There is no more "money printing machine"! Agents of major Internet manufacturers have reached a fork in the road: transforming cloud services and catching up with large models

Source of this article: Times Finance Author: Xu Xiaoqian

Source: pixabay

The agents of large factories that once supported Internet search advertising are gradually fading out of the Internet stage. They are either gradually withdrawing or seeking to transform.

Recently, it was reported that Changzhou Qingzhifeng Network Technology Co., Ltd., the largest general representative of a large search factory in Jiangsu, went bankrupt. According to the company's official website, Qingzhifeng Network Technology Co., Ltd. is a high-tech company mainly operated by Qingfeng Network Group in Jiangsu, specializing in website production, network marketing planning, software development and other services, and is a marketing service center of a large factory in Changzhou, Taizhou, Lianyungang and Yangzhou. At its peak, the company had hundreds of employees.

The latest video of Qingzhifeng's official account on Douyin stayed at the end of May, and the homepage introduction still shows that it provides services such as bidding, love procurement, and network construction. Under the latest video, some netizens asked about the dissolution of the company, and the company responded that it was just that the big factory did not do the bidding, and other businesses were normal, "If you don't believe it, you can come to the company's headquarters." ”

Times Finance contacted Qingzhifeng's official service hotline, and the other party said that the company is still doing related business. "As long as you pay the money and open an account normally, you can still be promoted on the platform." When it comes to whether the business adjustment will have an impact on subsequent marketing, the other party said that it will not have an impact.

From the tuyere to the fork in the road

Agencies like Ainomine, which used to be all over the place, were like capillaries that supported the rapid development of Internet advertising.

Wuxi Pan Asia is one of the typical representatives. In March 2011, Yan Jianou, general manager of Wuxi Pan Asia, was awarded the "Greatest Performance Contribution Award" by a large factory. The cooperation between Wuxi Pan Asia and the factory lasted from 2003 to 2013, and from 2008 to 2010, it maintained the first place as the general agent for three consecutive years, and then re-joined hands in 2019.

Wuxi Pan Asia has also been favored by the market. In 2016, Shangzhong Online (831916.NEEQ) issued a major asset restructuring report, planning to purchase 100% of the equity of Wuxi Pan Asia for 220 million yuan, of which 9.36 million shares were issued at 20 yuan per share, and 33 million yuan was paid in cash, with an appreciation rate of 788.58%. The company said that the reason for the higher value-added rate is that Wuxi Pan Asia belongs to the Internet marketing and related service industry, which has the characteristics of light assets, and the book value does not fully reflect its future profitability.

The deal was finally finalized in March 2017. At that time, the acquisition also involved a performance VAM. According to the announcement, Wuxi Pan Asia was required to achieve an audited net profit of 15 million yuan, 20 million yuan and 25 million yuan in 2016, 2017 and 2018 respectively.

The head agents snatch the wealth of the sky, and the small and medium-sized agents can also drink the soup during the bonus period.

Wu Lei, who was engaged in agent sales ten years ago, revealed to Times Finance that there is no need to dig out special efforts to expand customers in the early stage, as long as you do a good job of opening an account in the early stage, the demand for subsequent consumption of resources will soon keep up. Wu Lei's agency service provider has annual sales of up to 200 million yuan, thousands of orders, and the monthly income of sales employees with outstanding team performance is about 20,000 yuan.

There is no eternal brilliance. With the advent of the mobile Internet, traffic entrances began to disperse to independent and closed apps, and the advertising reach model changed. The rise of social media is eating into the number of users.

The acquired Wuxi Pan Asia had stable performance at first. According to the annual report of Shangzhong Online, the net profit of Wuxi Pan Asia in 2016 and 2017 was 14.97 million yuan and 20.28 million yuan respectively, accounting for more than 50% of the net profit of Shangzhong Online.

In 2018, the growth of Wuxi Pan Asia began to be sluggish, and profitability failed to continue. In 2018, the company achieved a net profit of 18.93 million yuan, a gap of more than 6 million yuan from the previously promised net profit scale. In the following year, Wuxi Pan Asia fell off a cliff, with a net profit of 5.4421 million yuan, accounting for 20.05% of the online net profit in the business.

Wang Wei did not catch up with the good days of making money in the industry. Three years ago, she joined the sales department of a large factory agent. Wang Wei introduced that the welfare benefits provided by the company are not bad in the industry, and grassroots sales can get nearly 15% of the commission. Employees with good performance will also have a basic salary increase once a quarter.

Even so, she already felt that it was starting to become difficult to sign orders, and some colleagues couldn't open orders for 3 months.

"There are not a few teams in the sales department that have not completed their performance, and even the sales champion cannot open a large order. If you can't make an order and can't think of a new direction for expansion, you may face the risk of being persuaded to quit. Wang Wei told Times Finance that the question they face is no longer "how much to make", but "to optimize or stay".

"Advertisers have more choices, customers are no longer obsessed with choosing a channel, only chemical, material, machinery companies are still relatively stable, they need to achieve the exposure of the company's official website on the website." Wang Wei said.

Where is the road to agent transformation?

Search marketing services are gradually experiencing growth bottlenecks, and agencies that promote their business are starting to pivot.

Pioneer Group (872123. NEEQ) has caught up with the glory days of Internet marketing. In the past two years, Chuangxin Group has tried to break away from a single Internet promotion business and increase the expansion of cloud services and other businesses. In 2016, Chuangxin Group began to register a company and cut into cloud computing-related business, which is regarded as the second curve of enterprise development.

Zhou Bohu, the founder of Chuangxin Group, said in an interview with the media that the company is currently laying out R&D and investment in the field of artificial intelligence, and has cooperated with ChatGPT and Baidu's Wenxin Yiyan to provide enterprises and governments with smarter, more accurate and more effective digital products.

According to financial data, the cloud computing service revenue of Chuangxin Group in 2023 will be 24.16 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 26.58%; Other revenue was 11.32 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 98%. However, digital marketing is still its main source of revenue, with annual revenue of 1.15 billion yuan.

The risk warning of its financial report pointed out that the related business of Chuangxin Group still has a significant dependence on top customers. Changes in the company's relationship with customers will increase the risk of fluctuations in the company's future performance.

Another large factory agency company, Microgrid Tonglian, is also actively transforming. In addition to Internet marketing, WeNetcom has developed vocational education, government digitalization and cloud communication services. According to the 2023 financial report of Micronetwork Tonglian, the revenue of the year was 342 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 14.2%. However, judging from the company's public information, the importance of cloud communication business has been ranked ahead of network marketing.

The once glorious Wuxi Pan Asia did not give up the network marketing promotion business, but put cloud computing and artificial intelligence in a more important position, and the position of network marketing has also shifted from search engines to head short video platforms.

"Search marketing still provides customers with a relatively precise target customer group, and advertisers in traditional industries will choose the previous platform, but they can clearly feel that the user scale is smaller. Short videos can achieve high exposure in a short period of time, but there are cases where the conversion rate is not high. Li Wei, manager of the Internet promotion agency, said to Times Finance.

Times Finance also noticed that the large model boom hit, and some agents also began to turn around and engage in data annotation business in the AI industry. Taiyuan data annotation base is an important layout of Baidu's artificial intelligence construction, and the dense outsourcing companies continue the strategy of sea of people, and they continue to feed AI, so as to achieve the iterative update of artificial intelligence.

Chen Feng is the gold medal sales of advertising agencies in southwest China, and his company is also transforming in the direction of AI, undertaking the sales tasks of the enterprise side of the platform's large model, "The company has begun to pay attention to using AI to do precision marketing for advertisers, and will also find some companies that need AI empowerment and transformation to serve." ”

(Names have been changed.) ）