To drive even more consumption on the platform, Douyin has created its own shopping festival: 818 (August 18). It is sandwiched between China’s two major shopping festivals, 618 and Double 11. The first-ever 818 shopping festival was last year, right after Douyin launched e-commerce features on the platform. So this was Douyin 818’s second year.

How Did the Douyin 818 Shopping Festival Perform This Year?

The 818 Shopping Festival on Douyin lasted from August 1 to August 18. Its main format was e-commerce livestreaming. Throughout the course of the festival, there were a total of 23 million hours of live streams, among which 11 million hours were from brand-run livestreams.

177 livestreams surpassed 10 million RMB in sales and 8 of them made it to 100 million RMB. Together, the total sales from the Top 100 livestreams during 818 reached 9.1 billion RMB in sales.

Compared with last year, where the total sales for the entire festival were 8 billion RMB, Douyin 818 has made great progress this year!

Top Live Streamers

Who was the live streamer that achieved the best result during 818? No surprise here. It was Luo Yonghao (罗永浩), founder of Smartisan, a technology company. Luo was one of the first celebrities/CEOs to do e-commerce live streaming on Douyin and he drew a lot of attention in his debut stream when he achieved 110 million RMB in sales. Sine then, he has become a popular streamer on the platform.

Following Luo, the next two top streamers were two male celebrities: Zhu Zixiao (朱梓骁) and Jia Nailiang (贾乃亮).

New Changes for This Year’s Douyin 818

Below are new changes in the event’s format as summarized by Today (今日网红), a livestream monitoring platform.

Change No.1: Prices are lower than Taobao

Main types of discounts during the 818 shopping festival were fan coupons, flash sales, and bonuses for newcomers. Adding these discounts, prices could be way lower.

For example, Ulike’s hair removal tool, with the original price of 2,499 RMB, was only 1,599 RMB in the livestream during 818. Its usual price on livestream was 1,769 RMB. That’s a good deal to buy it on 818.

Another type of hair removal tool whose original price was 2,499 RMB, was sold at 1,699 RMB on 818, which was the same price as on two top live streamers Austin Li and Viya’s livestreams. Usually Austin Li and Viya claim to have the lowest prices.

Other stores, such as apparel brand EGGKA, which requires Taobao users to pay 8 RMB shipping fee doesn’t ask the same thing for Douyin users during 818.

Changes No.2: Live performance by celebrities

To create buzz and grab as much as attention as possible for the 818 shopping festival, Douyin spent a large amount of budget to create a concert for its users (kind of like Alibaba’s 11.11 gala). Many top celebrities were invited, together with video calls with several Tokyo Olympic champions.

Other than the entertainment part of the gala, there were live streams with celebrities going on. In total, the gala has over 80 million viewers that night.

Changes No.3: 10 billion RMB in subsidies

This is very similar to Pinduoduo, an e-commerce platform known for its extremely low prices. By clicking “My Orders” (我的订单), users can see a page with lists of products that are subsidized with discounts from Douyin. Many of them were food & beverage, digital products, and books.

Will Douyin’s 818 Become the Next Double 11 Or 618?

It may. But there are already many e-commerce shopping festivals filling up the year, it is challenging for Douyin to create buzz and achieve the same scale that either 618 or Double 11 does.

And it seems like at the moment the goal of 818 is really to drive consumers to develop the habit of shopping on Douyin, not to create a shopping festival that will rival the big ones. The subsidies and discounts may convince consumers to make their first purchase on Douyin, or to buy more expensive items on Douyin for the first time, but will consumers continue purchasing on the platform after the festival is over? And besides that, what did Douyin do differently in this festival that makes it stand out from the other major shopping festivals? There wasn’t much innovation when it came to the festival content or shopping experience.

Read more: 亲测，抖音818真的会比淘宝双11便宜吗？

The post Can the Douyin 818 Shopping Festival Convince Consumers to Shop on Douyin? appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

While this news is not necessarily a consumer trend, a person’s job and work environment have a large impact on everything else in their life, from what they purchase, to what they do in their free time, and how much free time they have!

Working for Internet Giants Has Become Many People’s Goal

Working for these Internet big names such as Meituan, ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent is something that most people in China, especially young graduates, would love to have on their resumes. Even internship experience at these companies will make you stand out among the competition.

Not only job seekers, when it comes to blind dates, or when parents are rushing to introduce their children to other parents to seek potential marriage chances, working at these companies often impresses people.

Big Internet companies often offer better salaries, and they have all sorts of fancy facilities to please employees, such as canteens, gyms or leisure areas. They also have yummy afternoon tea to feed employees’ stomachs. These benefits often show up on social media, especially on Little Red Book, making viewers envious.

Yet Working for These Big Companies Like Bytedance Isn’t All Sunshine and Rainbows

Like the old saying says, every coin has two sides. Though working for these Internet giants does gain you glory and a higher salary, it has many downsides that smaller companies are doing better at. Working overtime every week is only one of the issues.

• Your Scope of Work is Very Limited

Because there are so many employees, you’re essentially h a cog in a wheel. It’s like a factory, only white collar. You are hired to do one thing, and just need to do that one thing well. For some people, this is a good thing as they will do less work and face less challenges.

But trust me, just because you finish your work doesn’t mean you can go home, especially if everyone else is still working. Plus sitting at the office not doing anything feels quite strange, and you may want to learn new skills and build up more personal connection through projects. But you won’t have the chance to be in charge of a whole project, and instead, you are only responsible for some paperwork.

Things could be worse for interns. Their daily tasks might just be ordering milk teas and booking meeting rooms. What they can gain from the internship is a nice title in their resumes.

• Lower chances to meet the management team

Because in those big companies, your supervisors have more supervisors above. It would be hard for you to meet them personally, not to mention the big boss of those Internet companies.

This is not a big issue for many people. But if employees get the chance to see the top management team, they may have more sense of belonging to the company, and they can directly express their needs without passing through several people.

• More bureaucratic

More employees tends to mean more processes. Something simple that should just be a short conversation on WeChat or Teams, must be filed with paperwork to get approved. Also, there are endless meetings. Daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly meetings. Sometimes, lunchtime is being converted into meetings.

Why Some of ByteDance’s Employees Are Not Happy About the Cancellation

Despite all of this, yes, there are people who want to work for extra hours, even on weekends.

Having this big and small weeks policy allows ByteDance’s employees to have subsidy, and it was a generous amount. If you earn 40k RMB a month, working an extra day on weekends will help you get 3,600 RMB. In small Internet companies, the amount is likely only a day’s salary at most.

Money is one thing, but the key and most important thing is that the workload is still there. If there is no decrease in the workload, that means employees still need to work extra hours to complete their tasks. And this time, it is without being paid for that extra time.

Read more: 从取消大小周，联想到互联网英雄主义时代的落幕

你在大厂赚得像CEO, 我在小厂忙得像CEO

The post ByteDance Cancels its “Big & Small Weeks” Work Schedule appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

But before we get into Honey Snow City and its viral song, a bit more about Nayuki.

Not long ago we wrote an article about what future may hold for Nayuki Tea with only 0.2% net profit margin. The main reason why the net profit margin is so low is that operating costs of its stores remain too high, and yet both the daily sales and average order amounts have been declining.

Another key reason for the lack of confidence from investors is that Nayuki Tea is facing too many competitors in the new beverage market. Its biggest opponent is Hey Tea, who is rumored to be on its way to file an IPO as well. The other is Sexy Tea or Chayan Yuese (茶颜悦色). We once mentioned the 6-hour line at Shenzhen Wenheyou, a great motivation is that the superfood court has a pop-up Sexy Tea store to attract visitors to come.

And recently another competitor has emerged. You guess right, it’s Honey Snow City. I came across the store quite often when I was having my undergraduate study in Guangzhou, but I never tried it. Until recently, when a song from the brand changed my mind…

About Honey Snow City 

The brand was founded by a student in Henan Province (河南省) in 1998. In most consumers’ minds, the first word they think of when they hear Honey Snow City is cheap. According to Essence Research (安信证券研究中心), at the top of the new beverage pyramid are players such as Nayuki Tea, Hey Tea and LELECHA ( (乐乐茶). The average of the amount per order are over 30 RMB. Following this, are brands with prices between 16-20 RMB, then those with prices between 10-16 RMB. At the bottom, are Honey Snow City and Yihetang (益禾堂) etc. Their prices are extremely low, under 10 RMB.

But it’s not only about its prices. The way Honey Snow City promotes itself is also very xiachen (下沉) or lower-tier city style. For example, they will play music and have dancing in front of stores and give out leaflets.

Yet despite its low image, the brand is doing well. It uses a franchisee store model, and the number of Honey Snow City’s stores are increasing rapidly. In 2018, the number of offline stores was 4,500; in 2019, the number was 7,050; and by June 2021, the number had already reached 15,000.

Honey Snow City’s Viral Song

But despite its growth, Honey Snow City was not seen as a trendy brand, until recently, when an old jingle from 2019 was resurfaced by a KOL on Douyin and went viral.

The song has become so viral that people are joking no one can say “你爱我，我爱你，蜜雪冰城甜蜜蜜” (I love you, you love me, MIXUE ice cream & tea) in a normal way. You always end up saying it with the melody. The jingle is so catchy you just can’t stop singing it once you’ve heard it.

The melody is the same with the household song Oh! Susanna. You can see on different platforms that people are so enthusiastically translating the song into different languages and singing it with different styles.

So what made the song suddenly go viral now instead of when it first came out?

Behind The Huge Popularity of The Song

Step 1: Choose a repetitive melody

When the song was first created, there were a lot of negative reactions. Some were saying the melody was too simple and not many lyrics were in the song, which made it very low. Some of the Honey Snow City stores even received complaints from customers saying something bad about the song.

But the brand was smart to choose the melody of Oh! Susanna since the tune is familiar to almost everyone. Honey Snow City doesn’t need to spend the time having people getting familiar with it. Another good example recently is another song called 热爱105度的你. Many people are posting videos of them singing the song with cute filters. But in fact, this is a song that Watsons used to promote its distilled water.

Step 2: Starting from offline to online

Usually, brands grab attention online and guide those traffic to their offline spots. But Honey Snow City did the opposite. The team decided to start offline and then move to online.

Why? Because they have more than 15k stores nationwide, and in total, the brand is able to reach over 10M customers every day with them. Ever since the song was created, it has been constantly played in those stores, waiting for a good timing to march online.

Step 3: PGC and the use of Douyin

In fact, the marketing team behind this song never expected it to go viral. Then at the end of May 2021, they spotted a UGC post on Douyin related to the song that was played over 100k times. The team thought this was a good time to push the song online.

When it comes to promoting the song, Honey Snow City’s marketing team heavily focused on Douyin. The decision is after careful comparison among different platforms. The team felt that WeChat is more suitable to announce official information, Weibo on the other hand, it suitable for images and words, while Douyin is a short video platform, and it is a better platform to deliver Honey Snow City content to its potential customers. 

Honey Snow City’s team has been developing its Douyin account since 2019 with different hashtags and activities to grow fan base. Now, it has over 2M followers on the platform, which is a solid base for the viral of this song. The brand started working with KOLs to invite them to recreate the song and visit its stores.

Bear in mind, most of Honey Snow City’s consumers don’t have high income, and they tend to have less educational background, so videos would have lower threshold for them to understand. But after the song, because it is so viral, I think even those high-income groups have started noticing this brand and trying it out.

Step 4: UGC to further develop the song

After those KOLs posted content about Honey Snow City, soon enough, netizens began having fun with the song, making their own videos.

Except this, a popular hashtag on Douyin is #蜜雪冰城社死现场# (embarrassing moments at Honey Snow City). This is very fun. Because after the song becomes viral, a rumor came out of nowhere saying that if you sing the song at the store in front of the brand’s staff, you can have a free drink.

But there is no such policy at the beginning. So it turns out that after you sing a song in front of the staff and other customers waiting in line, you are told that there is no such thing. It is really embarrassing but entertaining, so the hashtag also gets lots of attention on social media.

Honey Snow City notices this and quickly responded to it. The company notified its offline stores that if customers really sing the song, staff can give them either ice cream or coupons, encouraging people to keep visiting the store and creating content about them.

Then the brand leveraged this trend further. On Father’s Day, it sent gifts to customers who sang the song to their fathers and uploaded the video on social media.

With all these UGC promotions, Honey Snow City has been on the hot topic ranking board on Douyin at least 6 times recently. This is incredible performance for a used-to-be low-key brand known for cheap tea and xiachen marketing tactics.

As you can see, the buzz about Honey Snow City was badly timed for Nayuki’s IPO. But can Honey Snow City make this viral song turn into long-term growth? Or will the brand quickly be forgotten? We’ll have to wait and see. 

Read more: 奈雪的茶上市首日破发

奈雪上市新征程：凡是过往，皆为序章

蜜雪冰城主题曲爆火背后：二创、抖音与十万铁军

蜜雪冰城出圈始末

The post Honey Snow City Viral Song Overshadows Nayuki Tea IPO appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

Timeline of Douyin’s 618 Shopping Festival Promotions

The shopping festival will start on May 25 and end on June 18. The total process will be divided into two phases.

The first phase will be from May 25 to May 31, and it is the preheat for the whole event. The second phase starts from June 1 to June 18, and this will be the highlight of the whole event.

Deposit presale

During the first phase, users can put down deposits first to lock in the items they’d like to purchase during the actual shopping festival, which is the second phase. Before the start of the second phase, users will receive messages reminding them to pay the rest.

Paying deposit will help merchants get an estimate of potential customers. They can also predict GMV generated from the event, and it can also help them to prepare stock and improve logistics ahead of time.

Gamify the 618 shopping festival

To increase users’ engagement and bring entertainment for the event, Douyin will launch a game called “The Interaction City”. The game is mainly asking users to finish tasks and they will be rewarded with tools in the game. When the number of those tools reach a certain level, users’ can only pay 0.1 RMB to buy specific products.

Featured Livestreams

Douyin will support three kinds of livestream during the 618 shopping festival: KOLs, brands, and featured livestreams. The last type of livestream are about different topics and festivals, such as Children’s Day and the Dragon Boat Festival. These two holidays both fall within the 618 shopping festival period.

Provide discounts for Douyin’s service fee

During the second phase of Douyin’s 618 event, if brands offer prices which are lower or equal to the lowest price they’ve offered during the past 30 days, the platform will reward those brands with cheaper service fee of just 1% of the total sales amount.

Work with other platforms from ByteDance

Douyin is also leveraging other Bytedance-owned apps such as Toutiao, Watermelon Video, Douyin Huoshan and Douyin Jisu, to drive as much traffic as it can for this big event and prove its place in the ecommerce industry.

To improve users’ shopping experience on the platform, Douyin is introducing the fast refund function, shortening users’ waiting time for their refund request to be checked. One of the reasons that Douyin does this is to reduce users’ complaints regarding refunds.

Taobao Live has released its 618 plan as well 

Different from Douyin, Taobao Live’s 618 campaign period will start earlier, and it is divided into more detailed phases.

The whole event will last for a month, starting from May 20 and lasting until June 20. In general, Taobao Live will two main promotional cycles. The first round is from May 20 to June 3, and the second one will be from June 4 to June 20. Each round will have a presales and sales period.

To help brands generate more GMV, Taobao Live customizes plans for different accounts, including top and Tmall flagship store accounts, mid-tier accounts and small accounts. Other than this, Taobao also has plans for different types of livestreams, such as new products livestreams, celebrity livestreams and CEO livestreams.

Our take

It is fair to say this year’s 618 shopping festival is a big test for Douyin. If it does well and can prove strong results, it will be able to persuade more international brands to open up flagship stores on the platform. 

And it’s not only Douyin, many ecommerce platforms are seriously preparing for the 618 event. It seems it is really becoming the second 11.11.   

Read more: 抖音618活动怎么玩？看完就知道了

淘宝直播618活动总贴

The post Douyin is Going All In For This Year’s 618 Shopping Festival appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

This has been in the works for a while. In 2018, Zhang Yiming (张一鸣), CEO of ByteDance, founded a technological development company called Liangzi Yuedong Technology (量子跃动科技). In 2019, ByteDance became a stakeholder in two investment firms that mainly focus on consumer goods brands, and Liangzi Yuedong Technology also invested two other brands.

What Type of Brands Attract Bytedance To Invest?

Bytedance favours intelligence technology

Let’s dig into the projects ByteDance has invested in. In total, 9 projects are consumer goods brands, 3 are related to supply chain, 2 are media outlets. Among the consumer goods brands, 4 of them are intelligence technology brands. For example, NARWAL (云鲸), whose hero products is a floor mopping robot. We mentioned this product in our previous article talking about 10 hottest products of 2020.

ByteDance also favours founders with Internet background

Among those 14 investment projects we mentioned, 7 of the founders are coming from an Internet background.

ByteDance prefer to be the only investor

Out of the companies it has invested in the past 5 years, ByteDance has become 8 of the projects’ only investor. The remaining companies that have multiple investors are either about advanced technology or have stepped into a mature period of financing.

What Has Caused Bytedance to Invest in Some Projects Twice?

Though it has only been 2 years since ByteDance officially entered the investment industry, it has invested in two companies twice. They are the intelligent technology brand NARWAL and Lazy Bear Hotpot (懒熊火锅), a convenience store for hot pot ingredients that opened in 2020.

These two product categories have space for growth and these brand’s popularity in the market is rising. In terms of cleaning robots, there is no unicorn brand showing up yet. Besides, NARWAL’s main competitors such as Xiaomi and iRobot don’t have the function to clean itself, they require customers to wash the machine manually. What NARWAL does is to improve the automation and humanization of its cleaning robots. In August 2020, the sales volume of its floor mopping robots ranked TOP1 on Tmall. In its C-round financing, the brand applied for over 100 technical patents.

What Can Bytedance do for These Consumer Goods Brands?

Drive awareness by guiding more traffic to those brands’ Douyin official accounts

The most direct way that ByteDance supports those brands is by providing traffic to their official Douyin accounts. For example, in January 2021, ByteDance invested in a meal replacement brand Shark Fit (鲨鱼菲特). In March, the brand’s Douyin account followers grew from 26k to 62k, which was 138% growth.  

Help the Brands Develop Douyin Stores

As we mentioned earlier, Douyin announced on April 8 that it is creating an ecommerce system called “Interest Ecommerce” (兴趣电商). It launched Douyin Flagship Stores and has been investing heavily in building out its ecommerce department.

Unlike tradition ecommerce platforms, Douyin’s Interest Ecommerce doesn’t rely heavily on users searching for a specific product or brand. Instead, Douyin want to create an ecommerce platform similar to how Douyin’s algorithm recommends videos to watch based on the other videos a user has interacted with. With Interest Ecommerce, users don’t search for what they want, instead, they have the motivation to buy a product because they see someone recommending it and this arouses their interest.

It is estimated that the GMV of Douyin’s Interest Ecommerce will reach over 9.5 trillion RMB by 2023.

Open access to Bytedance’s other platforms

ByteDance has many other apps besides Douyin. In China, its biggest two are Douyin and Toutiao (头条), which reach many young female users and the middle-age consumers. It also has Dongchedi (懂车帝), a car introduction app and Hupu (虎扑), a sports app that often shares info about NBA. The majority of users on these two apps are males.

What ByteDance can do is to open green channels for brands that it has invested in and match those brands with a specific app based on the brand’s target consumers.

Read more:

 3月份出手3次，揭秘字节跳动的消费品投资野心

抖音电商定义做“兴趣电商”，它的价值和机会是什么？

The post Bytedance Has Begun to Invest in Consumer Goods Brands appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

Proving its Ability to Drive Attention and Sales

Selling Through Live Streams

Over the past year, Douyin was involved in many fashion events. It worked with Shenzhen Fashion Week and supported brands with their livestreams. 

For example, domestic designer brand LYNEE, which has 365k followers on Douyin, held a livestream during the fashion week. It made over 1.28 million RMB from the stream. What’s incredible is that the brand was founded in 2019 and its team only has around 10 people. When I wanted to search for the brand on Taobao to see what type of brand it was, I found it doesn’t have a Taobao or Tmall store, but it has a Douyin store.

Another domestic apparel brand Disimanling (迪丝嫚苓) also benefited a lot from Douyin’s support during Shenzhen Fashion Week. The brand did over 9.4 million RMB in sales on Douyin during the course of the week and 5.21 million of that came from one live stream session. 

Driving Attention

Douyin also worked with China Fashion Week to launch a ranking report about Chinese apparel brands’ performance on Douyin. It included brands such as Peacebird Women, LYNEE, TRACY CHU and others.

Douyin has also been giving traffic support for fashion related topics, such as #看秀时穿什么 (What do I wear when watching fashion shows). So far, the hashtag topic has 167 billion views on Douyin and people were actively participating in it, showing different outfits they would wear when watching those luxury shows. Many fashion KOLs were joining the trend, such as FuPeng (top live streamer Austin Li’s previous assistant) and Fil小白.

Douyin Flagship Store Feature Still in Early Stages

The flagship store feature is still very new and as of yet, few large international brands are treating Douyin Flagship Stores as an important sales channel. Peacebird Women is one of the few large brands that treats its Douyin flagship store seriously with similar inventory and as its Tmall store. With 1.43M followers on its Douyin account, it is very likely that Peacebird will become a trend setter and a case study for fashion brands considering the platform.

Last year, Douyin made huge progress building its e-commerce system. In the first 11 months of 2020, Douyin’s total e-commerce GMV grew 11 times and its Douyin Store (抖音小店) revenue grew 44.9 times. To clarify, when Douyin first launched e-commerce, it offered the ability to link out to other platforms such as Tmall, Taobao, and JD.com. Then, last year it started restricting outbound commerce links, encouraging brands and KOLs to open up Douyin Stores. Now the difference between Douyin Stores and a flagship store is that anyone can apply for a Douyin Store while a flagship store requires a brand’s trademark to apply, thereby is more trustworthy for consumers.

For those familiar with the Alibaba ecosystem, this is like comparing a Taobao store with a Tmall flagship store – same concept.

Compared with Taobao and WeChat, Douyin is like a teenager who has unlimited vitality and the most important fact is that, until now, there is no winners on the platform since it is still in an early age.

Ultimate Goal of Douyin Flagship Store: Convincing Luxury Fashion Brands to Join

If you read our previous article on Louis Vuitton’s 26,700 RMB inflatable vest you’ll know that an important reason why the vest went so viral and it was out of stock in many LV stores was because it went viral on Douyin. Many users were DIY-ing their own vests or testing out the LV vest as a life vest. The related topic #LV空气马甲 (LV’s inflatable vest) reached 280 million views.

Luxury brands already have confidence in Douyin. In March 2018, Dior became one of the first luxury brands to open a Douyin account. Since then many luxury brands have followed suit, opening their own accounts on the platform, including Gucci, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, Prada, Fendi and Burberry.

Behind those brands’ entering is their intention to reach young consumers. With the traffic bottleneck on Weibo and WeChat, luxury brands are urgently experimenting with Douyin, Bilibili and Xiaohongshu. 

Changing Their Mindset About Douyin

At the moment, luxury brands use Douyin as a platform to build their brand images and to tell brand stories. Douyin needs to convince them that it’s platform can also have commercial value and produce high conversion rates. 

Maybe the Douyin flagship store will open up a new world for those luxury brands, and it is very likely that in the future it will become the norm for luxury brands to have not only a Tmall flagship store and a WeChat mini program store, but now also a Douyin flagship store as well.

Read more: 深度｜时尚品牌在抖音上的机会终于来了吗？

The post Douyin Launches Flagship Stores Feature, Looking to Expand Fashion Business appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

Behind these numbers are the high quality of movies, government’s effort in controlling the COVID and the holiday period. Another key reason though, is Douyin. Studios are increasingly using Douyin in a variety of ways to promote movies.

How Does Douyin Promote Movies?

1. Douyin gives traffic to celebrities

Many celebrities are joining Douyin for promotion purposes. For example, Liu Dehua (刘德华), a top male actor in China. He joined Douyin on January 17. Five days later, Liu’s Douyin account had 571 million followers and had gained 140 million likes. Insane!

Liu was promoting the movie that he starred in: Endgame (人潮汹涌). One of his videos was giving out free movie tickets and the video gained 5 million likes and 190k comments.

Jia Ling (贾玲) is the movie director of “Hi, Mom”, which is thought to be the Blackhorse this year. Jia joined Douyin in early 2018, but until 2021, she only posted one video. To promote her movie, which she also starred in, she became active on Douyin and posted more than 10 videos.

Another main actress in her movie, Zhang Xiaofei (张小斐), posted 20 videos to promote “Hi, Mom”. In total, her videos received 23 million likes and she now has 6.5 million followers.

When Jia’s team was promoting the movie in different cities, they livestreamed the events. In total, 1.56 million people watched the livestream.

In addition to this kind of livestream, Douyin’s official movie account “抖音电影” (Douyin Movie) had livestreams for “Endgame” and “Hi, Mom”. On the livestream, the actors and actresses were giving out free movie tickets or discounts to the audience.

2. Douyin top KOLs film content with main actors & actresses

For example, when “Hi, Mom” launched, top Douyin account @疯产姐妹 (Broken Sisters) published a video with Jia Lin and Zhang Xiaofei. The video had 3.8 million likes and 132k comments.

3. Douyin encourages users to create related content

Once the movie “Chinatown Detective 3” was in theaters, many viewers were discussing with each other on Douyin who is Q? Q is a secret character that didn’t show up in the end of the movie.

For “Hi, Mom”, they designed a Douyin filter which puts a users’ face as the mom character in the movie. The filter has been used by more than 400M Douyin users.

Back to 2017, when another popular movie The Ex-File 3: The Return of The Exes (前任3) was on air, many users changed its classic scenes, for example, the female character eating mango or the male character dressing to be Joker (至尊宝). Users changed those scenes and had themselves as the main characters.

Users Can Also Watch Movies on Douyin

Other than promoting movies, since last year’s COVID quarantine, Bytedance has started airing movies on Douyin and its other video app Watermelon Video (西瓜视频). 

Last year, when people were not able to go to movie theatres, Douyin aired a new CNY movie called Lost in Russia (囧妈). SInce then, Douyin has provided nearly 100 movies for users to watch for free.

Douyin also uses movies to drive traffic to Watermelon Video by showing the first 6 minutes or so on Douyin and then if people want to continue, they have to become a Watermelon Video VIP user. 

Read more:

《李焕英》42.5亿票房神话背后：短视频成重要推手

4亿补贴背后，抖音与电影的“绑定”越来越深了？

The post Douyin Has Become a Key Promotion Platform for Movies appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

This is the first time the Gala has changed its headlining sponsor, but the organizers needn’t fret as this is a coveted sponsorship position and they were able to immediately find a replacement. 

Why Are Brands Desperate To Sponsor the Spring Festival Gala?

The Gala has an extremely high audience rating. Except 2015, the ratings from 2001 to 2020 are all above 30%. The view in 2020 reached 1.23 billion. According to South China Morning Post, it is fair to say the Spring Festival Gala has the highest audience rating in the world.

The Gala has become many household’s new year background music, just like in the US how the Macy’s Day Parade is to Thanksgiving or the Times Square Ball Drop is to New Year’s Eve – only much bigger. The Spring Festival Gala is a must-have to say goodbye to the past and welcome the new year.

As the Gala is watched all over China, it is also a quick way to introduce your brand to the Xiachen or lower tier cities market. Since it is put on by the state-run CCTV channel, it is seen as an authentic and trustworthy TV show in most people’s eyes. (Which also leads us to think that Pinduoduo was probably asked to pull out of the sponsorship.)

As China’s Economy Has Grown, Sponsorships Have Shifted

The Gala’s first sponsorship was from a domestic watch company called Compas in 1984. At that time, watches, bikes, and sewing machines were called Lao Sanjian (老三件), meaning once a household had these three things, it was a wealthy one.

In the 1990s, the home appliance industry were booming, and the Gala was either sponsored by Haier (海尔) or Midea Group (美的). In the early 2000s, the Gala became the battle field of Baijiu (白酒), a type of Chinese alcohol. Stepping into the 21^st century, the Gala has become the stage for Internet giants.

A Coveted Opportunity for Internet Brands

Being a headlining sponsor will guide massive traffic and for the large Chinese Internet companies who face intense competition for traffic, the Gala is an efficient way to stand out and build a bigger user base.

While the Gala has always been a popular sponsorship opportunity, it became extremely coveted after a successful case study that happened with WeChat 6 years ago when WeChat sponsored the Gala and developed the Shake and Get Red Pocket (摇一摇红包) function where users could interact with the TV show and get free random amounts of money in their WeChat Wallet (often just a couple cents or a couple RMB).

This campaign helped WeChat grow its user base from 8M to over 300M. WeChat used two days to achieve what Alipay had been doing for 8 years. The Red Pocket activity also educated users about the WeChat Pay function.

Following this case, we’ve seen Douyin, Alipay, Taobao and Baidu become the Red Pocket sponsors of the Gala. 

At the Same Time, The Gala Needs These Red Pocket Sponsors

Though the average audience rate of the Gala is high, as a nationwide TV show, it is hard for the Spring Festival Gala to satisfy 1.4 billion people. 

Since 2005, many local TV channel such as Zhejiang Television (浙江卫视), Jiangsu Television (江苏卫视) and Dragon Television (东方卫视) started hosting their own spring festival galas and they invited many popular actors and singers to the event, which lowered the audience numbers and rating of the main Spring Festival Gala on CCTV (China Central Television). 

Working with Internet giants to add in interactive digital experiences helps the Gala appeal to younger viewers and sharing red pockets is a great way to get viewers to choose their show over a show that doesn’t offer red pockets.

According to Chinese media outlet 36Kr, those top runners in the Internet industry have invested over 7 billion RMB in the Spring Festival Gala.   

Read more: 互联网巨头为何热衷在春晚发红包？

The post Douyin Has Replaced Pinduoduo as Sponsor of This Year’s Spring Festival Gala appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

As a result of the incident, Xinba’s commerce company was fined 900k RMB ($139K USD) and the fake bird’s nest company was fined 2 million RMB ($310 USD). On top of that, Xinba and the live streamer on his team responsible for selling the fake product, @时大漂亮, are forbidden from live streaming until February 21, and other members of his team are forbidden until January 7.

New Regulations

Recently the several Chinese government departments have announced new measures to better regulate the booming live streaming industry. 

The State Administration for Market Regulation (国家市场监督管理总局) made it clear that live streamers are not allowed to share fake news, deceive and mislead viewers, and they should be honest with their livestream performance, including the amount of viewers, likes and the ROI. 

The National Radio and Television Administration published an announcement on November 23 that it would regulate virtual gifts behaviours especially from minors. 

To sum up, at the moment there are four key changes that affect the commerce live streaming industry:

1) Monitoring for Fake News and Fake Stats

The government will use a combination of human and AI monitoring to pay closer attention to live streams with high viewership, high sales, lots of virtual gifts, and a history of  product quality issues. 

With stricter monitoring in place, viewers may find out that for some live streamers, the average number of viewers will decrease from several thousand to several hundred as they eliminate bots. 

2) The government will pay extra attention to top live streamers

Several top live streamers dominate and drive much of the commerce live streaming industry and as such brands must pay exorbitant amounts to work with them. But they are willing to because many brands felt like working with top streamers was safer and more trustworthy. 

The recent Xinba scandal not only affected the trusting relationship between him and his viewers, it had a negative effect on the entire industry, causing viewers and brands to question the reliability of other top streamers. 

As such, the monitoring of those streamers will be even more intense. As a potential side effect, brands shouldn’t be surprised if streamers want a longer period to review your products prior to agreeing to work with you, or they ask for more information to verify your product’s quality and safety. 

3) Certain celebrities will be barred from streaming

Inviting celebrities to participate in a live stream is a very popular way to drive traffic to the stream, however, moving forward, the government will restrict celebrities that are deemed to have done bad things in the past from appearing on live streams. 

For example, actress Fan Bingbing (范冰冰) who has been on the government’s bad side since her tax evasion scandal, and actress Li Xiaolu (李小璐) who got a lot of bad press for cheating on her husband. 

This could be an issue for brands that work with Fan. Earlier this year luxury beauty brand Guerlain announced that Fan was its newest global ambassador. Beauty brands are some of the biggest users of ecommerce live streaming.

However the regulations are unclear as to whether her image can still appear in the live stream, and only she herself is banned from attending, or if showing her image is banned too. 

If this is the case, it will also be an issue for Fan’s personal brand Fan Beauty whose popular face masks feature her image on the box.

4) Live streamers, accounts and ID should match

To start a livestream, a precondition is that the live streamer, the ID and the live streaming account ID must all match.

This may sound easy, but actually many live streamer’s accounts are in fact owned and registered by the MCNs they are signed with. This is done so that the MCN can retain more control over the live streamer. 

Oftentimes streamers are not loyal to MCNs and will try to leave once they’ve gotten successful. Usually because the MCNs take advantage of the streamer and keep most of their earnings. 

So this new rule that a streamer must own his or her account is actually a positive change for content creators who will now have more ownership over their traffic. 

Read more: 独家｜为什么抖音头部主播都停播了？

The post New Commerce Live Streaming Regulations You Need to Know appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

Colorkey is a very young domestic beauty brand. In its first year, it achieved over 200M RMB in sales. It only used 6 months to become a TOP5 domestic beauty brand on Tmall.

Its star product is its lip gloss, which costs around 59 RMB, making it very affordable for students or people who just start their career.

Check out our video to see how this young brand managed to become the TOP1 lipstick brand on Tmall and what we think of its products.

The post Colorkey, the NO.1 Chinese Brand on the Lipstick Category on Tmall appeared first on China Marketing Insights.