Ten Years On, Can a Remade *Super Girl* Make New Legends?

The audience has changed, the star-making model has changed, and even what people mean by "idol" has changed. How does Super Girl come back?

When a company sets out to repeat the success of a product it launched ten years ago, its ambition needs no explaining. The real question is whether it can win.

The product is Super Girl. At the launch event in Changsha, Hunan, on March 7, Hunan TV once again made clear how much it still values the star show of a decade ago. "Mengniu Suansuanru Super Girl 2016 will be another phenomenon of the internet era," said Luo Yi, deputy director of Hunan Broadcasting System.

Back with Super Girl again, the show's exclusive title sponsor, Mengniu, offered a slogan of its own. "We hope this year's Super Girl will once again create a legend in entertainment marketing," said Xu Ying, brand director for Mengniu Dairy's milk drinks.

Five new 2016 Super Girls also appeared at the event, singing the songs that made earlier winners famous. Their different looks signaled that the show is getting younger and hinted at the range of styles the new idols might take: Western, androgynous, cute, anime-inspired, goddess-like...

Ten years ago, Super Girl did more than produce a generation of idols led by Li Yuchun. It established Hunan TV as a top-tier satellite channel, a position it still holds. In 2004, Hunan TV ranked first among China's provincial satellite channels with a 4.505% market share. In 2015, it still ranked first, with 3.2773%. From 2004 to 2006, "Hunan TV" and "Super Girl" topped Chinese-language web searches and media coverage in the entertainment category.

But the following decade was also one in which the internet pressed traditional television harder every year.

The TV screen kept losing its pull. As 3G and 4G service spread, entertainment stopped centering on the home and moved to other, mobile screens: smartphones, tablets, and later wearables and VR headsets. According to the 2015 China Mobile Internet Research Report from mobile data firm QuestMobile, by December 2015 China had 899 million active smart mobile devices online, and the average person spent 2.36 hours a day on a phone.

So as Super Girl, the defining product of the TV era, starts up again, people want to know more than whether a new Li Yuchun will emerge. They want to know what this old entertainment empire can offer in a market the internet has remade.

What Has Changed in the New Super Girl?

On March 7, the launch event looked like a sequel to the glory of ten years ago. Hunan Broadcasting was still the lead, though the main stage had moved from Hunan TV to Mango TV. The sponsor was still Mengniu Dairy. EE-Media, the company born of the first Super Girl, was there too. Whatever is new lies behind these familiar faces, or so they say.

Meanwhile, new partners kept arriving: Sina Weibo, WeChat, the karaoke app Changba, the fashion app Mingxing Yichu. Each adds an internet twist to this year's show, and each stands for a new way of playing the game online.

"Super Girl is no longer just a variety show. It's more like an entertainment product," said Zhou Shan, executive producer of Super Girl 2016.

Zhou took the job at Mango TV's behest. Before becoming executive producer of this year's show, he was part of the team, led by Long Danni, that made the first Super Girl. Tasked with meeting the internet's challenge, Mango TV is turning itself from a distribution channel into a platform that makes its own content. Its plan has two parts: rebuilding classic franchises for the internet (hard, but with plenty of upside) and making wholly original work (web series, shows, web films and so on). Super Girl belongs to the first.

"In today's media environment, a TV station mainly tells people that something is happening. It is no longer purely where they consume entertainment. TV can't pull everything together in a single moment the way it once could," said Liu Chenliang, executive vice president of Mango TV. "If you rework a project purely on a TV platform, you still can't escape linear broadcasting, because once you're cut loose from the schedule you have nothing to work with."

That is one of the main reasons this year's Super Girl moved from Hunan TV to Mango TV. The other involves the licensing of talent shows, and it means this Super Girl may never air on Hunan TV at all.

The organizers say this is still being negotiated, but it is plainly a potential problem. Xu Wei, vice president of marketing at Changba, another partner this year, said some parents were wary of letting their children enter through Changba because they weren't sure this was the same Super Girl that Hunan TV used to run. "Some people even asked me to show contestants an official Super Girl invitation, and wanted me to prove the director and production team were real."

Changba is one of the direct-entry zones for sign-ups and open auditions. For an internet project, that makes obvious sense. As of March 6, more than 130,000 people had signed up across all channels, a large number. Liu Chenliang believes the contestant pool alone already gives the show enough scale. "Think about it: if 100,000 people each upload a video, that's 100,000 videos. If each one is watched by just 20 people, that's 2 million views. And how many people can one person influence? About 60. So at this basic scale, the capacity to draw users in is already fully open."

It isn't only the platform that has changed. The 2016 format has changed too. "For a talent show, the three biggest draws are the format, the star guests and the contestants' stories. What sets Super Girl apart is elimination round after round, starting with the open auditions," said Zhao Hui, vice president of EE-Media.

According to the official details, Super Girl 2016 will run for eight months. Open auditions across four main fronts (Mango TV as the main stage, 10 regional audition zones in China, a number of online and offline partner direct-entry zones, and eight overseas audition zones) will select a pool of 300 candidates. Up to this point, the process largely follows the show's traditional format.

After the auditions, Mango TV will produce the rest of the competition. Contestants enter a second, national head-to-head stage, also called the "idol incubation" stage. The 100 most popular contestants then compete for places in Mango TV's "Super Girl Academy." There, the show will give them vocal coaches, star mentors and talent-management teams for professional training, along with personal courses and their own private livestreaming rooms. The production team will show the birth of an "idol" as a reality show streamed live 24 hours a day, from every angle.

Can a Show Still Create an Idol for the Whole Nation?

Super Girl is adding a reality-show element because the way audiences consume idols has changed.

"Idols today are niche. They're no longer filtered out round by round as they used to be. We call today's idols 'private idols.' It's no longer 'I like this person, so you have to like them too.' It's that I have the person I like and you have the person you like. We may have nothing in common, but that doesn't stop us from being good friends. So we hope this kind of setup will help users find themselves more," said Liu Chenliang.

The industry calls variety shows built this way "idol-incubation shows." The genre really took off last year with shows such as iQiyi's King of Pop and Young Times and X-Fire, co-produced by Zhejiang TV with EE-Media and Tencent Video. They combine the selection and elimination of older talent shows with reality-show elements, and they borrow from the Japanese and Korean star-making systems: they follow young idols from ordinary people to stars and train them in every part of performing.

Idols made this way fit what young people today think an idol is. From solo stars like Kris Wu and Lu Han to the newer idol groups, such as China's TFBOYS and Japan's AKB48, none of them are national idols in the traditional sense.

On the whole, China's star-making industry is still finding its feet, but the direction is clear. This year you will see a string of idol-incubation shows, some developed by TV channels on their own, some co-produced by TV channels and video sites: Anhui TV's Star Power Asia, Hunan TV's Summer Sweethearts and Energetic Girls, Zhejiang TV's Lady Bees, and National Sweethearts, made by SMG's Internet Program Center and Dragon TV Center with Youku Tudou and SNH48.

Traditional TV talent shows such as The Voice of China, Sing My Song, Dream Partners and The Most Beautiful Harmony focus on competition and who wins each head-to-head. Idol-incubation shows have caught on because the kind of interaction they invite suits the habits of online video viewers better.

The original Super Girl was hardly short of new ideas about interaction. It may have been one of the first entertainment shows to make audience participation work. Riding China Mobile at the height of its power, text-message voting and phone campaigns for votes set off a nationwide entertainment craze and made a lot of money. According to public figures at the time, text voting alone brought Super Girl more than 10 million yuan: each text cost 1 yuan for China Mobile users, 0.5 yuan for China Unicom and Little Smart users, and 3 yuan from a landline (through a single shared IP number).

In an age when everyone uses WeChat, text voting plainly no longer suits how audiences behave. What should voting and interaction look like now? EE-Media started experimenting early. On the online talent show X-Fire, it tried voting through websites, through WeChat and with paid virtual items on video platforms, and it worked with a bullet-comment site to let viewers post wisecracks across the screen.

Huang Fang, a producer at EE-Media, said the company is mainly handling this year's early talent scouting and producing the final ten shows. Interaction and format are what the team discusses most. "We keep asking how to use the internet's reach and marketing strengths to engage young audiences better."

Penguin Intelligence once ran an online survey on how people interact on video sites. Among the interactive features video sites offer, it found, the most used were, in order: like/dislike, comments and favorites, and paying for virtual gifts (42.3% of users were not keen on "buy while you watch"). Bullet comments spread fast, with usage rising to 13.5%, overtaking subscriptions.

Among users who like to interact while watching live streams, 67.1% preferred to do so on mobile devices, against 32.9% on PCs. That matches the current pattern in which nearly 70% of video-site traffic comes from mobile.

This Super Girl will use some of these features as well. And because people watch online video differently, the production team also has to weigh episode length, how complex the format is, and how consistent the interaction is across the show. "A TV talent-show episode used to run about 90 minutes. This year a single round might be just 10 or 20 minutes. Nothing is settled yet. We're working out which format gives viewers the better experience," said Huang Fang.

The Old Commercial Pull May Never Come Back

To some extent, of course, they hope to produce more stars like Li Yuchun, Zhou Bichang and Zhang Liangying. But everything Super Girl relied on back then has changed. The way idols are made has changed so much that no one is sure what an idol should be anymore. Even the Super Girl team doesn't know whether the final winner will be one person or a group.

And the show may face more competitors than ever: talent shows on other satellite channels, reality-plus-talent shows from video sites and, of course, all sorts of idol-incubation groups. They may not understand talent shows better than Super Girl does, but one thing is certain: that golden age will not return.

The 2005 season of Super Girl was more popular than anything before it. According to ratings data released by CSM Media Research, people-meter surveys in 12 cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Changsha, gave the show an average rating of 8.54%, rising to an average of 11% during the finals. By one account, one in five Chinese people watched it, and its ratings record still stands. It caught the golden age of television, introduced ideas such as the talent show and the public vote, set the template for TV production for years, and even changed how China's music industry made stars. Some of the stars it produced have had far longer careers than those from similar shows: Li Yuchun and Zhang Liangying are still at the top of the industry.

With that popularity came enormous commercial value. According to public sources, the seven final-round episodes of Super Girl in 2005 brought in nearly 20 million yuan in advertising. The exclusive title sponsor, Mengniu, put in close to 100 million yuan in total, by far the largest contribution. That investment multiplied sales of Mengniu Suansuanru, and they kept growing: in 2004 alone, its revenue jumped from 700 million yuan to 3 billion yuan.

Today, title sponsorship for a hit satellite-TV variety show starts at 200 million yuan and can reach about 500 million (Where Are We Going, Dad?, for example), while for web variety shows it starts at 50 million yuan and can reach 300 million (U Can U Bibi, for example). By those standards, Mengniu's 150-million-yuan exclusive title sponsorship of this year's Super Girl looks fairly restrained.

"This year's Super Girl has already raised more than 300 million yuan in sponsorship online, not counting conventional ads," Yuan Ganghong, vice president of Mango TV, told QDaily. That puts it on a par with the top tier of web-show title sponsorships.

Given the current climate of public opinion, the new Super Girl has done quite well at attracting sponsors.