Text | Zhao Er knife
"Winter has arrived", the film and television industry has shouted "the wolf is coming" for many years, and it will spread to the entire entertainment industry in 2021.
Under the impact of many unfavorable news such as the epidemic and supervision, for the entertainment industry, whether it is long and short videos, online texts, animations, or live video tracks, the days of 2021 are not "comfortable", and the entire industry seems to suffer from serious "anxiety disorders".
Reader Yujun believes that the anxiety problem of the entertainment industry has three main symptoms: growth panic, user quality concerns, and difficulty in commercialization. For players on various tracks, only by finding a prescription to solve the three major symptoms can it be possible to enter the era of intensive cultivation and meticulous development from the extensive and barbaric growth stage, ushering in the moment of long flow.
Symptom 1: Increased panic
Can the growth story still be told?
The growth panic is the panic of the Internet industry, which is accustomed to explosive growth, about the slowdown in growth and even the recession.
For the entertainment industry, the most anxious thing is undoubtedly the disappearance of the demographic dividend. After more than a decade of explosive growth, the domestic mobile Internet has slowed down in terms of the number of users and the growth of user duration. According to the "Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet Network" released by CNNIC, as of June 2021, the number of mainland Internet users reached 1.011 billion, an increase of only 14.4 million compared with December 2020. According to the latest data from Analysys, the average monthly active user scale of China's mobile Internet in the first half of 2021 reached 1.033 billion, the user scale tended to be stable, and the overall growth rate slowed down.
After getting used to high-speed growth, in the face of the peak of the demographic dividend, in addition to the platform, the participants in the ecological chain of the entertainment industry such as anchors, MCN institutions, online writers, film and television animation production agencies, etc., also suffer from "growth panic disorder". How to solve the growth problem and alleviate the traffic panic has become a problem for the sustainable development of the industry.
The demographic dividend is gradually exhausted, and if you want to continue to achieve growth, you must "break the circle" and break the stereotype. Before drainage and volume, it is probably two sets of methods: rough wide net delivery, rapid start-up; or for user map delivery, net text App push to net text enthusiasts, live app push to live broadcast enthusiasts... In particular, the latter can be said to have initially achieved "efficient delivery", but after multiple rounds of delivery of the same graph user group, it is bound to cause the push range to solidify and stagnate THE GROWTH of ROI.
The interests and hobbies of users are diverse and constantly changing. If you want to break through, you must tap the needs of different levels of users. Users who are interested in online content may also be interested in games, interested in IP dramas, and may be potential audiences for live broadcasting - and these users are the potential growth groups. Then, how to influence the users of other circles and convert them into live users, it is necessary to have the ability to efficiently match products and users.
This has to mention the "ability to commercialize advertising". Taking Tencent Advertising as an example, it innovatively establishes the concept of commodity library, labels content or services, and helps advertising find matching user groups through more diversified and rich "products" and insights into user groups, and also helps users find "products" that meet their own needs or interests, so as to achieve circle-breaking growth of the crowd. On this basis, the ability to commercialize advertising can not only help advertising find users, but also help advertising have the ability to learn and continuously improve its efficiency in finding matching user groups.
The above is the solution to the dimension of "people". As the most high-profile live video track in the entertainment industry, the delivery environment it faces is "changing rapidly" and it must be "responsive". In addition, Tencent Advertising has also provided industry customers with multi-dimensional assistance such as "product", "time" and "field".
As far as "products" are concerned, the product measurement and selection strategies provided by Tencent Advertising help the live broadcast room to improve the plight of the concentration of delivery categories and the historical delivery categories that cannot meet the growth needs of ROI, and help continue to attract larger audiences with "categories".
In the dimension of "time", Tencent Advertising provides a "real-time solution for broadcasting", which stores resident anchors as commodities and circles the collection of anchors on broadcast. As long as there is an anchor on the air, the advertisement is in the on-line state - that is to say, the players of each live broadcast track can "commercialize" the live broadcast rooms of different categories of anchors, so that users can enter the live broadcast room through a smooth link in real time, and realize efficient new promotion and revitalization for 7 * 24 hours.
Finally, with the emergence of more and more unpredictable risks, players in the entertainment industry have fully realized the importance of "private domain traffic". Tencent provides a perfect ecosystem covering video numbers, mini programs, and enterprise WeChat, supplemented by rich digital tools, providing brands with multi-scenario layout opportunities and increasing their user touchpoints.
Looking forward to 2022, the external environment may be difficult to improve, but the growth story can still be told, but it is necessary to adopt a more "keeping pace with the times" and "targeted" delivery and operation methods.
Symptom 2: User quality concerns
The shift from competing quantity to chasing quality
In addition to traffic panic, how to improve the quality of users has also become a key point of industry anxiety.
How have we judged the effectiveness of promotions in the past? Overwriting, installing, downloading or registering means that the marketing objective is completed. But whether the user is active, whether they pay, etc. is uncontrollable. As advertising guru John Wanamaker said, "I know that half of the investment in advertising is useless, but the problem is that I don't know which half." ”
For the various tracks of the entertainment industry, in the previous blowout growth, the coverage user base achieved by promotion and marketing is massive, but it also forms a huge sunken user base. They may have seen the promotion, or they may have downloaded and signed up, but they just haven't consumed any of the content afterwards – so how do you get these sunken users to surface?
In addition, at a time when it is difficult and costly to pull new ones, how to make new users come alive has also become a problem in the industry. Moreover, since the incremental market is limited, then if any platform wants to maintain stable growth, it must work hard in the "stock market", and the important indicators of the stock market are user viscosity, use time and payment frequency - in terms of the video live broadcast track, in addition to the number of downloads and registered users, more attention is paid to whether users are active, the number of onlines, the frequency of interaction, the payment and other indicators.
So, how do you get new and sunk users "active"? And how to make the payment of active users more frequent, it is necessary to have a growing LTV thinking, recognize the multi-faceted nature of users, and use long-term thinking to achieve user hierarchical operation:
First of all, we must pay attention to the multi-faceted nature of users and do a good job of user stratification.
In addition to dividing the user group into four core circles of conventional pulling new, pre-installation activation, silent pulling, and unloading and refluxing, sunk users can also be divided into multiple dimensions, such as whether to download, whether to register, whether to log in, whether to uninstall, etc., and to estimate the conversion possibility of sunken users through the system; on this basis, the platform can also further circle people who are interested in different fields such as live broadcasting and e-commerce, and achieve targeted "activation" through strong commoditization capabilities.
Second, we must have long-term thinking to operate.
Long-term thinking is to recognize the diversity of users, on the basis of user stratification, rely on technology to "real-time" advertising optimization. For example, for different levels of people, different bids can be set, and the RTA (Realtime API) + advertising commodification scheme can be used to make the advertising budget spend more effectively.
At the same time, it is necessary to stimulate the needs of different levels of users.
Excavating the multi-faceted nature of user needs is actually to classify users into thousands of faces and build a more refined and clearer user layering system. In layman's terms, it is a user who has a tipping behavior in the show, in fact, it may become a paid user of online texts, long and short videos, in addition to the hobby scene, whether there has been a "paid" behavior can be used as a user layering dimension.
If traffic panic and user quality concerns are still the growth anxieties of the entertainment industry, then in 2022, the biggest test should be insufficient budget! Out of money! What to do?
Symptom Three: No money! What to do!!
Make a big move! Moving towards "profitable growth"
Tightening the money bag has become a common phenomenon in the past six months or so.
Starting from the film and television track, various fields such as online text, animation, long and short videos, and live video broadcasting have been difficulties at home and abroad in the past year.
The reason is related to the general environment, the increasing caution of capital, the normalization of policy supervision, and the impact of the epidemic on revenue that is not as expected, etc., all of which have caused the status quo of the industry that is "short of money".
For live video tracks, which are accustomed to big-budget promotions, it means a hard landing must be completed in 2022. How can we do more with a constant or even decreasing budget? How can you get more output without changing your inputs? It is the "voice" of players in various tracks of the entertainment industry.
On the other hand, the price of traffic has risen all the way in the past few years, becoming an "unbearable weight" for the entertainment industry. How can we break the situation by not only tightening our money bags, but also facing high traffic prices?
Or take the live video track as an example, not only the platform has traffic anxiety, MCN institutions and heads, waists and small anchors also have a strong desire for traffic growth. If the head anchor wants to maintain growth, there must always be an influx of new users; if the small and medium-sized anchors want to grow, they must drain the flow, and the MCN agency, whether it is cultivating small and medium-sized anchors or supporting the head anchors, has a strong demand for traffic.
Therefore, in a limited budget, playing tricks is not only the threshold that track players must cross, but also tests the wisdom of the platform.
In the face of the pain points of the entertainment industry, especially the live video track, "cost reduction and efficiency increase", Tencent Advertising and the industry have taken a firm step in the exploration of commercial profit growth - not only focusing on the growth of the number and quality of users, but also advancing to the growth of commercial value. Live broadcasting platforms have promotion budgets, and anchors or MCN agencies also have traffic purchase needs, so if the needs of the two are coordinated, they can naturally reduce their respective costs and are more likely to achieve their respective business goals.
I don't have any money, what should I do? Then work together and make money together. Promote the joint investment of the anchor big V and the Kuaishou platform, help the platform harvest growth and commercial returns, and also solve the situation that the traffic procurement in the anchor big V station is becoming more and more difficult and expensive. This is the optimal solution that Tencent advertising prescribes for "money shortage".
Yujun also observed that the video live broadcasting platform linkage network movies, micro-short dramas, etc. are put on the Tencent ecosystem, and the content is exposed at the same time, but also obtains a high number of plays and an increase in paid users, so that the producers and platforms of the network university and micro-short dramas can participate in the sub-account and generate income - these are the efforts made by all parties to improve commercialization. In addition, the high-quality IP in the novel platform, the output of short dramas and other content forms for delivery, but also to obtain exposure and high reading volume, to participate in the sub-account to generate income.
In summary, when the budget is reduced and the cost is reduced, the platform, content producers and anchors must "grow" and have the willingness to put it. The idea given by Tencent Advertising is to bring together the needs of all parties and move towards better commercialization with lower cost and more efficient matching methods.
brief summary:
Crises and opportunities coexist. How to relieve anxiety, eliminate panic, and get things back on the right path. For the entertainment industry, the correct path is to recognize the internal and external environment, do a good job in pulling new and stock revitalization, and improve user activity and payment frequency. Tencent Advertising has seized this trend, focusing on improving the commercialization ability of players, practicing "cost reduction and efficiency increase", and working with all parties to achieve transformation and upgrading from barbaric growth to refined operation, from scale growth to profitable growth, with the combination of user stratification and commoditization capabilities.
2022 is a new year, the entertainment industry will have more fun and interesting innovative ways to play, but also will bring more surprising marketing promotion methods, bring more warmth to the industry.
*Original article, reprinted with attribution indicated