Dingjiaoone original.
Author |Jin Yufan.
Edit |Wei Jia.
The Spring Festival has always been a super battlefield for Internet companies, and the festive atmosphere of the Spring Festival in the Year of the Dragon in 2024 has revealed the gunpowder smell of Internet giants.
If we zoom out of the camera, we can see the two major battlefields of tension:
The first battlefield is also the largest battlefield of the Spring Festival in the Year of the Dragon - the Spring Festival Gala. This session,The representatives of the money-throwing faction are JD.com and Xiaohongshu.
Jingdong, as an old face who returned to the "stage" of the Spring Festival Gala, won the exclusive interaction right of the Spring Festival Gala with a lot of money. Xiaohongshu, the "newcomer" of the Spring Festival Gala, is also a partner of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, participating in the Spring Festival Gala interaction in the form of notes and live sharing. In addition to direct cooperation, Alipay, which was sent by Ali, was not to be outdone, and upgraded the "Gathering Five Blessings" activity, which was in its eighth year, to the "Five Blessings Festival", trying to attract a wave of Spring Festival traffic and spend a small amount of money to do big things.
Another Spring Festival traffic war took place in the local life service market. In the past, it was Meituan and Ele.me, and this year there is more disruptor Douyin. The three platforms of "Meixing" are representatives of resources and capabilities, all of which claim to subsidize businesses and make profits to users.
The big brother Meituan chose to fight on the three fronts of in-store, home and in-store integrated business at the same time; Ali asked Ele.me to take the lead, preparing for the battle on the two lines of home and store, and "cooperating" with Fliggy and AutoNavi. Douyin avoided the home-to-home scene with higher barriers and focused its firepower on the store.
The Internet circle has not been so lively for a long time.
Compared with the collective absence of major Internet companies from the Spring Festival Gala in 2023, now, those who are deeply anxious about traffic have restarted the Spring Festival traffic competition.
In addition to Alibaba, Meituan, JD.com, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu, there will inevitably be more Internet companies that will take action and not miss any opportunity to increase users and increase activity. After all, at a time when attention is constantly being diverted, the Spring Festival is still the largest traffic entrance of the year, and this marketing field is changing dramatically, it is no longer a battlefield where book investment and actual returns are equal.
In the end, whose Spring Festival account book is more cost-effective? Who will be the top Internet streamer in the Spring Festival in 2024? A big drama is being played.
The biggest battlefield for Spring Festival marketing over the years is the Spring Festival Gala, and this year is no exception. This Spring Festival Gala marketing war is a "shared" traffic cake between the two platforms of Jingdong and Xiaohongshu.
The first to release the news was Xiaohongshu. On January 19, Xiaohongshu announced that it had reached a cooperation with CCTV Spring Festival Gala and became a note-taking and live broadcast sharing platform for the Spring Festival Gala.
Wang He, an Internet operator, analyzed that the sponsorship of the Spring Festival Gala has been carried out for so many years, and it is the first time that Xiaohongshu has seen this kind of cooperation. According to the official statement, Xiaohongshu wants to do a companion live broadcast, on Chinese New Year's Eve, set up a live broadcast room next to the Spring Festival Gala studio, broadcast behind-the-scenes stories, and interact with stars in real time, users can send notes, or go to the live broadcast room to buy the same style of Spring Festival Gala stars.
In Wang He's view, Xiaohongshu participated in the Spring Festival Gala for the first time and chose a cost-effective method. The gameplay of notes + live broadcast is in line with the characteristics of the platform, but the atmosphere of commercialization is also really strong - Xiaohongshu wants to increase user activity and enrich the content ecology through notes**, especiallyDrive the generalization and sinking of the user pool；On the one hand, it allows users to "buy while watching", converts users into consumers, and leverages the platform's e-commerce transactions.
Starting from the current situation of Xiaohongshu, the plan to grasp both content and e-commerce is really urgent. Wang He told Dingjiao that Xiaohongshu, which is frequently rumored to be listed, urgently needs to make efforts to add and retain users, speed up commercialization, and make high valuations.
According to ** report, the number of daily active users on the Xiaohongshu platform exceeded 100 million at the beginning of 2023, and it was originally planned that the scale of daily active users on the platform would increase to 1 by the end of 2023400 million, but the target was not achieved. However, Xiaohongshu did not respond.
Xiaohongshu's abacus is very fine, but the actual effect is still unknown, and the reason is that in addition to the previous reference, JD is the biggest variable.
5 days after Xiaohongshu released the news of its cooperation with the Spring Festival Gala, JD.com officially announced that it would become the exclusive interactive cooperation platform for the 2024 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, and the discussion instantly overshadowed Xiaohongshu, not only because of the exclusive interaction rights obtained by spending a lot of money, but also because the gameplay was quite gimmicky.
Image source Screenshot of JD.com, Xiaohongshu, and Alipay apps.
Jingdong shouted the slogan of "one penny", and will set up the main venue of the Spring Festival Gala on the APP, giving away 100 million physical goods, including large items including cars. The prizes are given out in the form of ** interaction, and users only need to pay a penny. Compared with the traditional gameplay of the previous Spring Festival Gala sponsorship to directly share cash red envelopes,JD.com's gift-giving activity this time has more payment links
Zhou Qian, an Internet person who has participated in the Spring Festival Gala cooperation, said that Jingdong did not use the Spring Festival Gala well two years ago, and the gameplay is too complicated. This "World War II" Spring Festival Gala, Jingdong intends to fully tap the traffic of the Spring Festival Gala, and the gimmick of a penny is also more innovative than red envelopes.
JD.com's intention is to increase e-commerce transactions, more precisely, it hopes to take advantage of the traffic peak of the Spring Festival GalaDivert traffic to the platform and strive for more users in the sinking market who are sensitive to the highest level. However, it is uncertain whether users need to pay for shipping and whether to open JD Pay, etc., and how much users who come to the wool will be retained is even more crucial.
Compared with Ali and Pinduoduo, there is still a gap in the scale of JD's users, and the vast sinking market is the territory where JD's e-commerce business penetration rate is low and the potential for new users is the largest. JD.com's many actions in the past year, including tens of billions of subsidies, low-price mentality, live broadcasts, etc., and now spending money to sponsor the Spring Festival Gala, are all aimed at the sinking market. Combined with the statements of many people, it will cost at least hundreds of millions of yuan to sponsor the Spring Festival Gala.
In addition to the "money-throwing faction" Jingdong and Xiaohongshu have a full sense of existence, there are also Alipay, players under the water. During this year's Spring Festival, Alipay upgraded the "Five Blessings" activity to the "Five Blessings Festival", set up a 500 million prize pool, 300 million red envelopes, and launched AI gameplay.
Although it has no cooperation with CCTV Spring Festival Gala, compared with Jingdong and Xiaohongshu, its biggest advantage is that in the scene of the Spring Festival, it has become an online folk activity with social connotations by exchanging five blessings and winning red envelopes with relatives and friends.
Alipay's "Jiwufu" no longer needs to spend a lot of money to build momentum on the Spring Festival Gala, but the other side of the coin is aesthetic fatigue. Alipay's "Jiwufu" campaign is in its eighth year, and this upgrade also looks like "old wine in new bottles".The cost is not high, but it remains to be seen how much Spring Festival traffic it can attract and how many users it will help Ali exchange for on the social map.
In addition to the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, the first window of traffic competition, the Spring Festival holiday is still the peak consumption season of the year for Chinese people, and the major platforms will naturally not miss this much-watched traffic entrance.
In addition to OTA platforms such as Ctrip, Fliggy, and Tongcheng Travel, in the face of the recovery of the tourism industry, it is more difficult than the Spring Festival in previous years, and what ordinary people are more aware of is the local life war set off by the three major platforms of "Beauty and Hunger".
Local life is one of the most lively of the many subdivisions of the Internet, and this track has been particularly crowded in the past year. From **, takeaway to wine and tourism, and taxis, they have become the main battlefield of competition between Meituan, Douyin and Alibaba. There is still a month before the Spring Festival, and the three major platforms have released big moves one after another.
Domestic Internet platforms make good use of the festival strategy, open these apps, without exception, are pushing Spring Festival activities to users, and they are all holding the banner of "subsidizing businesses and making profits to users". However, after comparison, it is not difficult to find that the three companies have their own focus on competing for festival traffic.
The first to make a move was Meituan, which is also the most high-profile and busiest one. For local life home, store, store integration(Tourism, leisure and entertainment, etc.).In the three major sections, Meituan is a diversion style that is evenly wet with rain and dew.
In terms of home delivery, in addition to Meituan's strong takeaway business, Meituan Flash Sale, Meituan Preferred, and Little Elephant Supermarket (formerly Meituan Grocery), which was upgraded some time ago, all launched the New Year's Festival activities early; In the in-store section, Meituan launched the "Year-end Reunion Night Family Banquet Advance Reservation" area, in addition to the reservation business, it also focuses on **, while tilting the traffic of merchants, it also launches a large number of discounts to users**.
Wine, tourism, entertainment, etc. are also the bulk of Spring Festival consumption, and Meituan's approach to the comprehensive business is to tilt traffic** and subsidy discounts to merchants in popular tourist cities.
Image source Screenshots of Meituan, Douyin, and Ele.me apps.
Compared to Meituan's three arrows,Ele.me focuses more on two sections: home delivery and store arrivalThe online New Year of the Dragon Festival area mainly covers the two major categories of instant retail and catering, and like Meituan, the way is to issue coupons to users and tilt traffic to head brands.
The advantage of Ele.me is that with the blessing of Alibaba's Hema Xiansheng, it has attracted the participation of leading merchants including Unilever and Starbucks, but compared with Meituan, the number of merchants participating in the New Year's Festival is relatively small.
As for the wine and tourism in the comprehensive section of the store, Ali arranged for Fliggy and AutoNavi to fight, and linked with Alipay's Wufu activities.
Ali and Meituan have been competing for many years in local life, and one of the major variables of this Spring Festival is that Douyin, which has a traffic advantage, has joined the battle.
Different from the high-mindedness of the past year, the "New Year Eating, Drinking and Playing Festival" launched by Douyin looks lively, but it actually focuses on the store, that is, including catering, leisure and entertainment, parent-child, etc., which includes the scene of the store.
Liu Li, a service provider close to Douyin, analyzed that in-store catering and in-store integration are the relatively dominant sections of Douyin, and the overall business model is not complicated, and the platform holds the C-end traffic and merchant supply, from which it matches transactions and earns commissions or advertising fees.
This Spring Festival,Douyin's main focus on in-store is actually to amplify its advantages as a traffic-based content platform and avoid the home-to-home scene with higher barriers。In addition to a sufficiently large traffic platform at the front end, the mid-end needs a logistics distribution scheduling system and store data management tools, and a merchant service and support system at the back-end.
Different from directly participating in the marketing of the Spring Festival Gala, local life, a traffic battlefield, is more competitive with resources and competitive barriers. Not only because the market plate is big enough, but also because during the Spring Festival, the demand for dine-in, travel and tourism, movie entertainment and other consumption instantly exploded, involving a huge group of merchants and the majority of users from first-tier cities to sinking markets.
In other words, the three platforms of "Beauty Hunger Shake" are not the ones with larger users and the hottest online festivals, so they can win and eat. It is difficult to change the competitive pattern of local life in a Spring Festival marketing war, but who can get a piece of the pie, break through the bottleneck of user growth, and bring more confidence to the market and business groups is still worth looking forward to.
Whether it is the title competition for the Spring Festival Gala or the Spring Festival traffic competition, the reason why the attention is high is that at the user level, "you can participate in billions of big projects".From the perspective of Internet development, this Spring Festival business book is also a history of changes in China's Internet traffic.
Internet companies have been eyeing the traffic window of the Spring Festival Gala since 2015. Tencent WeChat is the first to test the waters of the Spring Festival Gala, WeChat Pay through 500 million cash red envelopes, bound 200 million personal bank cards, breaking Alipay's monopoly on online payment that year.
From 2016 to 2018, Ali, who did not admit defeat, sponsored the Spring Festival Gala for three consecutive years, and strengthened its social attributes while giving Alipay a new lease through the activity of "collecting five blessings". Alipay's active users exceeded 500 million, but due to the lack of outstanding social scenes and content attributes, the follow-up user retention was not as good as that of its opponents.
Although the marketing of the Spring Festival Gala has generated a large amount of expenditure, the traffic effect it brings and the scale amplification effect on Internet products are really amazingA sponsorship contest for the Spring Festival Gala ignited by WeChat and Alipay has become a must for giants of all sizes.
In 2019, he participated in the war, smashed 1 billion cash red envelopes, and joined the 200 million daily active club. In 2020, the impact of the epidemic will be superimposed, and this year's Spring Festival marketing war will rewrite the pattern of e-commerce and ** to a certain extent. Kuaishou exclusively named the Spring Festival Gala and issued 1 billion Spring Festival Gala red envelopes to divert traffic for e-commerce and payment businesses; In addition to directly cooperating with the Spring Festival Gala, Douyin and Weishi are not to be outdone, respectively, sending 2 billion red envelopes and 1 billion red envelopes, the former is intended to pull the DAU of other products in the byte system, and the latter focuses on attracting new users of the short **.
From 2021 to 2022, Douyin and JD.com have won the bid one after another, but the "myth" of changing the industry pattern in just 7 days during the Spring Festival holiday is no longer difficult to stage. In 2023, the absence of Internet companies from the sponsorship of the Spring Festival Gala and the concession of traditional enterprises may be a signal.
Photo via Unsplash
Zhou Qian analyzed from the perspective of Internet companies that the marketing of the Spring Festival Gala was once regarded as an opportunity for new Internet products to overtake in corners, but this opportunity has been continuously diluted with the loss of new red envelope gameplay and the peak of Internet user growth.
Although the Internet red envelopes of the Spring Festival Gala in the Year of the Rabbit have gone out, no major Internet company dares to say that the Spring Festival traffic is not important. Judging from this year's Spring Festival Gala, the return of JD.com and Xiaohongshu, and the consideration of conversion rate moreThe logic of the Internet giants' participation in the Spring Festival traffic competition has changed, and behind this is the comprehensive transformation of the Internet.
An important signal is that despite the unabated smell of gunpowder in the traffic war, JD.com and Xiaohongshu, which sponsor the Spring Festival Gala of the Year of the Dragon, have not officially mentioned the word red envelope.
Another noteworthy change is that compared with the instant traffic obtained by sponsoring the Spring Festival Gala, how Internet companies can play with Spring Festival traffic and promote user conversion with high stickiness has become more meaningful. This year's fight of "Mei Hungry and Trembling" on the battlefield of local life is a typical example. They do their best, whether it is to smash resources or fight for creativity, the purpose is to first direct traffic into the station, and then convert it into "retention" through the operation and retention capacity of the product itself.
Yang Dong, an investor who pays attention to major Internet companies, concluded that in the past, major Internet companies took the route of burning money first and then making profits, but now,The era of the purely marketing-driven Internet is over。The reason for thisIn addition to the disappearance of traffic dividends, the lack of capital support is also an important factor, in addition, the slowdown in business growth is also difficult to activate by sponsoring the Spring Festival Gala.
Consumers are also increasingly less focused on marketing and more about the real product experience. Yang Dong said that the significance of sponsoring the Spring Festival Gala is that it can familiarize the public with the product in a short period of time, but if there is no use scenario, or the use experience cannot keep up, the user's habits will not change fundamentally.
The opportunity to sponsor the Spring Festival Gala is important, but it is no longer a single way out.
Zhou Qian told Dingjiao that from the title of the Spring Festival Gala, the red envelope war, to the various forms of content today, it is the process of China's Internet Jianghu regarding the CCTV Spring Festival Gala as a weather vane to "disenchantment", and it can be glimpsed from itThe demand for user growth and the road to commercialization and monetization of major Internet companies have become more and more urgent.
Under the great changes, who will be the biggest winner in this year's Spring Festival traffic war is full of variables.
Title image** on Unsplash. At the request of the interviewee, Wang He, Zhou Qian, Liu Li, and Yang Dong are pseudonyms in the article. Celebrate the New Year in peace and auspiciousness