JD.com invested 1.5 billion yuan as the exclusive partner of the Spring Festival Gala red envelope, which may be a safe choice for each other

Less than a month before the Chinese New Year's Eve night in 2022, the announcement of the exclusive red envelope interactive partner of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala is long overdue, following WeChat, Alipay, Taobao, Baidu, Kuaishou, and Douyin, this time it is JD.com's turn.

Unlike other Internet companies in previous years who concentrated on handing out red envelopes on the night of the Spring Festival Gala, JD.com continued its e-commerce promotion for more than one day, and the interactive activities lasted for a total of 23 days, from the 22nd of the Waxing Moon to the Lantern Festival.

During this period, JD.com will issue red envelopes and physical prizes worth 1.5 billion yuan, surpassing 1.2 billion yuan of Douyin, 1 billion of Kuaishou, 900 million of Baidu, and 600 million of Taobao, becoming the highest amount of red envelopes in the history of the Spring Festival Gala.

In other words, JD.com's wave of marketing activities has an average of about 65 million yuan per day. In the first, second and third quarters of last year, its average daily sales expenses were about 230 million, 350 million and 250 million yuan, respectively.

A Jingdong person said that the interactive activities also included physical prizes because of the support of JD Logistics. 2022 is the 10th year that JD.com has achieved Spring Festival delivery, and many courier companies will suspend delivery during the Spring Festival.

In the Spring Festival of 2014, WeChat attacked Alipay's position with red envelopes, and WeChat Pay rose to break the payment barriers that Ali had erected through e-commerce business for many years.

The incident was described by Alibaba founder Jack Ma as a "sneak attack on Pearl Harbor." Ma Yun warned Ali employees internally that if they did not desperately try to keep the mobile payment business "Alibaba is finished", in March of this year, Tencent became an important shareholder of JD.com, the latter obtained a first-level entrance to WeChat and hand Q, and preemptively listed on Alibaba in May of that year, and in early 2015, Tmall's revenue growth rate was surpassed by JD.com.

In the 2015 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, WeChat became the exclusive interactive platform for the Spring Festival Gala at a price of 53 million yuan, which was also the first interactive cooperation link of CCTV with internet companies on the "Spring Festival Gala Red Packet".

According to the official data, the total number of WeChat red envelopes sent and received on the Chinese New Year's Eve day reached 1.01 billion times, and the total number of WeChat shake interactions at the Spring Festival Gala reached 11 billion times. CCTV said at the time that the cooperation with WeChat brought CCTV a "youngest" and "richest" Spring Festival Gala.

Since the beginning of this year, CCTV Spring Festival Gala has become an important battlefield for Internet companies to compete for product innovation and marketing during the Spring Festival.

In 2016, Alipay obtained cooperation for 268.8 million yuan, and the naming fee rose by 5 times; in 2018, Taobao won the exclusive cooperation, and Bai Crow, the former chief product designer of Alipay, revealed in an interview that Taobao attracted 15 times the traffic that night was 15 times that of the "double 11" in 2017; in 2019, Baidu exchanged 900 million yuan of red envelopes for a short peak of 300 million DAU (daily active users); in 2020, Kuaishou exchanged 1 billion yuan for 780 million cumulative viewers in the live broadcast room.

After the fact, the data showed that short-term pulse marketing helped the platform gradually and limited, but in September 2020, the user scale was very close to Alibaba's Pinduoduo, announcing the exclusive cooperation to win the 2021 Spring Festival Gala red envelope.

Huang Zheng, then chairman of the board, said at the company's anniversary that year that the Spring Festival Gala project was the second touchstone for the whole company after buying more vegetables, and it was expected to invest billions of yuan. However, due to a series of negative news such as the death of young employees in early 2021, Pinduoduo withdrew from the exclusive cooperation of spring festival red envelopes when there were about half a month before the spring festival gala. TikTok takes over.

This year's Spring Festival Gala red envelope cooperation activities are more likely to trigger discussions because of the adjustment of the general environment. Unlike most of its peers, JD.com has a lot of self-operated business and asset-heavy business. Since last year, JD.com has preferred to say that it is a "new type of brick-and-mortar enterprise" with both physical and digital technology capabilities – for CCTV, JD.com seems to be a relatively safer cooperative choice. For JD.com, why not CCTV? (Guan Yiwen)