WeChat ads are live, and big foreign brands are in on the ground floor

Just a few days after testing ads in the WeChat timeline, Tencent has brought WeChat advertising live. Regular ads in the service began appearing in users’ timelines over the weekend, and among the first ones to pop up were advertisements for global brands BMW and Coca-Cola (pictured below). Chinese smartphone maker Vivo also has ads on the service.

It’s no surprise that global brands are interested in getting in on the ground floor of WeChat advertising. The service current boasts nearly 500 million active users, and it continues to grow. But reaction to the ads among users is mixed, with some annoyed at the interference in their timelines, and some pretending to insulted by the ads they saw.

Some users are feeling faux-insulted because many of China’s web users, partially in jest, are treating which ad they got shown as an indication of what Tencent’s big data machine thinks of them. If they saw the BMW ad, then Tencent thinks they’re wealthy and have good taste (which is flattering). If they saw the Vivo smartphone ad, that means Tencent sees them as middle class followers (not great, but not too bad). But if they saw the Coke ad? That means Tencent thinks they’re a loser. After all, anyone can afford a Coke!

Obviously, Tencent and its new WeChat advertising partners didn’t intend to send that message. Users are just coming up with their own interpretations of the ads they saw, and the joke is likely to disappear after new advertisers are added into the mix. But the public reaction does show that the addition of ads to WeChat is a big deal, and a major talking point among Chinese users.