traffic diversion and DSP traffic guidance stop, sales will immediately drop. Therefore, although the former has a gentle effect in the short term, it is a long-term approach, while the latter is immediate but lacks long-term resilience. The best placement strategy is to balance multiple dimensions from consumer mind to communication efficiency to full-chain integration. Based on the digitalization of people and goods, consumer behavior paths and browsing traces can be restored through technical means. For advertisers, placing media means using digital technology to precisely define audiences and achieve dynamic evaluation and adjustment optimization during the placement process. In the digital economy era, Focus Media can also achieve precise placement, platform-based placement, and platform-based full-chain analysis, making ad placement real-time monitorable, data returnable, and effects assessable, and building a transparent, precise, and brand-effect synergistic digital marketing service system. Moreover, due to the cooperation between Focus Media and Alibaba, relying on Alibaba's big data bank, the consumer journey becomes a visual and operable consumer asset management process; advertisers can more accurately reach target audiences, communicate with placed audiences, break the barrier between brand and effect, and shorten the cycle from 'brand' to 'effect'. A set of data proves the high return of brand advertising on Focus Media: Aunties invested more than 80% of its market budget on Focus Media, and from the brand effect improvement in the first and second weeks, Aunties' leads increased by more than 52%. Of course, this is only a short-term ROI of more than one month. After one year, two years, or even five years, when comprehensive data is used for attribution, the calculated long-term ROI will definitely far exceed this value. Because with the accumulation of data assets, each placement is an overlay of brand incremental effects, ultimately achieving a qualitative change from quantitative change. Focus Media's recent financial report shows that third-quarter revenue was 3.265 billion yuan, net profit was 1.379 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 136.77%. Since this year, not only have brands like Feihe and Bosideng, which have been successfully ignited through Focus Media's elevator media, continued to increase their investment, but many brands such as Yuanqi Forest, Xiaoxiandun, Yuanfudao, and JD Finance have also chosen Focus Media for substantial investment, which also proves from one side that brand owners recognize Focus Media's brand ignition ability and effect conversion. Traffic is not an asset; traffic is the starting point for generating assets. Brand and long-term loyal users are the real assets of an enterprise. In essence, assets need to be accumulated over time. The most important thing about brand advertising is the persistence of advertising. Short-term ad exposure can hardly build a brand. Brands like Wanglaoji and Nongfu Spring have been repeating a single selling point for decades, occupying user minds and firmly consolidating that mind. Unless consumer behavior changes, users will never switch brands. Brand building and media placement require long-termism. We should not only focus on short-term marketing activities but also on medium- and long-term growth. Brand advertising and performance advertising both lead to the same goal; the key is to build digital assets and mind assets, which are the foundation for an enterprise to thrive. Once the tip is adopted, a reward of 400-2000 yuan will be paid.