Text |Yi Yu
EdPrincipal
On December 1, 2023, Tencent News celebrated its 20th birthday.
For an information platform, it has gone through 20 years of turbulence and change in the media industry, but for a mature Internet product, it has just bid farewell to adolescence, just like a young man who accepts the "best gift", and will face a more complex and vast world.
One summer 20 years ago, Tencent's ** department was established, and the editing center was set up in Beijing. Three months later, ** internal test, on December 1, Tencent.com was officially launched. At that time, it was still an era dominated by traditional content elites, and the news portal** carried a huge imagination for the exploration of new content in the future.
Tencent poached Liu Shengyi, a legend in the advertising industry, responsible for the network**, advertising and group brand business, and found traditional ** people such as Chen Juhong in terms of content, and since then, the team has continued to expand, absorbing many traditional news talents to join, and launched "Prism", "Everyone", "Gu Yu" and other long-term content **IP, as well as "Thirteen Invitations", "Talking to Strangers" and other high-quality ** columns.
2012 is the year of the establishment of "Everybody", and it is also the year when the Toutiao app was launched. Almost all innovations in the Internet world are disruptive, and they often emerge from the edge and emerge from the negligible market.
Around 2015, a drastic change was brewed in the field of information distribution based on a new technical base, and the application of recommendation algorithms gave birth to a new era. From 2019 to 2022, Tencent News has entered a new era - the era of "human-machine collaboration", introducing algorithms and transforming its business.
However, the intervention of new technologies has brought the value ranking of the content industry into a fuzzy area, and headlines, sensationalism and fragmented content are more likely to have the upper hand in traffic, which has also led to a gradual imbalance in the balance of influence and attention.
Before this 20-year-old "** ceremony", Tencent News had just undergone a 500-day adjustment, reform and rebirth, and now Tencent News has finally explored a path of high-quality content and commercial self-consistency, and provided a reference sample for the industry.
As He Yijin, the head of Tencent News, said, Tencent News is committed to confronting and recording the ever-changing time.
In his book The Life Cycle of the Enterprise, Ichak Edison wrote: "In the life cycle of a business, the regeneration of the enterprise is a painful process, and entrepreneurs often find themselves faced with challenges in three areas: the delegation of authority, the change of leadership style, and the replacement of corporate goals. ”
This passage of Edison is a portrayal of Tencent News at that time.
The hands of time point to the summer of 2022. He Yijin recalled the chaos of the information industry at that time, and the effect of bad money driving out good money in the traffic field was significant.
In the era of "traffic is king", such a problem is quite common, and Tencent News resorted to tools to solve the problem by improving the performance of recommendation algorithms and upgrading data tools. He Yijin believes that it is far from enough to rely on the means of lack of value rationality, and if the indicators are used as the yardstick, what will be destroyed will be the thinking ability and aesthetic ability of human beings.
So what kind of content should a news client provide to its users?This question has always run through He Yijin's thinking, judgment and concrete actions every day.
He Yijin, head of Tencent News丨Source: Tencent Finance***In the process of interviewing many users, he found that most people naturally reject inferior content and regret the immersive consumption of meaningless content. In order not to make users feel that they are wasting time, Tencent News typed "".Increase the value density per unit timeThe concept of "".
The action is broadly divided into three parts: cutting out low-quality content, adding high-quality content, and optimizing the product experience.
In 2022, Tencent News has cleaned up 85% of low-quality content. This year, through MCN governance, the clean-up efforts have been increased to 95%. At the same time, Tencent News co-created content with academics, technical experts, entrepreneurs and directors, adding 17% of high-quality content.
Such a bold and direct "subtraction movement" has made many users feel Tencent News' determination to provide high-quality content. A heavy user of Tencent News said: "In the past year or so, Tencent News has reduced a lot of invalid information, and achieved 'less is more'. This elevates the tone as a whole and creates a professional and reliable image. ”
In addition, in terms of product experience, Tencent News has also made certain upgrades. In addition to allowing users to obtain effective content in a timely manner through morning and evening newspapers, night reading, second understanding, 7x24 news, and selected channels, Tencent News has also strengthened the Q&A function. So far, more than 1,800 respondents on the platform have interpreted 3,000+ hot events for users.
Correspondingly, after the content and product optimization, the evaluation system also needs to be reshaped. Tencent News has reduced the assessment of click-through rate, consumption and other indicators, and focused on the dimensions of long-term value, such as information concentration and sense of value.
After 500 days, Tencent News has not only achieved the bottom of the click-through rate**, but also accumulated product reputation for high-quality information, and most importantly, the above achievements are based on commercial self-consistency.
In the summer of 2023, Tencent News held a fan festival of high-quality content with the theme of "Sea of Possibilities" in Aranya.
And this waterway is guided by public value and guided by high-quality content. In other words, at a time when brainless short dramas are rampant, Tencent News has chosen another path in the era of traffic and does difficult but correct things.
Of course, this road may be difficult to walk, but the scenery on the top of the mountain is also destined to be extraordinary, after the reform of high-quality products, the content of Tencent News more and more reflects the characteristics of attracting like-minded people and matching the best value customer groups.
Taking the widely acclaimed humanities talk show "Thirteen Invitations" as an example, many viewers remembered the car brand Volvo from this program and were deeply impressed by Volvo's brand slogan "Only love and life cannot be disappointed".
The audience of "Thirteen Invitations" once questioned on social ** that a show can actually plant a consumable product with a high unit price such as a grass car, which shows the influence of content on the brand's mind.
Thirteen Invitations" audience comments丨Image source Xiaohongshu These are all thanks to the adaptation of the user circle of "Thirteen Invitations" to Volvo's consumers, and the cultural style conveyed in the program - "finding a sense of security in uncertainty, and constantly exploring the meaning of life" coincides with the concept that the brand wants to express, and the brand can logically transform the content mind into the brand mind.
Therefore, business news and high-quality content have a natural adaptability, which can provide brands with richer and more targeted marketing value to hit the precise customer group.
In addition to "Thirteen Invitations", Tencent News continues to output high-quality content, and co-creates high-quality program IPs with brands, such as "My Bronze Age" and "Because of the Study", etc., to achieve empathy and goodwill for the brand through users' recognition of content products.
After the launch of "My Bronze Age", the volume of Volkswagen Lanjing Auto's social ** increased by six times month-on-month, and the number of "Lanjing Life" theme salon** customized by Tencent News exceeded 300,000, and the interaction brought by KOL second creation content also increased significantly.
What's more worth mentioning is that with the cooperation of Tencent, the Forbidden City and the Agricultural Bank of China, the exhibition documentary "Because of the Study" and the Forbidden City exhibition have also become a major cultural event in 2022, detonating all channels, with a cumulative event of more than 1 billion.
Because of the study" was simultaneously broadcast by Tencent News in conjunction with the official Weibo and ** account of the Palace Museum, and the total number of ** on the whole network has reached 600 million so far. For the brand owner, Agricultural Bank of China, it has opened up a new idea of customized content marketing with product and effect synergy.
Because of the study" screenshot丨Source: Tencent News***In addition to co-creating high-quality content with brands, Tencent News also has the ability to innovate and customize the marketing demands of brands, providing diversified and more creative solutions to business narratives.
For example, Tencent News customized the rainforest documentary "Elephant Hunting" for Huawei Mate 50 series, which was filmed with a mobile phone, recording the survival status of wild Asian elephants from the perspective of news documentary.
To sum up, Tencent News has created a fertile ground for establishing brand recognition and helping marketing goals with a professional content production team and a strong content production mechanism.
From the annual case to the out-of-the-circle event, Tencent News has not only found a self-consistent business model, but also has the greater advantage of allowing two-way in-depth communication between users and brands, which is also the value advocated by the "Heartdomain Marketing" party.
In the era of stock competition, the "heart domain" is an important communication field for global marketing, and Tencent News' rich content field has formed its unique value barrier, enabling it to empower the influence of the brand with the influence of content.
Influence is first composed of user value and social value, and Xinyu marketing is a channel to convey these two values to the brand, connecting the brand with a wider range of consumers.
In other words, Tencent News injects emotional identity value into users with the left hand to empower the brand's private domain, and the right hand injects a certain social value into the brand, enriching the brand's information thickness in both the public and private domains as much as possible. For example, Tencent News' documentary "Dunhuang Master", which focuses on the inheritance of Dunhuang craftsmanship, is a commercial example of the integration of the two.
As a "luxury" company in China, Moutai has an enviable high gross profit and brand premium, thanks to the shaping of brand power, the brand has become a symbol, and the goods also have cultural attributes. Dunhuang is not only a city in the geographical sense, but also a spiritual coordinate and cultural highland.
So "Dunhuang **" joined hands with Kweichow Moutai and aimed the camera at the guardians of Dunhuang who stuck to the depths of the desert, and cut into the grand narrative of Dunhuang from the perspective of master-apprentice relationship, so that users have a further understanding of the ingenuity and inheritance spirit that the Moutai brand is integrated into.
Image source Tencent Advertising *** Dunhuang Master is the first time that Kweichow Moutai participated in the content production of the Internet platform, the program is based on the Moutai Double Flying Trademark and the Mogao Grottoes Cave 321 Double Flying Sky as the prototype, the second creation of the virtual Flying Fairy, with anthropomorphic dubbing, tells the past story of Mogao Grottoes, Dunhuang Academy and the guardian, this new audio-visual technology also gives new life connotation to traditional culture, and also makes the brand image "vivid".
For a mature enterprise like Moutai, occupying the minds of users is no longer the pursuit, and it is the manifestation of corporate long-termism and brand power to continue to strengthen the minds of users with the value density of content and bind the brand image and social responsibility more closely.
In 2023, the best battles in various industries will rise one after another, and e-commerce platforms will fight from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.
From the perspective of the brand, low price is the "black hole" of operation, blindly seeking low price in exchange for the market share and the scale effect created is not long-lasting, there will always be imitators to challenge the bottom line, such a result will undoubtedly make more brands fall into the trap of "quality for quantity" in operation.
To jump out of the violence, we need to sort out the truth of the market and find a pragmatic and sustainable response. Most importantly, brand building needs to be strengthened.
In recent years, countless facts and cases have verified that the grass planting behavior of the shop volume cannot really exchange for the loyalty of users to the brand or product, and the brand pays more attention to the effect transformation of ROI, pays more attention to the quantifiable return, spends the budget on the blade, and the investment market gradually returns to a rational trend.
For brand building, the style and spiritual characteristics of a brand or product are the basis of consumer communication, which can differentiate its concept and selling point. At this time, if you can tell a good brand story, you can not only convey the brand value, but also feed back the marketing conversion. And this ability to synergize quality and efficiency will eventually become the confidence for the brand to jump out of the battle.
Therefore, telling a good brand story is the first and key step in global marketing.
Not only that, Tencent News is backed by Tencent's tree, and brands can also find full life cycle operations in Tencent's ecosystem to achieve steady growth.