Text: Chen Shoucheng
Editor: Principal
Liu Qiangdong's live broadcast debut has become a major event in the industry recently.
At 6:18 p.m. on April 16, Liu Qiangdong landed in the live broadcast room of Jingdong Supermarket and Jingdong Home Appliances in the form of a digital person, with more than 20 million views in the one-hour live broadcast room and more than 50 million yuan in sales of the entire live broadcast, which is already comparable to the first-line head anchor.
Judging from the data, this live broadcast debut can not be described as unsuccessful. Liu Qiangdong's AI clone skillfully completed the borrowing of his own influence, and largely attracted a huge amount of free traffic. Not long ago, JD.com announced that it would invest one billion in cash and one billion in traffic as rewards to attract more original creators and high-quality content institutions to settle in. The live broadcast debut of AI digital human Liu Qiangdong obviously has the meaning of "taking the lead and building momentum first" for JD.com's content e-commerce strategy.
Once upon a time, the way to alleviate traffic hunger was to cooperate with various forms of content, such as buying traffic on content platforms or naming long-form video programs. However, the times have changed, and the e-commerce of content platforms has been so smooth, making waves again in the already stable e-commerce pattern.
Under the pressure of competitors step by step, the traditional shelf e-commerce platform must get out of the comfort zone and path dependence, and contentization has become an unavoidable trend. A business case like "Purchasing and Selling Dongge" is just one of the solutions for traditional e-commerce platforms to alleviate traffic anxiety.
Entrepreneur live broadcast, can it be copied?
The live broadcast of AI digital human Liu Qiangdong is a good move.
Once, JD.com's live broadcast e-commerce strategy chose Luo Yonghao as the starter. However, the "first generation of Internet celebrities" that made Douyin e-commerce an instant hit can no longer attract the attention of a large number of new users again and again, and live e-commerce is no longer an undeveloped land as it used to be. Luo Yonghao's live broadcast debut, the effect is not bad, but it can only be said to be a beginning of Jingdong.
On external platforms, the interests of super anchors are basically bound to the platform. Among the remaining top anchors, Taobao "basically talked about all the Internet celebrities you can think of". For JD.com, it is better to seek others than to seek oneself. It's time to move out of your own most influential and appealing founder.
Hedgehog Commune (ID: ciweigongshe) has analyzed in a previous article "Super Anchors, Collectively Tired" that the development of underlying technology will promote changes in the industry, and AI digital humans have reached a glimmer of possibility for super anchors to liberate themselves and gain freedom. Although Liu Qiangdong is not a super anchor, he is JD.com's super IP, and the AI digital human can allow him to make the most of his topicality without having to appear in person, and build momentum for JD.com's content strategy.
In the end, the sales performance of 50 million yuan really proved the gold content of Liu Qiangdong's three words.
In the future, can Dongge continue to replicate the success of the debut?
The case for reference is that in the past, every entrepreneur's live broadcast could bring corresponding topics and achievements. For example, Liang Jianzhang's Douyin live broadcast in exchange for Ctrip's performance growth, Dong Mingzhu's Jingdong live broadcast brought 700 million sales, Li Guoqing's live broadcast of wine sales ushered in the second spring of his career, and Yu Minhong's Douyin entrepreneurship made Dongfang Selection start, etc.
However, except for Li Guoqing, an entrepreneur who has lost his own business, few of the above people can stay in the live broadcast room, and due to the busy affairs of the company itself, they cannot complete the identity transformation from entrepreneur to anchor. On the other hand, although the personality charm of the entrepreneur itself can attract the attention of a large number of users, the personality traits displayed by him may not be completely consistent with the identity of "anchor".
Live broadcast, in the end, can only become their special marketing event at some special time points, similar to the logic of Lei Jun's appearance in Xiaomi's live broadcast room at some point in time to interact with fans.
Jingdong is obviously aware of this, so it did not let Liu Qiangdong himself come out to stand on the platform at the beginning, but directly let the "Procurement and Marketing Dongge" appear, this is a "Liu Qiangdong" who is closer to the identity of the anchor, and can be stationed in the live broadcast room for a long time in the future.
Of course, Liu Qiangdong's debut brought a lot of topicality to this live broadcast. When the freshness of the audience passes, can the AI digital human continue to have such a dazzling performance?
In terms of trust and price power, Liu Qiangdong and JD.com behind him have certain advantages, in addition, JD.com also has a strong ability to fulfill the contract. Whether Dongge can continue to make efforts depends on whether the underlying technology behind it can continue to innovate, and on the other hand, it depends on whether JD's content capabilities can continue to evolve.
The traffic hunger of e-commerce platforms
"Liu Qiangdong" fights so hard, to a certain extent, because competitors work too hard.
In the past few years, the biggest change in the e-commerce industry has not come from the already stable Big Three, but from the challenge of new forces. The path to e-commerce for content platforms is so smooth that almost all content platform companies in China can transform into e-commerce companies. The leaders are Douyin and Kuaishou, followed by Bilibili and Xiaohongshu.
According to the forecast data of the Network Economic Agency, the scale of China's live broadcast e-commerce transactions will reach 4,565.7 billion yuan in 2023, an increase of 1,065.7 billion yuan compared with last year, a year-on-year increase of about 30%. A corresponding data is that the national online retail sales in 2023 will be 15.42 trillion yuan, an increase of 1.63 trillion yuan compared with last year, a year-on-year increase of 11%.
At the same time, the financial report data released by Kuaishou shows that the annual GMV of Kuaishou e-commerce in 2023 has reached 1.18 trillion yuan. According to a later report, the GMV target of Douyin e-commerce in 2023 is 2.3 trillion yuan. In addition, both Bilibili and Xiaohongshu's e-commerce business have grown accordingly.
Almost all of the increments come from live e-commerce, which is not a good signal for shelf e-commerce platforms.
In the past logic, shelf e-commerce platforms and content platforms are complementary relationships. The latter is an important place for the former to purchase traffic, and the former is the revenue path of the latter. Li Jiaqi's live broadcast needs to go to Douyin to put a large number of slices, and Station B will hold a party, and it also needs the title of Taobao Jingdong Pinduoduo.
Today, some things remain the same, but others do. The link of planting grass and closing within the content platform has been opened, so that the e-commerce platform has added strong competitors, and the efficiency of purchasing traffic has also become low. Because no matter what kind of product it is, it is likely to face equal competition from within the content platform. Even more extreme is the disappearance of the concept of the "Internet": content platforms directly block external links, making competition fierce.
In the last generation of the e-commerce war, vertical e-commerce platforms eventually lost to integrated e-commerce platforms, one of the reasons is that vertical e-commerce platforms cannot afford to pay high purchase costs, and cannot dilute the purchase cost through a large number of goods. Nowadays, in the face of content e-commerce platforms, integrated shelf e-commerce platforms must face the "traffic war" again. The latter can easily get a large amount of free traffic, while the cost of buying traffic for the former is increasing invisibly.
It is better to seek others than to seek oneself, and blood transfusion is not as good as hematopoiesis. By building its own content ecosystem, it can not only obtain traffic at a lower cost, but also form a self-circulation of internal traffic. Theoretically, this is the optimal solution for the current shelf e-commerce platform, and it is also the only way to resolve the traffic dilemma.
However, the word "content" is fairly easy for the content platform itself. How difficult is it for e-commerce platforms, and how much effort does a shelf e-commerce platform have to put in in order to build a real content ecosystem?
E-commerce platforms do content: throwing money, poaching people, and restructuring
Before the live broadcast of "Purchasing and Selling Dongge", JD.com announced that it would invest one billion cash and one billion traffic as rewards to attract more original creators and high-quality content institutions to settle in.
Before JD.com's billion-dollar handwriting, Taobao announced at its annual content e-commerce ceremony that it would increase investment in content e-commerce with an additional 10 billion cash and 100 billion traffic. At the scene, Dao Fang, general manager of the content e-commerce division of Taotian Group, also made bold statements: the user scale increased by 100% year-on-year, the monthly transaction exceeded one million anchors increased by 100% year-on-year, and GMV increased by 80% year-on-year.
Taobao's efforts in live broadcast e-commerce are earlier than JD.com, and the exploration of content is also earlier. In the past few years, Taobao has made many big moves, but it is nothing more than throwing money and poaching people. At this year's content ceremony, Daofang also told all the media present, including the Hedgehog Commune: "Basically, we have talked about all the Internet celebrities you can think of. ”
Reflected in the specific cases of the past two years, Taobao has invited a large number of celebrity Internet celebrities to enter the Taobao live broadcast in a steady stream, so that Internet celebrities with their own content value can attract some free traffic, and at the same time help a group of content Internet celebrities with content capabilities but lack supply chain energy to complete the commercialization test in Taobao and so on. The list here includes Yili Xiaoshazi, Li Dan, Moon Thief Society, TVB, etc., and the list is still growing.
The relevant person in charge of Taobao Live once said that Taobao Live does hope that there will be more external people with content attributes, and institutions and anchors with such a foundation can join Taobao Live to complement each other and explore a new way suitable for taking into account the content attributes and selling attributes in the Tao system. For now, it seems that this strategy is still continuing.
In the media group interview after the content e-commerce ceremony, Daofang also said that Taobao fully embraced content last year and opened up the test of all content types, and found that the effect of non-human content in information and film and television clips was limited, and although users retained pure content, it could not bring back visits. Therefore, Taobao's content eventually shrank to the positioning of "content community with people", and only the life consumption content set by real people can bring valuable e-commerce attributes.
Of course, from the end of last year to now, the biggest change within Taobao Live is the adjustment and reorganization of the organizational structure. In December last year, Taotian Group merged the shopping team with Taobao Live to form the Taobao Content E-commerce Division, led by Daofang. For the first time, Taotian's live broadcast, short video, and graphics and text have been opened, and this new department has also undertaken the goal of enriching the ecology with content-based means, and in this way, it has improved DAU and DAC, and driven Taotian's GMV growth.
Before the merger, shopping and planting grass and Taobao live broadcast are two independent paths, and there is a threshold for undertaking conversion, Daofang believes that now after the merger of the two teams, the transaction path is shorter, and after planting grass from shopping content, you can directly link Taobao live to place an order and make a transaction. That is, short video water storage and live broadcast recall.
Investing resources to bet on content is a common choice for Taobao and JD.com. An interesting fact is that in the current process of change in the e-commerce industry, the battle between B2C and C2C, vertical e-commerce platform and integrated e-commerce platform no longer exists. Everyone in the industry is all about content.
Who can win at this stage, and who can really build a systematic content ecology, may only be left to time to verify.