Station B draws a big pie again: advertising and e-commerce business ushered in two big moves

Text | Wang Yuchan, ed. | Zhang Xinyu

In the past week, the commercialization of Bilibili (hereinafter referred to as "Station B") has made two major moves, one is to release the commercial middle office system "brand bank", like ByteDance and Kuaishou to further open up the advertising system; the other is to launch the "Little Yellow Car" in the live broadcast room, following the experience of Kuaishou E-commerce and Douyin E-commerce in the past two years, and the launch of "Little Yellow Car" is the beginning of a series of live streaming business layouts since then.

"Brand Bank" was officially released at the AD TALK 2021 marketing conference for advertisers on Station B, according to COO Li Yi, it is composed of a commercial traffic management system, an advertising system, and the UP main business cooperation platform "Fireworks", with the purpose of helping customers "tap the ecological resources of Station B through the system, invest and manage brand equity, and achieve long-term appreciation of brand value", so as not to turn advertising into a "one-time" business.

Regarding the "little yellow car", all viewers who have watched the Taobao live broadcast, douyin or kuaishou live broadcast should be very familiar with this function - with the small yellow car, you can watch the live broadcast while placing an order. Previously, Station B has always been relatively cautious about live e-commerce, and has not set up a process of paid shopping in the live broadcast room. Now, the appearance of the small yellow car means that Station B is accepting live broadcasts with goods in a more proactive manner.

Station B has just experienced a less optimistic third quarter. Q3 financial report shows that the growth of B station users is stable, but the net loss has expanded year-on-year, and the efficiency of spending money is getting lower and lower. After the release of the earnings report, the stock price of Station B plunged 17.2% in the US stock trading day of the day.

The pressure to make money has always been there, but it is more stressful to break the circle away from the comfort zone and the overall downturn of the advertising industry. In the third quarter, the advertising business of various content platforms tightened their belts, and ByteDance even sent out the news that the domestic business advertising revenue stopped growing, setting off the advertising business of Station B, which increased by 110.04% year-on-year, as if it were thriving - but in fact, this growth rate is also the lowest level of Station B in a year, and the base itself is also very low.

Not particularly good, not particularly bad. Station B has been carefully and cautiously opening up the resources in the station, but the two recent new products, "Brand Bank" and "Little Yellow Car", punch brand advertising and one punch live e-commerce, the commercialization process has indeed accelerated significantly.

Little yellow car

After three years of promoting the "bounty plan" with Alibaba and helping up the main belt goods to realize cash, Station B finally opened a low-key live streaming with goods.

Since December 11, Station B has successively launched the "Little Yellow Car" function in a few UP main live broadcast rooms, allowing users to place orders while watching live broadcasts. According to 36Kr, only about 10 UP masters have been selected by The B station to participate in the test, and their fan ratings range from more than 100,000 to millions. Station B gave traffic support to the group of UP owners who took the lead in trying to live stream with goods.

Click on the small yellow car in the live broadcast room, select the product, and jump to a third-party e-commerce platform, such as Taobao. At the same time, the live broadcast of station B will always be played in the background, and users can continue to hear the voice of the anchor. There will be a "back to station B" option in the lower left corner of Taobao, after completing the purchase in Taobao, click this option to jump directly back to the live broadcast room of station B.

B station live broadcast room transaction jump page

The first batch of participants included runner-up channel, film and television hurricane, first look at the review, 囧仙, moving gun DongDongGun, foodie please close your eyes, etc. Among them, DongDongGun announced in the live broadcast room that the final turnover of this 70-minute live broadcast was as high as 1 million yuan.

According to 36Kr's observation, the atmosphere in several live broadcasts is relatively harmonious, and there is no sign of causing users to be obviously disgusted. Regarding the statement that "B station users may reject live streaming with goods", an anchor invited to the internal test optimistically said to 36Kr: "There is traffic on the platform, and there can be transactions when there is traffic." There are 267 million MAU in Station B, and it is impossible for these people not to consume. ”

"I think compared to Douyin and Kuaishou, Station B has a better environment for carrying goods, because everyone is not so sensitive to price, and many people are watching live broadcasts with the mentality of planting grass instead of taking advantage." The anchor believes that "for brands, these young users are the people they want to cover more." ”

After this test, Station B may gradually expand the scope of the live broadcast room covered by the small yellow car. But at the same time, like the "bounty program", there will definitely be a threshold and review for the UP owner.

In addition, 36Kr has previously written an analysis that Station B has a tendency to "introduce the entire business behavior into the official process". It can be predicted that Station B will gradually improve the transaction process within the platform. At the end of last month, Station B just spent a huge amount of money to win the payment license, and now the mode of jumping to Taobao to place orders is unlikely to be the ultimate form of live streaming with goods on Station B.

Branded banks

Brand Bank is a new product officially launched at the AD TALK marketing conference on December 10, which can be said to be the new middle office of the old bank "Brand Advertising" of Station B Advertising.

"In the past few years, we have been concentrating on doing commercial middle office. Advertising can not let the customer's money spend once and end, and the second time to buy an advertisement will cost another amount of money, it is a completely independent event. Li Yi said that the business system of Station B, "Brand Bank", was born to solve this problem, that is, customers can "tap the entire content of the whole ecology of Station B" through the commercial system of Station B, and at the same time continuously invest and manage brand assets, and ultimately achieve "sustained growth and precipitation of brand value".

From the perspective of Station B, this concept is obviously more conducive to maintaining long-term and stable cooperation with advertisers, not allowing advertisers to spend all their money at once, and not exposing the advertising business of Station B to the risk of food shortage.

So is the logic of brand banking real?

Li Yi listed a formula: brand equity = brand content + user relationship, the meaning of the existence of brand bank is to let brand equity exist in Station B.

"Every click search, every bullet screen, every Amway, every forward, every sharing, all build brand equity." In station B, it will not be because a content has passed, which is a small dimension of brand equity precipitation. Li Yi said.

Compared with the relatively short-term business of short video advertising on Douyin and Kuaishou, "long-term value" is the story that Station B has been telling to advertisers. In the long-standing cognition, B station is a suitable for brand advertising community, advertisers basically will not take the standard of performance advertising (such as conversion rate) to measure B station advertising, but B station advertising itself has always lacked an official standard. The commercial middle office of "brand bank" should have appeared a long time ago.

So what exactly is in the bank?

Station B upgraded the "3i interest marketing model" based on UP main marketing last year to the "4i interest marketing model" based on the marketing methodology of station B ecology, one of which is compound interest (icon).

Station B provides a set of data to prove "compound interest":

The advertising video placed by the brand owner on station B accounts for 45% of the total playback volume after 7 days, which is called "time compound interest";

According to the statistics of the top 100 brands in 2021, brand content in the community is constantly being fissioned by the two innovations, and after one year of advertising, the brand-related manuscripts on the site increase by 2.15 times, called "community compound interest";

Generate significant user preferences, driving a 2.75-fold increase in brand-related searches, known as "IP compound interest".

To put it simply, the brand bank is to let advertisers see clearly what can be bought in station B from a longer-term perspective, and what to buy, to make up for the shortcomings of brand advertising in the past, which is not easy to measure the value, and also to make advertisers more familiar with the diverse investment targets of station B.

In addition, it is worth mentioning that the marketing model of Station B has changed from "based on THE main UP" to "based on the ecology of Station B". Last year's Ad Talk conference was highlighted by the creative ability of the UP master, but the duration of this year's conference was divided by OGV content. The number of official self-made variety shows, episodes, and animations of Station B has increased significantly, and the UP master on the stage is only He Classmate, who is super head.

Just like TV stations and the three major long-form video websites, the high investment in OGV content often means that the platform needs more large customers who can afford to pay the naming fee of variety shows. Obviously, Station B wants to give more choices to brand advertisers with a large budget: if brands do not recognize the instant purchasing power of B station users and are skeptical of carrying goods, at least the future mentality of this group of users can not be ignored.

But from now on, the list of competitors of Station B will become longer.