I miss Mr. Ye Maozhong

Editor's Note:

This is an era of traffic operation advertising, an era that calls for the return of creativity, and an era that requires advertising and marketing people to be fearless of challenges. In this era, we have witnesses, sighs, reluctance, and expectations. On such a day, we are very grateful to Mr. Ye Maozhong.

Mr. Ye Maozhong is the promoter of the establishment of local brands and marketing systems, as well as the adherents of advertising creativity, and we have witnessed too many miracles belonging to him. As Professor Chen Gang of Peking University said in the preface to Ye Maozhong's "Advertising Man's Handbook": A person who can become a representative of the times must respond to the needs of this era, and whether it is because of accidental fate or conscious efforts, this person must have led the trend and direction of this field and promoted the changes of the times in his own way.

"Born to be creative, dead to be creative, better to live than to die is also creative", Mr. Ye Maozhong went to heaven with creativity, but our era of advertising creativity continues.

"I'd rather be a wolf in the wilderness than a beautiful tiger in a circus." Inheriting Mr. Wang's creative soul, carrying forward the spirit of innovation, and bringing "advertising" to a better era is the mission of every advertising marketer. "Modern Advertising" organized some colleagues in the industry to recall the story with Mr. Ye Maozhong through the form of articles, which is a retrospective, a nostalgia, and an inspiration.

He's not just an ad for the local advertising industry

——Tribute to Mr. Ye Maozhong

Text | Xu Yuren

An advertiser who was enlightened by Ye Maozhong's books

Last month, after a casual conversation with a friend, he said that Ye Maozhong's recent idea was a chicken farm in Tibet, "a high egg", and there was applause on the spot. There is no way to verify the authenticity of this matter, because last Friday, Lao Ye was gone. After being shocked, I learned that Lao Ye was only 54 years old, and I was even more shocked. May Mr. Ye go all the way! Heaven has no pain and sorrow, heaven has creativity and art, and heaven has love and affection.

Lao Ye is worthy of the title of Mr. Ye. In fact, I am not familiar with Mr. Ye, and I have not seen much. The last time was at an Internet marketing campaign, only to see a quiet middle-aged man wearing a hat lying on the front C table. He wasn't sleeping, he was painting something. After a while, the host said that he invited Teacher Ye Maozhong to the stage to give a speech, and he went up. Then come down and continue to be in the same state as before. Finally, calling for a group photo of the guests, he went up again. At the end of the group photo, he was the first to step off the stage and walked directly out of the venue, without much communication with anyone, leaving only a lonely and strong back. Thinking about it now, the pain he had in his heart and the pain he was suffering was unknown to anyone at that time.

Mr. Ye and Mr. Ye are actually very familiar, because I watched his books enter the industry, listened to his cases and stories grow in the industry, and the close colleagues I have worked with are also from Ye Maozhong Marketing Planning Company. Sometimes we use his case as a positive reference, and sometimes as a negative teaching material. After all, in the advertising industry, there has always been a powerful force criticizing his theories and works. The Slovaks are dead, and those words that criticize him, either kind or malicious, have long since drifted away with the wind and do not know where to go. But people who like and dislike him agree that Mr. Ye is definitely a generation of grandmasters in the advertising and marketing industry.

When he was less than thirty, he firmly believed in three words, "write a name." He wrote a book based on his own experience in advertising operations, directly opposing the Western advertising theory represented by the American Advertising Agencies Association (4A), which is a milestone in the history of Chinese advertising, which is the "Advertising People's Handbook" published in 1996. In 1997, I bought a copy or borrowed one, I can't remember, I just remember reading it overnight, and I can't remember much of the contents of the book, but the influence of the book on me is still there. The impact of this book on Chinese national brands is deeper and farther, and now the great Chinese brands that are proud of the world are more or less related to Mr. Ye. Now that I think about it, what a remarkable thing it is.

Mr. Ye is a master of persuasion, advertising itself is an art of persuasion, Teacher Ye convinces customers to be oppressive, overwhelming emotional sales, it is said that the seven wolves proposal, he carried is to jump to the conference room table, beat his chest, shouted out the earth-shattering crying ghost god of the sentence: "Men just want to be cruel to themselves." There are many similar legends, such as sitting in front of Party A's building on hunger strike until Party A agrees to adopt his idea.

In addition to marketing his own brain, Mr. Ye will also market his hat and name. In the early years, Mr. Ye took a plane, always waited until the plane broadcast his name several times before getting on the plane, the air in the entire waiting hall was helping to spread Ye Maozhong, and then Mr. Ye and his hat ran all the way in full view of everyone, and Mr. Ye's eyes on the outdoor billboard behind him were also watching himself speeding all the way. In full view of everyone and everyone's expectation, Mr. Ye pressed the brim of his hat again and walked into the hatch. Everyone lowered their heads and opened the magazine in their hands—ah, how could there still be Ye Maozhong in the magazine. Mr. Ye is deeply aware of the psychology of the audience, so the title is: Who is This guy in Ye Maozhong? Mr. Ye deeply knows that the high probability of being able to fly on business in those years is an entrepreneur, a boss, and a customer.

The crowd laughed at him for being too crazy, and he laughed at the fact that others couldn't see through it. Therefore, he is showing his attitude towards life in this way, is not it fun.

The good things in the world are not strong, and the clouds are easy to scatter and the glass is brittle, so he eventually became a collector of works of art.

They have always sent people away, and each returned his home. Relatives or grief, others have also sung. So Mr. Ye made a big fuss with his customers in the world, quietly left, and met the people he loved and loved him in heaven.

There are so many original authors of his collection in heaven waiting for him to share his artistic life.

"Learning conflict": breaking down cognitive boundaries

Text | Li Qingsong

Founder of Shanghai Wen & Tian Brand Consulting Co., Ltd

Ye Maozhong, as a banner marketing figure, really died young!

Before at 4A, we included myself all thought he was a universal marginal presence, and although he made good money, from 5 million to more than 10 million per year, he was definitely a pioneering figure, giving the Marketing Consulting community a way to some kind of success.

If there is some kind of "lying" marketing original sin in the marketing world, he must be counted as one. It seems that in 2013 he said that he wanted to apologize to consumers, saying that he had done a lot of advertisements just to attract attention, including things like Zhenao nucleic acid, but some people said that it was after the advertising law came out.

But in China, the one who can bear this original sin is Liao Ruoxing. In a way, this is a kind of pioneer, an industry wake-up caller.

I can assert that China's local brand consulting community is bound to move forward even more, and the status quo is already there. The decline of 4A is not in their personnel quality, funds, not in the absence of good customers, everything lies in the backwardness of ideas, all the dissemination for the purpose of dissemination can only be used as accompaniment, everything back to the product, back to the consumer, back to the authenticity of the product, has never left the consumer.

For entrepreneurs, opening the boundaries of your cognition may be more successful than before. As a former 4A or still a 4A person (I am barely one of them, although I also hate factionalism), learning and paying tribute to pioneers, regardless of faction, learning is always on the way, then you will not lose in this era when the awakening of the oriental lion is roaring.

Regarding the conflict theory created by Ye Maozhong, by extension, I further thought about the problem of "learning conflict", and his theory belongs to a kind of theory that breaks everyone's normal cognition.

For an enterprise, it is important for the creator or the head of the actual controller to learn thinking, not that the simple behavior you learn occurs. Of course, there are people who know that there is a problem but are afraid of pain and selectively do not change it is even more problematic, and there is a very important point is whether you are eager or eager to break the boundaries of cognition, although you still do not know what kind of good and bad results will occur after breaking.

For brand strategy, this is how you seek innovation and how to innovate and what kind of people to find to innovate... The problem of such thinking has not been solved in the real sense, so it is difficult to achieve the real upgrading and out-of-the-loop of the brand.

Regarding the breaking of cognitive boundaries, I have also observed or participated in some entrepreneurial cases. We signed a three-year contract for brand strategy consulting in the previous period, a mushroom company in Shandong, with an annual turnover of less than one billion. When communicating with the entrepreneur in depth, he said similar words himself, and proved that his own English was actually not good, so he took the interpreter directly to several places in the United States to buy land, build factories in the local area, and do agriculture there. It's hard to believe that he has even made hundreds of millions of foreign self-produced and self-sold businesses; until he only selected us through the Tencent meeting, he said that he was also stepping out and opening up the border, although he was actually not sure about the domestic consumer market...

I recently read a lot of his articles and growth trajectory, and I also bought all of Ye Maozhong's books.

Old leaf, all the way good! At the same time, everyone should also pay attention to take care of their bodies!

Advertising ghost Ye Maozhong two or three things

| Liu Qiang

Member of the Standing Committee of the Academic Committee of China Advertising Association,

Ningbo University of Finance and Economics, head of advertising major, professor

At 10:32 p.m. on January 14, 2022, someone posted a message in the WeChat group of the Academic Committee of the China Advertising Association that Ye Maozhong, a famous advertiser, had passed away. How did such a young and promising age suddenly go away? The WeChat group immediately exploded. Many big names in the advertising industry recalled their past with Ye Maozhong. This advertiser who always wears a baseball cap and uses it as his LOGO can win such a mourning at the moment when he leaves the advertising industry he loves, which may be something he did not expect before his death, and also shows his influence in the Chinese advertising industry.

Ye Maozhong is a Chinese advertising ghost, and is somewhat similar to Hideo Yoshida, the fourth president of Japan Dentsu, who is known as the Japanese advertising ghost, and has always worked passionately and selflessly. Because they are all in the advertising circle, because of the business relationship, I have had contact with Ye Maozhong, and more often mention his classic planning cases in the advertising circle, so it can be regarded as a long-term friendship. In 2000, I was the marketing director of Harbin Diwang Group, and the company advertised only a single product of drainage stone drinking liquid, and achieved annual sales of more than 400 million. I am responsible for advertising planning, media strategy and marketing operations in the company, and my office is in Beijing. I remember that in August, the company wanted to do an internal training for the marketing backbone, and arranged two lecturers, one was Ye Maozhong and the other was me. Zhang Bing, the company's marketing general manager, went to Beijing Asian Games Village to contact Ye Maozhong to give a lecture, Ye Maozhong said two conditions, one is only to talk about the brand, when the domestic brand marketing just appeared, everyone is relatively unfamiliar, listen to it may have gains; the second is that the cost of two lessons is 20,000 yuan, and then buy a batch of books he planned and wrote for the sacred elephant floor "Sacred Elephant Brand Integration Planning Documentary". Zhang Bing came back to discuss with me, and I said okay. That's it. At that time, the concept and theory of brand in China were basically half-understood, and his insistence on talking about brands stimulated my interest in systematically studying brands, and later I went to Dentsu Hideo Yoshida Foundation to visit and do brand strategy research. Looking back now, at that time, the domestic advertising industry's understanding of the theory and practice of branding was very limited, but Ye Maozhong started the brand planning business when the brand concept first entered China, indicating that his market acumen was very high.

The lecture will be held at a hotel in Beijing. On the day of the lecture, the company sent a car to greet Ye Maozhong with the iconic baseball cap, a pair of dark wide-rimmed glasses, and three assistants, two women and a man, all from Zhejiang. You must bring a few assistants when you go out, which seems to be the standard configuration of the big names in the Beijing industry at that time, and also shows his sense of identity as a well-known professional advertiser. At that time, the hotel did not even have a projector, and the projector was their own. Lectures with projectors, at that time, were still relatively rare, so it looked more professional, and the effect of explaining cases, especially playing videos, was also better. Ye Maozhong talked about his origin and experience in advertising. At first, he was a literary youth who liked to write poetry and paint, but because he was not satisfied with spending his life in obscurity in his hometown of Taizhou, Jiangsu, he broke into the advertising circle on the beach and then turned to Beijing to start a business. Taizhou is a small third-tier city located in central Jiangsu next to the Yangtze River, and has no reputation in China, the former general secretary Hu Jintao was born and raised in Taizhou, and another celebrity is Mei Lanfang, a Peking Opera taidou.

Ye Maozhong's lectures mainly shared some of the planning cases he did. His planning is characterized by poetry and wildness, the so-called poetry is some aesthetic color, which may be related to his love of writing poetry and painting; while the wild nature is that his planning is full of imagination and passion, but sometimes not so decent, so it also brings some mixed reviews from the industry. He shared the planning plan of Ningbo Dahong Eagle cigarettes, Hunan Furong Wang cigarettes, small raindrops, Zhenao nucleic acid, and the newly planned sacred elephant floor, and some advertising videos of his planned cases were played in the middle. He planned for the brand of Ningbo Red Eagle, positioned the brand slogan as: Big Red Eagle, Victory Eagle, visual image with the first letter V of English Victory as the LOGO, and released advertisements on the high artillery at the entrance and exit of the capital airport, which produced a huge visual impact, and then went to Thailand to shoot surf film and television advertisements, Egypt's pyramid film and television advertisements, so that the big red eagle cigarettes were famous for a while, and also triggered the follow-up Hunan Furong King cigarettes, Henan Hongqiqu cigarettes have come to the door to cooperate. He said that when he was planning the sacred elephant floor, he wrote a poem for each package of floors and attached it to the box of the floor, so as to arouse the emotional resonance of consumers. Then, he went to Africa to shoot videos of wild elephants as material for film and television advertising. These plans revealed Ye Maozhong's poetic temperament and idealistic feelings, as well as his keen insight into the market, and in the context of the node when China's advertising industry was shifting from start-up to professionalization and specialization, it undoubtedly exuded a fresh breath and won the recognition of advertisers in society. Although I myself do not quite agree with some of the practices planned by Ye Maozhong, as Professor Chen Gang of Peking University wrote in the preface to Ye Maozhong's "Advertising Man's Handbook": "Ye Maozhong is a strange thing in this generation. Ye Maozhong should be a phenomenon of people in the 60s. To understand the phenomena of Ye Maozhong and Ye Maozhong, we must start from the background of the social and psychological characteristics of this generation, in order to gradually appreciate and explain the various contradictions and complexities contained therein. ”

Admittedly, the advertising industry has different voices about the use of some of Ye Maozhong's planning techniques. For this problem, I think to put it in the specific context of the development of China's advertising industry to consider, first of all, the emergence of Ye Maozhong, is the result of the times to create heroes, when China's advertising industry is neither professional nor professional, although from 1983, Xiamen University pioneered the advertising major, graduates also have more than ten sessions, but can be recognized by enterprises and well-known advertising masters are rarely seen, Ye Maozhong is one of the few advertising industry head "masters". On the other hand, I think that the Chinese advertising community and the industry lack adequate liaison mechanism. The advertising community should uphold the correct values and scientific methods, and constantly pass on this concept and method to the advertising industry. Only in this way can the development path of Chinese advertising become broader and broader.

At lunch together, I said that I was also from Taizhou, teaching communication and advertising in colleges and universities, and coming out to enterprises in the middle to do marketing and advertising practice for a short time. He was stunned at first, and he did not expect to accidentally meet a fellow countryman who was advertising, even if he saw his fellow countryman, two tears were flowing, so they talked very happily. He said that college teachers have theory plus practical combat, which is really powerful. At that time, advertising planning in China was not a concept recognized by the mainstream society, coupled with the so-called idea king He Yang was arrested by the Ningxia police in 2000 for fraud, so Ye Maozhong was somewhat sensitive to the identity of the advertising planner, trying to use the concept of management consulting, and said that he was endorsed by the People's Daily as an agency should be rated as China's top ten advertising planners, indicating that the official attitude towards advertising planning is supportive, and some confusion and worry are revealed in the words. It is true that in the context of the advertising industry is not very standardized, advertising is mixed, and advertising is almost used as a derogatory term in society, which is indeed a difficult time for advertisers. After that, I returned to the university to continue teaching, and once The owner of Rimula men's clothing, Hong Zhongxin, invited me to Jinjiang to talk about the media plan, saying that Ye Maozhong was planning for the Qi brand clothing in Jinjiang, and asked me if I wanted to meet and talk. Because the founder of Qipai is the younger brother of the founder of Rimula Men's Wear, ranking seventh, the relationship between the two families is very close. I said that the business that others are doing is best not to meddle in, which is a passing point. The last time I met Ye Maozhong was at the 2019 China Advertising Association Academic Committee Commemoration of the Forty Years of China's Advertising Industry Recovery Conference, he participated in the last program performance, did not expect that this time was actually a trick, which made people sigh. After hearing the news of Ye Maozhong's death, I wrote a poem with a hidden head, which is attached here:

Mourning Leaf Maozhong

Leaves fall in the new year,

Maocai folded branches west wind remnants,

Zhongzheng does not rely on hailing dreams,

Everything is empty.

Ye Maozhong, the Chinese advertising industry misses you very much

Text | Lu Bin

Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics

Ye Maozhong, gone, was only 54 years old. Suddenly, the old people in China's advertising industry were shocked and sighed! This generation of advertisers who know the story of Ye Maozhong's creation of the odd year have the honor of witnessing and participating in the development of contemporary Chinese advertising. While everyone is invariably mourning Mr. Ye, it is inevitable that they will also have more emotions and some tragedies about their advertising life. After all, people who can recall Ye Maozhong and the background of the advertising industry in the era he was brilliant in have also become the old wine of the advertising industry.

Ye Maozhong's advertising innovation story is precisely in sync with the development of TELEVISION media advertising in China. He started from Jiangsu Taizhou TELEVISION Station, mistakenly hit and bumped into the advertising circle, in the era of national attention to CCTV's golden bidding, his advertising career and advertising territory reached the peak state of rising sun. At that time, Bai Yansong once said, "Lead a dog into CCTV, let it show its face for a few minutes in the prime time of a set of programs every day, and within a month, it will become a famous dog." ”

That era has made a number of national brands that have now become the pride of China's industry, of which Mr. Ye and a group of local Chinese advertising pioneers have contributed to it. In today's college classroom, when I still excitedly tell the classic advertising planning cases of that period to the advertising students born in the post-00s, the children who grew up with mobile media have a disdainful face, and in their opinion, those cases are too untechnical. But they had to look up to the pioneers of Chinese advertising represented by Ye Maozhong, and the chinese advertising elites represented by Ye Maozhong relied on their wisdom and wisdom to rise in the wind and water in that era, fame and fortune, they relied on their advertising professional ability, started from scratch, with diligence, wisdom and sensitivity to obtain a rich accumulation of wealth, the market value of the local advertisers they created, so that the advertisers behind them could not reach the dust, but also let the advertisers after them worship, follow, flock to.

The brilliant galaxy is brilliant, but there are always a few superstars that light up the night sky. It is precisely because of the "emergence" of a group of Chinese local advertising elites in Ye Mao that China's advertising industry has not lost to those multinational advertising media giants in the professional ability and market competition of advertising and marketing. Compared with the local advertisers of his generation, Ye Maozhong solves marketing problems from the perspective of advertising and examines advertising from the level of brand marketing. However, in the jianghu of advertising and marketing, word of mouth is more of Mr. Ye's wealth energy.

Balloons that blow up will always be blown up. Mr. Ye's advertising era is the era of the barbaric growth of the Chinese market economy, and the market prosperity blown up in the name of advertising is naturally deeply imprinted in the minds of Chinese consumers. At the same time, various prime-time and layout advertising bidding meetings represented by CCTV have become more and more lively. At this time, the operators of the traditional media advertising department became the protagonists of the "advertising market", and for a while the mainstream voice of China's advertising industry was issued, and Ye Maozhong's name began to gradually fade out of the advertising circle.

Mr. Ye, who came from an advertising background, is well versed in marketing, and he knows that the essence of advertising still depends on the marketing effect. At the same time as fading out of the advertising circle, Mr. Ye is also breaking the "circle", he and his company began to march upstream of advertising, making more and faster money in the field of marketing consulting, which also made the advertisers who were still in the circle envious and even a little hungry.

The advertising industry iteration is too fast, everyone is accelerating and running forward, too late to recall those water-like years, afraid of being eliminated by this industry in this era. In the past few years, I have seen Mr. Ye's large billboard at the airport, and I thought to myself: In the era of digital media, what high tricks will Lao Ye have to detonate the advertising and marketing industry?

Unexpectedly, when Lao Ye was rich and powerful, he died young. Heavenly jealous talent, the jianghu has no leaves, but he interpreted his name and story into the big lP of the new media era, and became the meta-starting point of the advertising and marketing meta-universe.

Rest in peace, Ye Maozhong! Brother is no longer in the jianghu, but there will still be legends of brother on the jianghu! In any case, the eulogy issued in the name of the China Advertising Association is enough to prove that Mr. Ye has made outstanding contributions to china's advertising industry, and the history of Chinese advertising has also left a page of color for the name of Ye Maozhong, which is enough to comfort Mr. Ye's spirit in heaven.

While remembering Mr. Ye Maozhong with this article, I also pay tribute to the glorious years of China's advertising industry that we have walked, seen and experienced together!

Produced by Modern Advertising Magazine