Hong Kong Advertiser of the Month: WeChat Pay

WeChat Pay has registered the biggest increase in advertising awareness in Hong Kong for the month of July 2022, of all the brands we track in the market. Data from YouGov BrandIndex, which tracks consumer perceptions toward brands on a daily basis worldwide, shows that Ad Awareness of the mobile payment service saw an uplift of 10.5 percentage points over the four-week period.

This comes ahead of the Hong Kong government’s Phase II disbursement of consumption vouchers, which eligible consumers can receive via any of six service providers, including: Alipay HK, BoC Pay, HSBC’s PayMe, HKT’s Tap & Go, Octopus Cards and WeChat Pay HK.

To encourage consumers to choose WeChat Pay for their Phase II digital coupons, the Tencent-owned service ran an omnichannel marketing campaign from June to July, which featured local actor Michael Tao performing a song highlighting WeChat Pay’s cash rewards and range of merchants. Tao’s music video in public screens was played across social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and WeChat.

According to data from YouGov BrandIndex, WeChat Pay’s Ad Awareness score rose from a low of 14.0% on 26 June to a high of 24.5% by 25 July. Ad Awareness is a BrandIndex metric that measures the percentage of people who have seen adverts from a particular brand in the previous two weeks.

Octopus Cards and HSBC’s PayMe enjoyed the second and third largest jumps in Ad Awareness – both by 7.4 percentage points when rounded to one decimal place – with the former rising from 29.9% on 26 June to 37.3% by 14 July, and the latter from 30.2% on 27 June to 37.6% by 22 July. Alipay also recorded a 7.3-point spike in Ad Awareness, from 23.8% on 26 June to 31.2% by 25 July.

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Methodology: YouGov BrandIndex collects data on thousands of brands every day. A brand’s Ad Awareness score is based on the question: “Which of the following consumer brands have you seen an advertisement for in the past two weeks?” (% Yes). Data from surveys of adults aged 18 years and above residing in Hong Kong from 26 June to 25 July 2022. Ad Awareness scores are based on a four-week moving average. The change in scores for each brand is calculated by taking the difference between the highest and lowest scoring days within the period. Learn more about BrandIndex.