Same Captive TV Audience, Different Ads: How China's Spring Festival Gala and America's Super Bowl Compare

We compared brand marketing during China's Spring Festival Gala and the American Super Bowl, and found some interesting things.

For years now, viewers have mocked CCTV's Spring Festival Gala while watching it. But this year's show sank to a new low. Many people couldn't even be bothered to make up jokes; they summed up their feelings in one word: "awkward."

When the QDaily Research Lab asked "What do you want to gripe about at the Spring Festival Gala?", we received nearly 10,000 responses. The top three: "It's just background music — everyone's busy grabbing red envelopes," "Feng Gong's sketch delivered, as expected, a pile of internet catchphrases," and "political correctness." On Weibo's trending chart, #SpringFestivalGalaGripeCenter# drew 1.53 million interactions. That is small next to the 350 million for The Mermaid, the film released today, or the hundreds of millions of views for the galas on Jiangsu Satellite TV and Beijing TV that aired one after another.

Young people stopped expecting anything from the Gala long ago, but this is the first year it offered not a single surprise.

Seven and a half hours after the Gala ended, the Super Bowl — often called America's "Spring Festival Gala" — kicked off its championship game. The Carolina Panthers fought the Denver Broncos, and the halftime show brought in the British band Coldplay, Beyoncé, and Bruno Mars, nicknamed "Brother Mars" in China. The crowd was on fire.

The halftime show is one of the Super Bowl's main attractions, as we discussed yesterday in our piece on the game's 50-year history.

As our detailed report on the Super Bowl yesterday explained, the game can't simply be summed up as America's "Spring Festival Gala." But in terms of how much attention it draws, the label conveys its standing in America more directly than anything else.

Put the CCTV Gala and the Super Bowl side by side and the difference in style is obvious. Yet in one respect they are alike: each is its country's biggest brand event of the year, and simply appearing is often taken as proof of a company's or brand's strength. That is what this article sets out to examine.

Advertisers splash out, of course, because of the ratings. According to CCTV.com, 690 million people still watched the Year of the Monkey Gala on television — though the figure deserves some skepticism. This year's Super Bowl ratings aren't out yet, but since the game sets a new record almost every year, they are unlikely to disappoint. In 2015, 114 million Americans watched the Super Bowl: of every 100 Americans watching TV at that hour, 74 were watching the game.

In absolute numbers the Super Bowl can't beat the Gala (a matter of population). And while television is being written off as a medium in both countries, the Gala's ratings have fallen for several years running, whereas the Super Bowl keeps breaking records. Either way, neither lacks advertisers — and when we laid the two advertiser lists side by side, some interesting patterns emerged.

Ads began running nonstop as soon as the 7:30 p.m. Xinwen Lianbo news broadcast ended. But the real big spenders were those that squeezed into the final ten minutes before the show began. These slots, auctioned last November, were topped by LeEco's 30-second ad at 70 million yuan. Midea, Meizu, and the liquor brand Gujing Gong took the last three slots before the countdown; their prices weren't disclosed, but rumor put each above 100 million yuan. Also on air were Jomoo, BAIC Huansu, Alipay, China Pacific Insurance, 360 Search, Bank of Beijing, Feihe milk powder, Telunsu, WiFi Master Key, Gome, Suning.com, Yadea electric scooters, Xiang Piao Piao, and Bybo Dental.

The Super Bowl, meanwhile, featured 43 brands. Besides regulars like Budweiser, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi, first-timers included Amazon, Yum! Brands' Taco Bell, the Pokémon games, and the health juice drink Bai — all buying into this luxury venue at US$5 million per 30 seconds (which makes the Super Bowl look much cheaper than the Gala). According to Prosper Insights and Analytics, 17.7% of viewers consider the ads more important than the game itself.

Internet companies and automakers: the main forces on the two battlefields

Half the Super Bowl audience tunes in for the ads. What people seem to remember of our Gala's opening ads is the bullet comments scrolling over them online. That impression only deepens after five hours of a show that viewers joke should be called the Xinwen Lianbo Gala, after the state evening news.

Leaving creativity aside, what does the advertiser list of "the world's most-watched, longest-running gala with the largest cast" tell us?

Meizu, LeEco, 360, and Shanda's WiFi Master Key all crowded into the prime slots of the countdown. Internet companies again led the ad war this year, much as they did last year — a measure of how hot the internet sector has been these past few years.

360 ran twice before the Gala began, the first internet company to appear. It promoted neither its Qiku phones nor 360 Safeguard, but 360 Search, which it spun off as a standalone brand last January.

360 hopes the CCTV platform will lift its brand awareness fast — still the biggest thing a Gala ad can buy. According to iiMedia Research's 2015 Q3 China Mobile Search Market Report, Baidu holds the largest share, Shenma Search has 17.4%, and 360 Search only 4.2%, while Baidu, QQ, UC, and other rivals are all fighting for mobile.

Meizu's Huang Zhang had boasted on Weibo: "If Meizu fans really want us to advertise on the Spring Festival Gala, I'll do it once this gets 100,000 reposts." He kept his word. Meizu's ad ran three times before the show.

The closer an opening ad runs to airtime, the more it is worth. Meizu landed the platinum slot, second only to Midea and Gujing Gong liquor, the Gala's perennial advertisers — and that's not counting Meizu's logo in the bottom-right corner of the 10:30 p.m. public service ad. Alipay and Mengdian also ran ads before the show.

At the Super Bowl, automakers — traditionally among the biggest spenders — came back in force this year. Acura, GM, and Honda all returned after skipping the 2015 game (or earlier ones), each with a key model.

Acura used its ad to unveil the new NSX supercar; GM brought the Buick brand to the Super Bowl for the first time; and Honda bought a 60-second spot for the 2017 Ridgeline pickup.

Carmakers have long been Super Bowl regulars, but after the 2008 financial crisis hit Detroit hard, Korean and Japanese brands had more money to spend on ads. Hyundai, a new official NFL sponsor, went big: two 30-second ads in the first half, a 60-second ad just before kickoff, and another 60-second ad in the pre-game show. Toyota and Kia have also become familiar faces in recent years.

Food and drink brands are Super Bowl regulars too: Coca-Cola, Doritos, Pepsi, and Snickers appear almost every year.

The Gala's equivalent big spenders are home appliance and dairy brands, such as Midea and Mengniu.

Gala internet companies are busy jostling and explaining themselves; Super Bowl ones are already looking to the future

Xiaomi, once rumored to be advertising on the Gala, never appeared. Of the internet companies that did, Meizu and LeEco had already traded insults.

Last November, after CCTV's annual ad auction, LeEco won the only 30-second slot for 70 million yuan. Meizu CEO Huang Zhang then grumbled on his personal Weibo, claiming that if more than 100,000 Meizu fans wanted the company on the Gala, he would make it happen. The official Weibo account of LeEco's Superphone replied: "Even with 100,000 reposts, gold slot or platinum, the year's first Gala ad already belongs to LeEco. In products and on the Gala alike, LeEco takes first place. Feel free to follow our lead."

The spat ended with Meizu taking the second-to-last platinum slot (which looks like a win). The ad itself was full of gimmicks. It billed itself as the first Gala ad shot in bullet-comment style and said its creative was made with Meizu's own users. It stressed that the company had been around for 12 years and sold more than 20 million phones in 2015, and it threw in a once-fashionable buzzword: "craftsman spirit."

2015 was a good year for Meizu. Sales jumped on the strength of the Meilan Note 2, launched in 2014, and in February it took a 3.6 billion yuan investment from Alibaba. But even on a roll it faced an old rival, Xiaomi, and a new one, LeEco — so Meizu was eager to tell consumers that it was the stronger company.

LeEco's ad, by contrast, was about defining itself, which makes sense: it had changed its logo and reorganized its corporate structure on January 12. Long accused of hype and over-marketing, LeEco summed itself up as a company that had "merely had its dream laughed at by 99% of people." To shoot the ad it brought in Zhang Yimou and Liu Jianhong, both already signed to LeEco, along with its close ally Guo Jingming and founder Jia Yueting himself. In the version CCTV actually aired, though, Liu's shots were cut. Perhaps that had something to do with his past as a CCTV football commentator: he left CCTV in 2014 to become chief content officer of LeEco Sports.

Internet companies have appeared at the Super Bowl in recent years too, but most of their ads lay out a view of the future.

Amazon, a first-timer this year, devoted its ad to the Echo smart speaker — new hardware built around Alexa, a voice assistant along the lines of Siri and Cortana. PayPal, for its part, claimed to have created a new class culture of the future: not the nouveau riche, but a new group of consumers enjoying fuller financial services — the millennials.

On paper, LeEco paid the most at the Gala; Budweiser spent the most at the Super Bowl

LeEco's 70 million yuan made it the top bidder for the 2016 CCTV Spring Festival Gala and won it the only 30-second slot. The deal itself became a talking point.

Apart from LeEco's, every opening ad at the Gala ran 15 seconds. Super Bowl ads, which like to tell stories, usually run a full 60 seconds. With demand outstripping supply, CBS turned away many 30-second orders this year and sold mainly 60-second slots.

Budweiser has long been one of the Super Bowl's biggest advertisers. This year it bought 180 seconds of airtime, with one ad each for Budweiser, Bud Light, and Shock Top. Its Super Bowl ad spending is estimated at US$30 million — slightly down from 210 seconds last year (at US$4.5 million per 30 seconds) and 240 seconds the year before.

A survey of nearly 40,000 American consumers found that Super Bowl ads raised viewers' liking for the advertised products by 6.6%, and by more for ads in prime slots. Viewers' liking for Budweiser rose 37.8% after last year's game.

As the Super Bowl's signature national brand, Budweiser also signed a strategic partnership with NFL China (the National Football League's China arm) on the eve of Super Bowl 50, running through 2022, to bring America's national sport to more Chinese viewers.

According to CVSC-Sofres Media (CSM), by the end of 2014 the number of Chinese viewers interested in the NFL and American football had reached 17.7 million, a tenfold increase in five years. Most of them live in China's first- and second-tier cities.

More than 17 Chinese media platforms livestreamed the Super Bowl this year. Did you watch?

Gala advertisers are increasingly local. Where have the global brands gone?

Jomoo, BAIC Huansu, Alipay, China Pacific Insurance, 360 Search, Bank of Beijing, Feihe milk powder, Telunsu, WiFi Master Key, Gome, Suning.com, Yadea electric scooters, Xiang Piao Piao, Bybo Dental, LeEco, Midea, Meizu, Gujing Gong liquor...

Budweiser and McDonald's, which advertised at both the Super Bowl and the Gala last year, were nowhere to be seen. Samsung Galaxy and Jeep, which squeezed into the final dozen-odd minutes before last year's Gala, were gone too. Compared with previous years, the pre-show ad time this year was taken entirely by Chinese brands.

The Gala keeps getting worse, and its pull on young people weakens every year. It is also true that multinationals are spending more carefully on advertising and paying more attention to targeted marketing for each of their brands. CCTV's top bidder for 2016 ad time was Jilongdai, a P2P lending platform, while Procter & Gamble — the top bidder three years running a decade ago — is nowhere near the top of the list.

Midea, meanwhile, is the Gala's undisputed national brand: it has held the midnight countdown slot for 15 consecutive years. That slot, like the Meizu and Gujing Gong slots just before the countdown, is not auctioned. Companies get them through strategic partnerships with CCTV, so others may not land them however much they are willing to pay.

According to available figures, the midnight time-signal ad cost 6.8 million yuan in 2005, rose 5.4-fold to 37.09 million yuan in 2007, and reached 57.2 million yuan in 2011.

Seen another way, most Super Bowl advertisers are domestic companies too — it's just that they long ago became multinationals.

The new faces at the Super Bowl and the Gala share some curious coincidences

Like the Gala, the Super Bowl brings unexpected new faces every year. Po from Kung Fu Panda was the big winner, appearing at both. Wix.com, the Israeli website-building service, chose this Chinese panda with American DNA for its second Super Bowl appearance.

Riding the Chinese box-office run of Kung Fu Panda 3, FAW-Volkswagen, a strategic partner of the film, ran a custom ad for its all-new Bora on the Gala.

In their full-length versions, both ads used lots of animation and wrote the product into the film's scenes. Apart from the slightly jarring Chinese dubbing, the Bora ad's pairing of "Bao" (as in Bora, Baolai in Chinese) and "A-Bao" (Po's Chinese name) — "only those with kung fu deserve a car with kung fu" — felt natural.

Pokémon made its Super Bowl debut to mark its 20th birthday, with production, pacing, and music that were genuinely stirring. Bank of Beijing timed its Gala appearance just as well: it, too, turns 20 this year.

Lesser-known brands that make it onto the Gala or the Super Bowl usually have some particular reason for being there (rich companies need less of one).

At this year's Gala, Bybo Dental took the slot right after LeEco's. Behind it was a 1 billion yuan investment from Lenovo. A few weeks earlier, 71-year-old Liu Chuanzhi had personally attended the private dental chain's combined forum and annual meeting, saying, "Investing in Bybo Dental is Legend Holdings' entry point into healthcare." With Bybo Dental set to expand faster in 2016, a Gala appearance made sense.

Avocados from Mexico, the trade group that debuted at last year's Super Bowl to striking effect, came back this year with another clever ad, which made our roundup of this year's most creative Super Bowl ads.

That reflects how popular avocados have become in the U.S. in recent years. In Mexico, avocados work almost like currency. Mexico is the world's largest producer, and its avocado trade with the U.S. is worth US$1 billion a year — more than five times the combined figure for the second- and third-largest producers, Indonesia and the U.S.

Super Bowl ads compete on creativity; Gala ads mostly just say "we're here"

Honda's ad featured a flock of sheep, Doritos brought three dogs, Mountain Dew had a monkey and a pug, Hyundai a brown bear, and Heinz ketchup a pack of dachshunds. Animals were everywhere in this year's Super Bowl ads.

Animals make it easy to tell a story that is fresh and a little funny. Honda and Mountain Dew went for deadpan humor; the animals in the Doritos, Hyundai, and Heinz ads were endearingly goofy. Either way, they hit the spot.

Movies are another Super Bowl favorite. This year Wix.com's ad used Kung Fu Panda and Coca-Cola's used Ant-Man. The first is a sequel and the second had already been a hit, so viewers knew the characters and felt no distance from them. Every Super Bowl also airs trailers for Hollywood's upcoming blockbusters; this year's included X-Men: Apocalypse, Disney's live-action The Jungle Book, Deadpool, and the fifth Bourne film.

None of this is unique to 2016; it has always been this way. Yet the ads find something new every year, and more than half of YouTube's most popular ads each year come from the Super Bowl. In its 50 years, the game has also produced plenty of classics, the best known being Apple's "1984."

The Gala, by contrast, mostly relied on celebrity endorsers, as in the Xiang Piao Piao milk tea and LeEco ads, or on flat voiceovers that did nothing but tell viewers "we're here!"

To be fair, the gap between Gala ads and Super Bowl ads is huge, and it won't close any time soon; many causes lie behind it. Still, we hope to see something different in these dozen-odd minutes, when more eyes are on the screen than at any other time. One consolation: brands' Chinese New Year ads have started to improve, as our roundup of 2016 New Year ads showed.

We mock the show and shake our phones for red envelopes; Americans scroll Facebook and Twitter

This year the Gala's official red-envelope partner switched from WeChat to Alipay, and the red envelopes pushed out at set times during the show were what kept many people watching.

In figures released after midnight, Alipay said its "Xiu Hongbao, Chuan Fuqi" ("tap for red envelopes, pass on good fortune") campaign during the Gala drew 324.5 billion interactions, and that 790,000 people who collected all five "fu" blessing cards split a 215 million yuan prize, or 271.66 yuan each on average. But the rule that you had to collect the full set to win anything annoyed many people; some complained that the rules alone filled 13 phone screens.

WeChat, shut out of the Gala this time, rolled out two surprises before the show to keep users engaged: "New Year greeting red envelopes" with photos inside, and "red-envelope photos" in Moments. By 3 a.m. on the first day of the new year, it had released its own numbers: 8.08 billion red envelopes sent on New Year's Eve, with 420 million people around the world joining the "red envelope battle."

Between grabs, people kept checking Weibo and WeChat official accounts, where the big accounts worked overtime — revisiting earlier Galas that produced classic after classic, rating celebrities' outfits one by one, and so on. But as we said at the start, too many people were disappointed. As one Zhihu user put it: "(This year) is a milestone, a turning point in Gala history. From now on, the Gala is no longer part of Chinese New Year."

At the Super Bowl, leaving aside the Panthers-Broncos game itself, the show electrified viewers, from Lady Gaga's national anthem at the start to the halftime sets by Coldplay, Beyoncé, and Bruno Mars. The camerawork and the stage design both aimed for a riot of color, a direct nod to the diversity and equality American society now stresses. Plenty of LGBT accounts joined the conversation on Twitter and Facebook. And footage of Stephen Curry, this year's NBA Most Valuable Player, beating a drum for the Panthers at the opening became a hit on social media.

Among the ads, Doritos' caused some controversy. The ad, in which a Doritos chip is used to tease an unborn baby in the womb, drew plenty of mockery, and some Twitter users said it made them rethink whether to eat Doritos at all.

"Chinese characteristics" vs. "American characteristics"

This year's Gala featured three public service ads: Home Is Wherever You Are, Dreams Come True, and The Door, made respectively by Veraworm of Dentsu Aegis Network, McCann Worldgroup China, and Amber Communications of Leo Group. Veraworm also wrote, as a company, the lyrics for the song "Shining Era," which is in fact product placement for the sportswear brand Guirenniao; the same song will later appear in its commercial.

This kind of ad would almost never appear among the high-priced Super Bowl spots, and it shows how unusual the Gala is. Let's call it, for now, "Chinese characteristics."

While deep-pocketed car brands crowded into the Super Bowl, the Gala ran an ad for Yadea electric scooters. If the Netherlands is a nation of bicycles and Italy a nation of Vespa scooters, China is a nation of electric bikes. It accounts for about 90% of global sales, which grew from a few tens of thousands a year in the late 1990s to 120 million in 2013. Between the bicycle and the car, Chinese consumers have a stepping stone: the electric bike.

360 Search's 15-second Gala ad seemed to make just one point: it can be trusted. But the setup was "The internet is a mess. Don't believe everything. Watch out for scams..." Viewers could hardly help thinking of the recent Baidu Tieba scandal and the earlier scandal over Putian-network hospitals buying top search rankings. While Google tries to live up to "Don't be evil," an ad that comes so close to a search scandal and whose tagline reads simply "Find one you can trust" has a distinctly "Chinese characteristic."

The Super Bowl has its own American characteristics, of course. Mexican avocados, adored in the U.S., bought ad time for the second year running. Bud Light built its ad around the ongoing presidential election. Audi paid tribute to the recently deceased David Bowie, who started out in London and shaped a generation of European and American music and style. And MINI's ad featured Abby Wambach, the openly gay American soccer player, playing to American concern with this kind of "political correctness."

So America's "Spring Festival Gala" goes in for political correctness too, and there's nothing wrong with that. But could our Gala at least be a bit more watchable?

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