Text/Xiaoke (Public number: Haige Business Watch ID: hgsygc)
On January 21, the 2023 CCTV Spring Festival Gala in the Year of the Rabbit met with the people of the whole country. However, the sponsors of the Spring Festival Gala, which have attracted much attention in previous years, have not yet waited for the official announcement.
There is a saying in the Internet industry: if you haven't been to the Spring Festival Gala, you are not a real giant. As of last year, BAT, Kuaishou and Douyin, the five major mainstream manufacturers, had spent huge sums of money to throw red envelopes on the Spring Festival evening. Among the remaining Internet companies that can be called, Pinduoduo once withdrew from the Spring Festival Gala competition due to negative news, and the size of Station B and Xiaohongshu may be small. According to this analysis, many industry media have analyzed that in terms of the number of users and "ammunition reserves" and the volume of the Spring Festival Gala, only Meituan is the only one. But apparently, this year, Wang Xing did not buy the "ticket" to board the big ship of the Spring Festival Gala.
From the highly sought-after fragrant dumplings to today's silence, the "Spring Festival Gala Interactive Red Envelope" has only been in this popular evening for only 8 years. So, why are the Spring Festival Gala red envelopes not fragrant, and how does the traffic magic opened by Internet companies by grabbing red envelopes fail?
Holding hands for the Spring Festival Gala, half of the scenery history
As a special cultural symbol, the Spring Festival Gala has not only recorded the changes of the times through rich and diverse cultural programs in the past 40 years, but also witnessed the change of industry giants and the birth of new upstarts. In 1984, Combas watches, the first to appear on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala as a sponsor, represented the beginning of manufacturing in the eighties and nineties of the last century; Since 2003, 16 times at zero point for the beauty of the national people, echoing the "golden age" of real estate. Since then, with the roar of the Internet era, the CCTV Spring Festival Gala seems to have become an arena for IT giants.
In 2015, WeChat won the exclusive cooperation of CCTV's Spring Festival Gala with more than 50 million advertising fees, which marked that the Internet industry represented by Tencent officially entered a larger field. In the following 8 years, Ali, Kuaishou, Douyin, Baidu, and JD.com successively appeared on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala as "exclusive interactive partners", turning "grabbing red envelopes while watching the Spring Festival Gala" into a "new folk custom of the Spring Festival" that the public is accustomed to and enjoys tirelessly.
As the originator of the Spring Festival Gala red envelopes, WeChat took out 500 million cash red envelopes to users to "shake it" at the Spring Festival Gala. Chinese New Year's Eve night, the total number of WeChat red envelopes sent and received reached 1.01 billion, the total number of interactions reached 11 billion, and the peak interaction was 810 million times per minute. This allowed WeChat to add 20 million new payment users overnight, and successfully bound 200 million personal bank cards in the following two days. After this battle, WeChat Pay achieved corner overtaking and became a leading financial service platform comparable to Alipay.
WeChat's huge success on the Spring Festival Gala that year was seen by rival Alibaba as a bitter lesson in the "Pearl Harbor attack." In the following three years, Alibaba's Alipay and Taobao successively joined hands with the Spring Festival Gala, and harvested traffic through password red envelopes, jiwufu, empty shopping carts and other games. In the cooperation with the Spring Festival Gala in 2016, Alipay successfully gained 1.1 billion pairs of friends; In Chinese New Year's Eve night of 2018, Taobao's instantaneous traffic reached 15 times that of the previous year's Double 11, and nearly 100 million users jointly created the "Taobao crash event". Through continuous cooperation with the Spring Festival Gala, Alipay slowed down the offensive pace of WeChat Pay, and Taobao occupied a place in the sinking market.
But the same fate is different - although they are all Internet companies, they are all "big ways to spread money" that are inseparable from their roots, and the amount of money is still rising year by year, but compared with Tencent and Ali to achieve their strategic intentions to a certain extent, the gains of Internet companies on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala are completely different. When "grabbing red envelopes while watching the Spring Festival Gala" entered its 5th year, a watershed appeared.
At the 2019 Spring Festival Gala, Baidu threw 900 million yuan in red envelopes and quickly increased the DAU (daily active users) of Baidu APP from 160 million to 300 million through interactive forms such as shaking, Baidu App search keywords, and information flow Easter eggs. But that impressive figure didn't last long. According to the monitoring of the Guojin Research and Innovation Center, after only 5 days, the retention rate of new users of mobile Baidu is only 2%, and there has been no major breakthrough in financial and mobile business. Even more embarrassing, Baidu lost its first loss since its listing in the first quarter of 2019 due to spending on the Spring Festival red envelope event.
Since then, the Spring Festival Gala has ushered in the "short video era" that has been fast and shaken for two consecutive years. However, whether it is Kuaishou, which relies on the "video + like" method to send out 1 billion yuan red envelopes during the Spring Festival Gala, or Douyin, which sprinkles 2 billion yuan of "red envelope rain" and launches more than 50 New Year special effects and mini games, has not been able to replicate the miracle of WeChat and Alipay. Kuaishou did not achieve its goal of "ensuring retention and reaching an average of 300 million DAUs in the three months after the holiday" set for the Spring Festival Gala; Douyin, which quickly launched the payment function before the Spring Festival, has still not been able to shake the status of Alipay and WeChat in payment.
The time has come in 2022, and JD.com won the red envelope cooperation of CCTV's Spring Festival Gala with 1.5 billion yuan. Official data shows that during the Spring Festival Gala, the cumulative number of interactions between Chinese around the world participating in the JD.com APP red envelope reached 69.1 billion times - this is the first time in history that the number of red envelope interactions at the Spring Festival Gala has declined. In addition, JD.com's user growth is not obvious. According to the company's financial report, as of the end of 2021, JD.com's MAU (monthly active users) in the past year was 570 million; in the first three quarters of 2022, it was 580.5 million, 580.8 million, and 588.3 million, respectively, and growth almost stagnated.
From the infinite scenery of the first half, to the backfire in the second half, the history of Internet bigwigs throwing red envelopes on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala has been 8 years, but this is not a long time compared with the watch industry represented by Combas sponsoring the Spring Festival Gala for 10 consecutive years, and Midea's monopoly on the Spring Festival Gala for 16 years. So, what made the red envelope war of Internet companies die on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala?
Why does traffic magic fail?
In fact, starting with Baidu, sponsoring the Spring Festival Gala is hardly a cost-effective business for Internet giants. This is not only the reasons for the Spring Festival Gala itself, but also related to factors such as the Internet entering the stock era, the difficulty of pulling new ones and retaining, and the relative solidification of Internet products and gameplay.
Starting from the first crab-eating WeChat, Internet giants have smashed billions of dollars into the Spring Festival Gala every year, and one of their core demands is to attract new ones. But there are fewer and fewer people to recruit today. According to the Statistical Report on Internet Development in China, as of June last year, the size of China's Internet users had reached 1.051 billion, while China's total population was 1.41 billion, and the penetration rate of Internet users had almost reached the ceiling.
In addition, at a time when entertainment content is rich or even redundant, the traditional Spring Festival Gala has long become difficult to adjust in the face of diverse audiences, and the young and yellow caused by the abdication of old artists and the limited business level of newcomers have made the content of the party more and more scarce. According to relevant statistics, the ratings of the Spring Festival Gala in the last three years since 2020 are 20.63%, 23.26% and 21.93%, respectively, which are the lowest three in history. Obviously, more and more forms of entertainment are dividing up the audience's attention to the Spring Festival Gala.
In the era of mobile Internet, any interactive gameplay has a shelf life. The WeChat red envelope, which became a hit at the Spring Festival Gala, not only tapped the potential of WeChat mobile payment + social networking, but also integrated red envelope products into people's lives after that. But none of the players who took over since then have developed a comparable product. The decline in the innovation ability of Internet companies, the fewer and fewer new products and services with the potential to shake the old pattern, and the red envelope war of the Spring Festival Gala have gone from the initial highlight moment to the current no one.
For sponsoring companies, it is understandable to use the influence of the Spring Festival Gala to pull new ones, promote new businesses, and strengthen corporate moats, but it has become more and more difficult to retain the users who have been pulled. In fact, with the passage of time, the popularity of the Spring Festival Gala gradually dissipated, and the social relationships connected by the red envelopes were rapidly lost at a speed visible to the naked eye. In the face of unsustainable retention and conversion rates, this huge competition seems to have lost its original meaning.
In addition, the Internet industry, which has created countless wealth myths, has also collectively moved towards a slowdown stage in recent years. Especially in the past year, anti-monopoly, personal privacy, data security and other issues have caused many leading enterprises to be subject to certain restrictions. Nowadays, the wallets of large manufacturers have shrunk, and the cost performance of the Spring Festival Gala is getting lower and lower, so Internet companies that are busy "reducing costs and increasing efficiency" are naturally indifferent to the red envelope activities of the Spring Festival Gala.
Where is the next "Spring Festival Gala Red Envelope"?
More and more Internet bigwigs realize that the single-day peak brought by the Spring Festival Gala red envelope is not enough to solve the long-term difficulties faced by the company. After bidding farewell to the stage of the Spring Festival Gala, Internet companies also began to look for new industry growth points. In particular, e-commerce platforms with high requirements for sales conversion urgently need to convert the traffic precipitated on the platform into real money to help merchants bring goods. Therefore, Internet companies that have become more "pragmatic" no longer pursue high-flying detonation, but frequently and deeply bind with various popular variety shows, further pushing live streaming goods to the foreground.
Last year, Ali's Diantao APP sponsored the phenomenal hit variety show "Happy Back"; Jingdong has appeared in many variety shows such as "Annual Comedy Competition 2" and "Concert at 8 pm"; Kuaishou has successively cooperated with Henan Satellite TV and China Central Radio and Television Station to create two programs, "National Chao Ceremony" and "China National Treasure Conference". In addition, Pinduoduo, Meituan, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, etc. have also sponsored popular variety shows or self-made "micro-variety shows" to seek higher return on investment with the "how fast is better to save" approach.
"0713 Re-employment Boy Group" is a well-deserved popular dark horse recently. During Singles' Day last year, Alibaba's Diantao APP named the 0713 new group comprehensive "Happy Back", creating a comprehensive mobile live broadcast room for re-employed brothers for three consecutive periods. In the program, the 0713 boy group not only visited the white goose and big yellow croaker breeding base in Xiangshan, Zhejiang, but also walked into the Diantao live broadcast room as an anchor to promote local source food and specialties, and experienced the whole process of professional anchors from product selection to live broadcast delivery, directly filling the effect of variety shows.
In addition to packaging variety shows into live broadcast rooms, new media platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu also personally went to the scene, making "small but beautiful" micro-short ensembles such as "Super Nice Conference" and "Escape from the City Plan", shortening the path between celebrity hipsters and goods. Among them, the girlfriend travel variety show "Because It's a Friend", jointly produced by Douyin and Emperor Entertainment, in addition to launching 12 episodes of the program, also organized two live broadcasts with goods on the Douyin platform, attracting 5 million views, selling 147,000 products, and selling a total of nearly 20 million.
In addition, compared with the restraint in the stage implantation of the Spring Festival Gala, variety shows obviously give Internet brands more room for implantation. Through the construction of characters, scenes and plots in variety shows, Internet companies can further amplify the brand effect and connect potential consumers. In the "Annual Comedy Competition", the guests combined the sponsorship brand JD.com with the content of the program, which not only created unexpected laughs for the audience, but also made the brand impression of JD.com more deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.
With the decline of traffic dividends, Internet companies are more inclined to communicate deeply with different vertical users to enhance the mental influence and wallet share of each layer of users. Therefore, compared with the "family-friendly" Spring Festival Gala, variety shows obviously have more accurate crowd positioning, which can help traffic platforms better connect with consumers. The emotional social reality show "90 Marriage Agency 2022" focuses on the workers of the post-90s big factories, which is also a high-quality target user of JD.com. After naming this show, JD.com bound CP Super Sweet with the concept of visiting JD Super Sweet, allowing the audience to change the stereotype of JD.com while getting the same good thing, and further expanding user coverage.
In the past few years, Internet giants have built a huge and diversified ecosystem, video websites, e-commerce, offline retail, etc. often "group battle" to guide and undertake the traffic of variety shows, with the help of variety show IP industrialization to promote industry growth. "This! Backed by Alibaba's ecology, Street Dance has linked up with Aliyu, Koi Naqu, Tmall, Ele.me, Hema and other businesses under Alibaba, and carried out all-round cooperation in new retail and other fields. Since 2018, "Street Dance" has launched more than 1,000 derivatives and sold them online and offline with the help of Alibaba, with a cumulative transaction amount of more than 800 million.
Luo Zhenyu, a former producer of CCTV, once said: "We don't know anything about the power of the Spring Festival Gala. "Indeed, being able to bring 1.4 billion viewers in front of a television at the same time is something that no program, including the World Cup or the Olympics, can do. But for Internet companies, choosing the right time to cooperate with the Spring Festival Gala may be more important than winning the cooperation itself. After bidding farewell to the reckless era of traffic, the Spring Festival Gala red envelope may withdraw, but for Internet companies, finding the next "Spring Festival Gala Red Envelope" is always an important issue for them to solve.