After 40 minutes of broadcasting, more than 20 million people watched, and AI "Liu Qiangdong" didn't want to be Li Jiaqi
This is the Daily People column, "Frontline", where we want to capture the important and potentially far-reaching slices of the complex business world.
At 6:18 p.m. on April 16, Liu Qiangdong, chairman of the board of directors of Jingdong Group, officially started the live broadcast. This sudden move made many people confused: "Why did "Liu Qiangdong" announce bringing goods at this time? Does JD.com, which does not have a super head anchor, want to make "Liu Qiangdong" the first brother of JD.com? Will consumers really pay for digital human anchors?
(Previous portals: Haidilao let go of the franchise, Hema crazy price cut, county milk tea battle royale, Ali big change handing in, Huawei sneak attack on Apple)
Text | Chang Fangfei
Edit | Shinno
Operations | Puffs
Doppelganger "Liu Qiangdong"
"Liu Qiangdong", who returned to the center of the stage, chose to sit in front of the camera in the live broadcast room this time.
His appearance was quite grand. In order to pave the way for the "boss", the real Jingdong procurement and sales anchor talked about the products in advance, because he was too nervous, and some people read the wrong price. At 6:18 p.m. on April 16, all the people in the live broadcast room were clamoring, "Three-two-one, welcome Dongge Digital People". In the next second, Liu Qiangdong's digital clone, "Brother Dong", appeared in the live broadcast room of Jingdong Supermarket and Jingdong Home Appliances at the same time.
The No. 1 live broadcast debut, even if it only appeared in the form of a digital human for just 40 minutes, JD.com was also waiting for it. People close to JD.com revealed that the whole project is moving forward quickly, and "other work has to make way for it". Previously, there was almost no precedent for founders to use digital human live streaming to bring goods, which was a big test for JD Technology and the retail team, and each department was cautious, for fear that something would go wrong in a certain link, "it will be fired directly".
The arrival of "Liu Qiangdong" quickly boosted the popularity of the two live broadcast rooms. About 20 minutes after the broadcast, the number of viewers in the live broadcast room of Jingdong Supermarket and Jingdong Home Appliances quickly jumped from two or three million to 10 million.
It's just that in more than 40 minutes, compared to the real anchor and the audience, you ask me and answer, "Procurement and Marketing Dongge" is more like a one-way product introduction. The timbre, image, and body movements of the digital human are close to Liu Qiangdong himself, perhaps for the sake of the safety of the debut, the digital human anchor did not interact with the barrage throughout the whole process, but the purpose of bringing the goods was still achieved - the eye beef steak and yogurt were sold out quickly, although the specific sales volume was not marked.
▲ The live broadcast room of "Purchasing and Selling Dongge". Photo / The Paper
Compared with bringing goods, what "Brother Dongge" wants to recommend more is obviously Jingdong Live, which re-uses low prices as a sharp blade. When introducing agricultural and sideline products, he repeatedly mentioned that "Jingdong is cheap", and when it came to the live broadcast room of home appliances where the unit price of customers climbed to thousands of yuan, he emphasized Jingdong's "super quality-price ratio" and "complete after-sales system".
The low-price strategy really works. Just a month ago, JD.com released its fourth-quarter 2023 earnings report. On the eve of the release, the stock price was also depressed and market expectations, but the final revenue growth of 3.6% proved to a certain extent that JD.com withstood the pressure in the organizational upheaval. After comprehensively promoting the low-price strategy, JD.com reduced merchants' commissions and service fees, while the revenue of daily necessities, household appliances and electronic products all returned to growth. An insider said in an interview that JD.com is regaining the advantage of the 3C category, and the growth rate of GMV on Double 11 is "approaching double digits".
Behind the live broadcast of "Purchasing and Selling Dongge" is still JD.com's desire to promote the low-price strategy and make up for the shortcomings of the live broadcast. A complete live broadcast ecological model requires three parts: the head talent, the waist MCN organization, and the store self-broadcast. For JD.com, almost all three parts have challenges.
In the past few years, the super head anchor has continued to refresh the record of bringing goods - Li Jiaqi is firmly at the top of Taobao, Crazy Brother Yang once had no opponent in Douyin, and Jingdong, as one of the e-commerce platforms, has not found its own head anchor except for Jingdong procurement and sales.
After the "small composition incident", Dong Yuhui repeatedly emphasized that he had not contacted other companies, but the news of JD.com's poaching still came out from time to time. At the beginning of this year, a person familiar with the matter revealed that JD.com held several small-scale meetings to explore the feasibility of recruiting Dong Yuhui. In the live broadcast room of home appliances, the slogan "Jingdong Travel, Walk with Hui" was even played. It is difficult to poach, and JD.com has already started a plan to support new anchors, providing high-commission goods and traffic weight support for talents who premiered after March 1 last year.
Some analysts believe that the live broadcast of "Procurement and Sales Dongge" is to solve the problem that Jingdong does not have over-the-top anchors. But people close to JD.com gave another answer - in order to help support merchants to broadcast themselves.
In JD.com's description, this AI solution can greatly reduce the threshold for merchants to start broadcasting. Before the broadcast, as long as the merchant imports the product link, JD Yunyanxi digital human can immediately remember all the selling points and details, and generate a script for bringing goods through the large model, which is "completely foolish".
Before the end of "Liu Qiangdong" this time, JD.com had already tested the waters of digital people in its own App. According to JD.com's official data, during the Spring Festival this year, Yanxi digital people have a cumulative GMV of more than 40 million yuan. And the purpose of the live broadcast of "Liu Qiangdong" this time is more like an endorsement for this digital person, "to let merchants and brands see how realistic AI is".
▲ Yanxi Digital Human has launched a service package during the Spring Festival this year, in addition to a fixed service fee of 19,800 yuan for three months, it is also necessary to take a commission on GMV. Photo/JD Cloud official
The big guys who have returned to the front line have their own troubles
In reality, Liu Qiangdong's return to the front line dates back to the end of 2022.
Faced with the unfavorable situation that JD.com was in at that time, Liu Qiangdong quickly did three things: pointed out the problem, adjusted the structure, and emphasized the low-price strategy. At an internal meeting, he angrily reprimanded a part of JD.com's retail department for "fooling themselves with PPT and fake empty words".
For founders, it's not enough to be aware of the problem, it's also about being able to turn the tide. It is Liu Qiangdong's will to regain the advantage of low prices. He believes that Wal-Mart's success is due to the fact that "the gross profit is lower than that of the mom-and-pop store". JD.com is also known for its low-priced goods and high-quality services, and if it wants to survive in today's competitive environment, it must take back its former advantages.
The pressure of business growth has also brought Jack Ma back to the center stage.
A week ago, as the founder of Alibaba, he posted an article on the company's intranet under the nickname "Feng Qingyang" to summarize the past year. He praised a series of changes by Tsai Chongxin and Wu Yongming, and believed that Alibaba's biggest change was "not to chase KPIs, but to recognize himself."
For Alibaba, "recognizing yourself" means focusing on its core business – Taotian Group and Alibaba Cloud, which are directly managed by CEO Wu Yongming. The top management has prescribed a "prescription" for non-core businesses, including new retail: each divest and bear its own profits and losses. At the earnings conference, Tsai Chongxin revealed that Alibaba's asset management committee already has a special team responsible for capital market transactions. In the last nine months of 2023, it has exited $1.7 billion in non-core assets, and will exit traditional brick-and-mortar retail businesses in the future.
According to Caixin, after Jack Ma's post, there was a statement that pointed directly to the strategic vacillation of the current management in the past year. Ma hopes that employees will give concrete examples, while explaining: "If it was easy to make up your mind in the past year, it was not reform. Any decision affects the interests and efforts of hundreds of thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands of customers, and any reform must be made with determination, responsibility and reverence. ”
This unshakable determination comes from the sense of urgency to be chased and surpassed by those who come after it. According to the financial report, Pinduoduo's revenue in the fourth quarter of 2023 will be close to 88.9 billion yuan, which is close to 6% of Ali's e-commerce revenue in terms of numbers alone, and the growth rate is still not slowing down. The user's pursuit of low prices caught JD.com, which once said in the KPI to increase the unit price of customers, and Ali, which has been focusing on consumption upgrading for many years, were somewhat caught off guard.
The day before the digital person "Liu Qiangdong" was launched, Baidu CEO Robin Li's body also walked into the live broadcast room, in order to give Jiyue and CEO Xia Yiping a platform. According to the first financial report, Xia Yiping was personally responsible for Jiyue marketing, and the first thing he did after taking office was to pull Robin Li and become an anchor.
▲ Robin Li's live broadcast experience is extremely more than 01. Picture / Screenshot of Jiyue live broadcast
Not long ago, Robin Li updated his annual OKR for 2024, and the keyword is directly to make money. The word "profit" appears in the two goals of mobile ecology and intelligent cloud, and 5 of the 7 key achievements have profit assessments, including content, cloud computing, big health, personal cloud, and Xiaodu.
The sense of urgency behind this may be glimpsed in the earnings report. In the earnings call, Robin Li revealed that the AI model, which is at the absolute core of the strategy, has brought more than 600 million yuan in revenue to the cloud business.
But there was little to no boost in the core advertising business. This was once the sexiest part of Baidu's AI story, after all, overseas advertising giants Google and Meta have already tasted the sweetness of advertising revenue increase. However, the "22% increase in conversion rate" was not reflected in Baidu's revenue growth, and Robin Li must have been quite anxious.
How else can live broadcast be rolled
Turning his attention back to the live broadcast track, According to people familiar with the matter, as early as 2022, JD.com began to purchase technical solutions for digital humans.
To put it simply, a digital human anchor is a virtual anchor based on AI technology, and the large model restores the image, expression, and voice of a real person by learning portrait video, voice, and speech, and finally achieves a state that is infinitely close to a real person. The digital human live broadcast is a batch delivery model for this type of anchor to replace the real anchor.
It seems that this is a more "sexy" way to live stream. All you need is a table, a computer, and you can broadcast live 24/7. Wang Yifan is one of the first people to start a digital human live broadcast business, and it has been three years since he entered this track, and at the peak of his career, the trained digital people were broadcast in 483 live broadcast rooms at the same time, and the net profit of each live broadcast room was at least hundreds of yuan per day.
But generally speaking, the GMV of digital anchors is not high. Compared with more interactive live anchors, digital human anchors are more like simple shelf sales, which "can only attract users who place orders silently".
Despite this, the advent of digital anchors has greatly reduced the operating costs of live streaming. Wang Yifan revealed that in addition to the cost of computing power, there is almost no investment, and "one operator can be responsible for 20 digital live broadcast rooms at the same time". Every team that enters the live broadcast must calculate an account: the technical customization fee of the digital human anchor is only 8,000 yuan to 10,000 yuan. The live broadcast room needs to be equipped with a team of at least five people, even if it is a waist team, the annual labor cost is close to one million, and you can "save 90%" by choosing a digital human anchor.
And the reason behind this is that live streaming e-commerce is becoming more and more "volume", and one of the most obvious features is that the cost of traffic is becoming higher and higher.
As the platform's algorithms and streaming tools become more and more mature, merchants, whether it is streaming action, customer acquisition cost, or ROI on the merchant side, can be calculated clearly. In the past year, many friends around Wang Yifan who are brands can still reach millions of yuan in GMV of single-day live broadcasts, but after careful calculation, "the cost of streaming alone accounts for nearly 80%".
To add insult to injury, starting in 2023, almost all e-commerce platforms will take "price power" as the highest priority indicator. In addition to content, operation, and streaming capabilities, merchants must also compete with merchants in the same category for absolute low prices, which can even directly determine the recommended direction of platform traffic.
▲ Live e-commerce is becoming more and more "volume". Photo / Visual China
Douyin's traffic black box is like a treasure, and all merchants and anchors hope to find the key to open it. But every few months, the platform changes a new set of passwords, and everyone has to re-decipher them. In April last year, Douyin replaced the GMV (GPM) metric of 1,000 impressions in traffic recommendations with the number of orders (OPM). And this year, Douyin has re-established its strategy of price power - which means that Douyin, like all e-commerce platforms, has rolled up the "lowest price on the whole network". A brand operator revealed in an interview that the price of products of the same brand should be compared with those outside the site, while the price of unbranded products should be compared with those of the whole network.
In addition, Douyin's traffic distribution mechanism is quite complex, and the indicators that affect traffic distribution are not only price, but also exposure entry rate, dwell time, interaction rate, product click conversion rate, and so on.
In addition to businesses, from overheads to first-line anchors, they have also gradually faded out of the live broadcast room by reducing the duration and frequency of live broadcasts. In addition to enduring physical fatigue and psychological pressure, anchors also have a deeper feeling that "traffic is difficult to master, and GMV is even more difficult to complete". The merchant volume, the platform volume, the anchor is in it, and he can be the first to feel the ups and downs of traffic, and not every live broadcast carefully prepared by the anchor can win the GMV as he wishes.
Almost every practitioner in the middle of it has to anxiously look for the next point of growth.
(At the request of the interviewee, Wang Yifan is a pseudonym.) ）
Resources:
1. Ali retreated, Caixin Weekly
2, Liu Qiangdong has never left, Tiger sniffs the network
3. Baidu 2024 OKR: Robin Li wants to catch up with two late sets, Photon Planet
4. From 2024 onwards, Douyin e-commerce will only have three categories of goods, and these 87 categories will be absolutely low-priced
The article is the original work of Daily People, and infringement must be investigated.