one day

#opinion

Zalo, a major instant messaging app in Vietnam, and the ugly fact behind its popular sticker packages.

Sticker is one of the features that differentiate Zalo from competitors. 61% of Zalo users have used stickers in their conversations. Within this group, the sticker usage frequency is extremely high. On average, users tend to use stickers 4 out of 5 chatting times. Free and easy to express their emotion are two key factors making users choose to use stickers.

74% of sticker users have seen and engaged with branded stickers. 72% of them claim that “Stickers make me want to stick to the brand” showcases the positive impact of leveraging stickers into communication strategy, boosting brand love and reference.

These quotes are taken from the Zalo White Paper by Adtima, the advertising agency of VNG. It is clear that stickers play an important role Zalo's marketing, especially in retaining their users. However, what that white paper didn't reveal is that there are stickers that are 'stolen' from artists without permission.

I just accidentally found this post by the original artist of Fat Cat Ami, or Ami Bụng Bự as its Vietnamese name. As a user who has been using and loving this sticker, I feel deceived. They use the intellectual product of someone else under their brand name without even a basic credit. And what's more unethical, Zalo still keeps those packages downloadable in the sticker store, even though the artist has more than once claimed her copyright.

Even though I'm not at all an artist, I guess I somehow know how hard and time-consuming it is to finally come up with a comic character and grow the stories. This action from Zalo totally destroyed the very little dedication I had for this app. Apart from that Facebook-QQ mixed UI, this is another reason why I wanna uninstall it so much.

And I hope the way Zalo develops its products doesn't represent how Vietnamese product developers have in their mindset.

In Vietnam, intellectual property is usually neglected, by both product owners and consumers. That is a correlation that pushes the issue even worse, in the context that there is not enough efficient legal framework. It can be seen in the figure below that copyrights in Vietnam has a very low score compared to the regional average.

-Phuong 🐯