36Kr exclusive | Taobao live broadcast strategy upgrade, the original head of operations Zhao Yuanyuan left his job to start a business

Wen | Qiao Qian and Peng Qian

36Kr learned from multiple sources that Zhao Yuanyuan, a senior expert of Alibaba's content e-commerce business department and head of Taobao live broadcast operations, will leave his job in the near future, and the next step is to start a mcn institution, and Ali will be one of the investors.

At the same time, Taobao Live will usher in an organizational "upgrade": the establishment of a new Taobao Live BroadcastIng Division, composed of the original Taobao Live Merging with other business lines of the original Content E-commerce Division (Wow Oh Video, Taobao Toutiao, etc.), the former General Manager of the Content E-commerce Division Yu Feng (flower name Xuande) as the head of the new Taobao Live Broadcasting Division, reporting to Jiang Fan, president of Taobao Tmall.

Zhao Yuanyuan, whose real name is Zhao Yang, was born in 1979. Prior to joining Alibaba in August 2017 to take charge of Taobao Live, he worked in marketing for 15 years and served as a senior creative director at Ogilvy& Mather.

Although Taobao launched its live broadcast business in 2016, it was mainly momentum in the early stage and its development was slow. In 2018, Taobao Live exceeded the transaction volume of 100 billion yuan for the first time, and Zhao Yuanyuan was a key figure in this period of business acceleration, and also an important promoter behind Li Jiaqi and other big anchors. At the end of 2018, Ali officials had said that the target transaction volume of Taobao Live in the next three years was 500 billion. According to the agency's forecast, the transaction volume driven by Taobao live broadcasting is expected to exceed 200 billion yuan in 2019, according to this estimate, the current development speed seems to be in line with or even exceed expectations.

In 2019, Ali's entire market has more than 6 trillion GMV, and the sales volume contributed by live broadcasting is far from large, but the strategic significance is very obvious.

Ali has begun to exert efforts on "content" since 2016, but products such as graphics and text, short videos and other products have achieved mediocre results, and Taobao Live can be said to make up for the shortcomings of its content side, effectively helping Taobao to lengthen the stay time of users and improve the conversion efficiency of traffic. In addition, in addition to relying on the selling point of "limited time and low price" to attract users, the live broadcast business itself also has huge room for improvement in creativity, gameplay, experience, etc., which is very likely to reshape the future marketing form of the brand, which is related to the foundation of Ali's retail business.

Judging from the information currently released by Ali officials, the next step of Taobao Live broadcasting is to focus on "live streaming store", that is, to make live broadcasting a universal tool. Therefore, the self-broadcast of merchants and industrial belts is the direction of official strong support, which is very different from the previous stage of promoting anchors with goods, so that Li Jiaqiweiya is out of the circle - the problem of too concentrated traffic of large anchors is not popular with the platform, and Ali needs to firmly grasp the distribution of traffic.

2019 is the first year of the real live e-commerce. From the content company Kuaishou Douyin Xiaohongshu to the e-commerce company Jingdong Suning Pinduoduo, all of them are online and increase this business. In this field, Taobao Live may be a research object that they cannot bypass. Therefore, some people close to Zhao Yuanyuan told 36Kr that Zhao had previously talked about entry matters with Kuaishou and Douyin, but "the conditions were not discussed."

There is no doubt that the pattern of live e-commerce is still in a sharp change. An e-commerce industry source familiar with Ali's ecology said, "Ali's ability at the level of goods and merchants is not something that other companies will be able to catch up with for a while." However, after all, Kuaishou has already born a super king of goods such as Simba, and has also set a grand goal of more than 100 billion yuan in total goods in 2020, and his success or failure and whether he can be copied may directly affect the next battle situation of live e-commerce.