Source: Alphabet List
Author: Yan Fei
Edit: Shu Zihua
Digital collections have become a must for domestic technology companies. Today, the competition even extends into space.
On April 24, China Aerospace released a number of digital collections, the most eye-catching of which was the "Moon Soil". Inspired by the lunar soil samples brought back by Chang'e 5, the collection is limited to 1731 copies on the Baidu App and Xiaodu APP platforms, echoing the total weight of the lunar soil of 1731 grams.
The "Moon Soil" digital collection was issued on Baidu's blockchain "Baidu Super Chain", each priced at 118 yuan, and sold out in just one minute.
Since the beginning of this year, Baidu has accelerated its pace in the digital collection track, and its actions have been frequent: first it launched the limited digital collection of the Spring Festival and the Ice and Snow Games during the Spring Festival and the Winter Olympic Games; then after the Spring Festival rework, it distributed the "Start of Work" collection to all employees; at the end of February, Baidu began to give users free animation avatar digital collections, covering multiple IPs such as "Yellow Comedy Fungus", "Talking Tom Cat", "AHu" and "Rabbit Piglet".
The cooperation with the sale of the "Moon Soil" digital collection is the first time that Baidu has sold digital collections to the public; the theme has also broken through the previous two-dimensional yuan, museum cultural creation, etc., cutting into the aerospace field of national concern, and the audience is wider.
In addition to Baidu, Companies such as Alibaba and Tencent have also landed on the digital collection track, either by allies or personally.
Behind the market boom is the growing preference for digital collections among young domestic consumers, especially Gen Z. As the indigenous people of the Internet age, they pay special attention to the shaping of online identities, and they are willing to buy things that are conducive to online socialization, and the unique, futuristic and fashionable digital collection is just enough to meet the demand.
Strong demand has brought about an ever-expanding market size. According to a research report by the Hashri Think Tank, the total issuance value of the domestic digital collection in 2021 will be about RMB150 million. Digital collections are in the ascendant, the market is still in the blue ocean; and the technology factories represented by BAT have the advantages of technology, infrastructure and IP resources, and have the best chance to cut the cake.
But the first thing they have to answer is how to explore the diversified value of digital collections while meeting domestic regulatory requirements, rather than evolving into a target of hype. Whether it is the novel "moon soil" or the many second creations around the museum's collection, it is BAT's up and down exploration along the main line of development of this digital collection.
When companies such as BAT lay out their digital collections, the underlying technology is based on the blockchain, and the cooperative IP and the final product try to resonate with the mainstream aesthetic and value system, rather than catering to the niche and taking the side like "boring apes".
Baidu started with search, and the company's genes come with a keen sensitivity to big events and the focus of netizens. This feature is also reflected in Baidu's digital collection development route.
On April 16, the crew of the Shenzhou 13 spacecraft, which has been traveling in space for six months, successfully returned to the ship, becoming a hot spot of national concern, and the major events and small things of the astronauts were on weibo hot search. A week later, at China Space Day, the world's first "moon soil" digital collection was released on Baidu SuperChain.
In addition to the "Lunar Soil", a series of digital collections with deep space exploration elements were released on the same day, with the theme of China's first lunar rover "Jade Rabbit" and the first Mars rover "Zhu Rong". The intensive release of the space digital collection is obviously to echo the national pride brought by China's space industry.
In addition, the Beijing Winter Olympics at the beginning of this year are also a national event. Baidu cooperated with Han Meilin, the father of the Olympic "Fuwa", to distribute the "Ice and Snow Overflow" digital collection combined with the sports project for 20 consecutive days during the event, and users received free digital collection rewards while participating in the Baidu APP cash red envelope activity.
Ant's whale detectives have tried to seize the boom of museum cultural creation in recent years. Last October, Ant launched a treasure project to move the collections of museums across the country to the blockchain for digitization. At present, more than 30 museums (institutes) across the country have joined.
In addition, Alipay linked the five blessings to digital collections in the "Collection of Five Blessings" activity for the Spring Festival in 2022, and cultural and creative partners include Henan Museum, Nanjing Museum, Hunan Provincial Museum, etc. The injection of huge traffic has significantly improved users' awareness of digital collections.
Tencent's strongest sector is Pan-Entertainment, and the national comics sought after by young people have become an important entry point for its layout of digital collections.
On the same day that Baidu released the "Moon Soil" digital collection, Tencent's magic core officially launched the "Tencent Animation Ten Years Limited" digital collection, covering 10 classic Chinese comics such as "Under One Man", "Fox Demon Little Red Lady", and "The King Spares His Life". As of press time, the collections are sold out.
However, although BAT has its own characteristics in the IP selection of digital collections, there are many overlaps and intersections, and it is not limited to a certain subdivision category. As long as it is in line with the spirit of the times and the tastes of young people, they will actively try.
For example, in January this year, Baidu released a number of Spring Festival collector's edition digital collections, the design blueprint is from Chongqing Dazu Stone Carving Thousand Hands Guanyin; Whale Detective launched the animation "Saint Seiya" theme digital collection at the end of March, which can be used as Alipay payment code skin; Phantom Core has also launched a luoyang Longmen stone carved digital collection in addition to Guoman.
Judging from the sales performance, many of the digital collections launched by BAT have been sold out in a short period of time, and reservations and even lottery purchases have become the norm. On the one hand, this is because most of the collections are sold at a low price of more than ten yuan or tens of yuan; on the other hand, there are also psychological factors that consumers are willing to taste early and regard digital collections as "social currency".
The hot sales of collections such as "Moon Soil" highlight the natural high favor of domestic netizens for digital collections that plant fundamental soil culture, reflect the style of the times, and excavate diversified aesthetics. Users' "wild consumption" not only affects the decision-making of BAT and other platform operators, but also subtly shapes the domestic ecology of digital collections.
Digital collections originating in NFTs arose overseas and were subsequently emulated by domestic companies. But on the development path, the digital collection industry at home and abroad has embarked on a completely different path.
Compared with overseas players, in addition to being closer to the mainstream in terms of IP selection, domestic companies also have fundamentally different perceptions of the value of digital collections. This is the biggest difference between the two.
Overseas platforms represented by Yuga Labs, the company behind the "Boring Ape", regard digital collections as an alternative investment product, and the core idea is to make the price more truly reflect the value of the collection through high-frequency trading based on blockchain. In art transactions that lack pricing standards, this game has its own plausible merits, but it also inevitably leads to a lot of speculation and fraud.
In contrast, eliminating hype and exploring the diversified value of digital collections is the direction of major domestic players such as BAT. This qualitative difference is based on the active choice of different regulatory environments.
On the one hand, as the owners of digital collection trading platforms, BAT and other companies structure them on their own alliance chains, including Baidu Super Chain, Tencent Zhixin Chain, etc., which can be non-transferable at the rule level and only use legal tender transactions, thereby "de-financializing" and eliminating speculation from the source.
On the other hand, the platform is also cracking down on the over-the-counter trading of digital collections through various means. For example, Alipay's "Dunhuang Feitian" NFT skin sold for 9.9 yuan, but it was hyped to 1.5 million yuan on second-hand trading platforms such as Idle Fish; after noticing this situation, Alipay reiterated that it could not be resold, and Idle Fish quickly removed the relevant digital collections from the shelves.
However, from the perspective of consumer interests, technology Internet companies do not allow digital collections to produce secondary trading markets, and they must give more value to the collections themselves and provide a more solid foundation for their sales and collections.
An excellent digital collection must first have artistic aesthetic value. On this level, BAT does a good job.
Baidu's "Moon Soil" and "Thousand Hands Guanyin", Whale Detective's "Tiger Cultural Relics", "Zodiac Cultural Relics", "Treasure of the Town Hall", etc., whether it is IP prototype, cultural connotation or digital presentation, have a fairly high level; many collections use 3D modeling, and their technical threshold and presentation effect far exceed 2D works such as "Boring Ape".
Beautifully designed digital collections are not only popular with fans, but their marketing value is also being noticed and discovered by enterprises. Especially in the FMCG industry, the issuance of digital collections is becoming the standard for new product marketing.
For example, in mid-March this year, dairy company Jindian released new products such as carbon-neutral milk on the Baidu meta-universe platform "Xi'an", and jointly released a limited digital collection with Baidu SuperChain to encourage netizens to join low-carbon organic life.
This combination of virtual reality and blockchain technology marketing methods, not only with its own communication power, but also can reduce the cost of physical materials, warehousing and logistics, etc., and more in line with the main low-carbon theme of enterprises, and has achieved good marketing results and public opinion response.
In addition, the value of the digital collection is reflected in positive externalities. In addition to bringing an aesthetic experience to collectors, it also needs to take on more public welfare functions.
For example, Baidu's release of the "Lunar Soil" digital collection is itself a boost to space science popularization; in addition, it has also reached cooperation with China's lunar exploration project and plans to play a role in space science and technology popularization and other fields.
In addition, at the end of March this year, Baidu released three digital collections of endangered animals, "Yunnan Golden Snub-nosed Monkey", "Siberian Tiger" and "Snow Leopard", in order to disseminate animal science knowledge and call on the whole people to pay attention to biodiversity conservation.
Ants focused on cultural tourism. At present, among the digital collections of the Whale Detective Platform, the circulation of cultural tourism and art collections accounts for about 70%, and its application scenarios include payment code skins and social media digital avatars.
Tencent launched the 2021 Public Welfare Review "Little Red Flower Digital Collection" at the beginning of this year, aiming to record the public welfare activities of six major themes such as rural revitalization, nature conservation, and education assistance in the past year, and users can redeem and collect them after completing their tasks.
The public welfare attribute of digital collections has also attracted the attention of the outside world. On March 27, Fashion COSMO magazine and Baidu SuperChain released a free digital collection based on posters created by seven artists to convey the theme of "women are priceless".
In the fields of intellectual property rights and art trading, digital collections have revealed broad market prospects and application space. Companies like BAT aren't in a hurry to make money from it, but they're also looking for ways to combine digital collections with their own businesses.
Distributing collections for free as employee benefits is one of the common ways to play. After the Spring Festival this year, Baidu distributed tens of thousands of digital collections to employees, with the image of Xiaodu robot, promoting a wave of its own products while building corporate culture.
Tencent also distributed its digital collection to 100,000 employees on its 23rd anniversary last year. Based on the QQ corporate image, employees can match about 700,000 different styles; in addition, there are 18 models with a total of 1,000 Easter egg collections.
On the other hand, technology Internet companies are also looking to attract attention with digital collections and drive business growth.
In November 2021, Baixin Bank, which was jointly initiated by Baidu and China CITIC Bank, celebrated its fourth anniversary and released the first digital collection of the banking industry, which attracted attention from the outside world. At the time, Chen Longqiang, chief strategy officer of Baixin Bank, said that the move was "an attempt for us to meet the meta-universe".
Tmall hopes to help platform brand merchants take advantage of the opportunity to sell goods by issuing digital collections. At the end of February, it did the grass channel "Something", and made the digital collection as the first trend word, jointly releasing the digital collection with 7 brands such as Adidas, Libai, Jiang Xiaobai and Razer.
Tencent has focused on the big cultural entertainment fields that it is good at, including national comics and music. In addition to releasing collections of popular comics such as "Under One Man", it also cooperated with musicians to release a digital collection of music, and the first participating singers included Hu Yanbin, Zhang Chu, Zhang Gayi, etc.
In addition to the Internet of Science and Technology, other industries are also actively laying out digital collections.
For example, many film and television dramas have made digital collections a must-have for publicity. In the domestic market, "Embracing You Through Winter" and "Miracle Stupid Child" have launched themed IP collections on Baidu Super Chain; overseas blockbusters such as "Dune", "Sin City" and "Godfather" have also released collections on different platforms.
In addition, consumer brands such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, McDonald's, KFC, and Nesher's tea, bmw, Porsche, Ferrari and other automobile brands, and sports brands such as Nike and Adidas have all sold digital collections, all of which are popular with fans.
However, on the whole, the domestic digital collection ecology is still in the exploration stage, and there is still a long way to go from mature commercial applications.
In addition to constantly testing the waters and running into the upstream and downstream cooperation processes, BAT and other technology Internet companies are more about finding the positioning of digital collections, finding a balance between artistic, social and commercial values, and opening up imagination space for the future.
Baidu's digital collections in space and the release of "Moon Soil" imply the main line of development of the digital collection industry: social value first, and multiple values integrate and coexist. How to integrate social and commercial values and polish a healthier digital collection ecology will be the focus of major companies' development.
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