Chinese online video group Youku Tudou and e-commerce giant Alibaba Group will work together to drive the adoption of big data in marketing in China.
Alibaba Group’s online marketing technology platform, Alimama, will use its data and technology to support innovative online video marketing techniques, such as ‘View and Buy’ developed by Youku, and Merchants’ Video Channel developed by Tudou.
These are expected to help small companies improve their operations with data and make online video marketing services more accessible to them.
Youku Tudou and Alimama will also jointly establish a Marketing Innovation Lab.
Alimama announced earlier this year that it would launch online video marketing services to help widen the relevance and reach of online video marketing by Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com merchants to a broader base of customers.
Alibaba chairman and founder Jack Ma is in California this week for a series of meetings that may lead to the recently listed group expanding its investments in the Hollywood entertainment scene. Alibaba already owns a 16.5% stake in New York-stock Exchange-listed Youku Tudou.
"The Youku Tudou Cloud and Alibaba’s data and technology will collaboratively bring consumer behavior in media and entertainment and consumer behavior in products and services closer together. Both parties will work in stride to realize the “Screen is Channel” and the “Content is Storefront” vision, creating strong synergies between the domains of media and entertainment, and commerce and payment.” said Victor Koo, Chairman and CEO of Youku Tudou.
"We will build the marketing infrastructure with Youku Tudou in the big data era with the aim of creating value for small companies with data, improving user experience, and building a simple yet highly effective ecosystem that can benefit all participants," said Jonathan Lu, CEO of Alibaba Group.
Alimama also formally launched its open Data Management Platform which works with brands and merchants to enhance understanding of their customer data and to direct targeted marketing to a broader base of consumers with similar attributes.