Animax Feels the Alodia Effect

Among Filipino geek culture bloggers, Filipina cosplayer and Net idol Alodia Gosiengfiao has earned a reputation for causing traffic spikes whenever she’s featured in a blog post. Chalk it up to her enormous and loyal online fan base. Call it the Alodia Effect.

The Effect Quantified

Animax Asia is now feeling the Alodia Effect. The Southeast Asian anime cable network recently hired Alodia and Filipina VJ Stephanie Henares as their brand ambassadors — their “Ani-Mates”. The Ani-Mates’ duties include maintaining blogs and posting Web-exclusive videos for Animax. Thanks to the Ani-Mates initiative, Animax has experienced a whopping 17% jump in Web site traffic.

The Ani-Mates microsite attracted 48,000 page views, from 41,000 unique visits, within three weeks of the Ani-Mates’ introduction. That’s a sizable chunk of the 400,000 pageviews attracted by the Animax web site over the same period.

Until now, there were no public numbers to quantify Alodia’s ability to attract niche Web traffic. It was a phenomenon discussed only among small circles of Filipino geek culture bloggers and marketers. Now we have international statistics to prove that the Alodia Effect is indeed very, very real.

Key Lessons from Pretty Girls

Considering that anime fans often express their passions online, Animax is clearly on the right track with the Ani-Mates. “Engagement — it is the one word that we at Animax are really obsessed about,” says Animax Asia General Manager Gregory Ho. “The colorful personalities of Stephanie and Alodia really help take our interaction with viewers to the next level because they are so relatable to our fans and are seen simply as being just like one of them.”

Animax is doing two things right here, two things all marketers should be doing:

1. Hiring fans to engage fans: Anime fans are among the most passionate fans in the world. Anime endorsers need to credibly and authentically mirror that passion. Cosplay is one of the ultimate expressions of anime fan passion, and Alodia happens to be the Philippines’ cosplay queen.

Passion isn’t exclusive to anime fans. Somewhere in your market is a group of passionate fans just waiting for you to engage them. The best way to do that is through someone just like them. You need to hire fans to engage fans.

2. Creating content tailored for the Web: Most TV executives are happy to just dump TV content onto the Web like so much shovelware. They don’t recognize the fundamental differences between TV and the Web: real-time interactivity, social connectivity, and multimedia flexibility. The Web has no fourth wall, audience members listen to each other as much as they listen to you, and content doesn’t have to come in unlinked thirty-minute one-format chunks.

Greg understands those differences. That’s why he’s tasked Alodia and Steph to create content exclusively tailored for the Web. They even have a social network to support conversations around their content. Alodia, a Philippine Blog Awards nominee with over 40,000 Facebook fans, is particularly adept at creating content for the Web and fostering conversation around that content. She’s even got previous problogging experience with one of the Philippines’ largest media conglomerates.

Traditional Southeast Asian marketers are still accustomed to using inauthentic shills and recycled shovelware. Through the success of the Ani-Mates initiative, Animax Asia is showing everyone in the region a better way to engage today’s hyperconnected markets.

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