Everyone Says They Didn't Spend Less. So Where Did the Double 11 Ads Go? | Double 11 Insights ③

Every e-commerce platform now wants something different out of Double 11. The ads are all still there — they've just gone quiet.

You still can't get away from Double 11 ads. But haven't you noticed that this year they feel less rowdy?

That made us wonder whether ad spending on this year's Double 11 had actually fallen. Going by volume, everyone we interviewed said the opposite.

"Our numbers show growth, and the buying is starting earlier," said Jin Min, spokesperson for Tongcheng Advertising, which sells the ad space in the Beijing subway. In Beijing, she said, nearly every station has a run of Tmall and JD.com light boxes. Tongcheng holds 75% of the city's subway ad inventory.

By Jin's figures, at Guomao Station alone Tmall bought three large zones: the south wall of the transfer corridor, the passage and escalators from Line 1 to Line 10, and the wall posters on both sides of the east concourse of Line 10. Yangmatou took the wall posters on both sides of the Line 10 west concourse; Mogujie took the wall posters in the south corridor linking the two Line 10 concourses at Guomao; iQiyi took the wall posters in the south corridor linking the two Line 10 platforms, plus the west platform heading toward Shuangjing; JD.com bought 12 sets of connected light boxes.

Guomao Station. By advertising value it is an S-tier station — the top grade of subway ad inventory — with average daily foot traffic of 549,000. At Tongcheng's published rates, four weeks of those ads would come to 8.568 million yuan. Even with discounts, that is not cheap.

Focus Media, which owns more building-lobby ad screens than anyone, would not give QDaily specific numbers, saying only that "the Double 11 slot is completely booked, and the busy season that starts in November will run to the end of the year."

"The brands we work for have doubled their Double 11 ad budgets this year, both on-platform — on the e-commerce sites — and off," said Zhang Huimin, managing director for e-commerce at GroupM China, the media agency owned by WPP. He is handling ad buying for more than 20 brands' Double 11 campaigns this year, Procter & Gamble among them.

And yet, while you can still feel Double 11 being warmed up and talked up, the whiff of gunpowder is fainter than in past years. The clearest case is the ad war between JD.com and Tmall. The end of the "ambush" is probably a big reason you no longer feel swept along by a wall of advertising.

Between 2013 and 2015, when Tmall and JD.com were fighting hardest, you'd often see pictures like this online: one subway corridor, a row of Tmall ads on the left, a row of JD.com ads on the right. Walk the whole of Guomao Station in Beijing today and you'll find that Tmall and JD.com ad spots are almost never side by side. In cinema advertising lately, it's also rare to see the two running back to back.

According to an industry figure who asked not to be named, e-commerce companies began writing exclusivity clauses into their outdoor ad buys this year. Eight years into the shopping festival, "no ambushes" seems to have become an unwritten rule. Yangmatou did remind people to save some budget for the next shopping event — Black Friday, which it pushes hardest — but even that looked far less pugnacious.

Another heavyweight in Double 11 advertising, Suning.com, is now "partnered" with Tmall, and Yihaodian has been taken over by JD.com — both of which dull the sense of a pitched battle. What's left are women's-fashion platforms like Mogujie and Vipshop, and cross-border shopping sites like Yangmatou and NetEase Kaola. None of them can match Tmall or JD.com on sheer size, so this year they are all trying more roundabout ways to catch a shopper's eye.

Mogujie has put its hopes on an original web series, The Worry-Solving Buyer's Shop (《解忧买手店》), a short drama starring its endorser Li Yifeng, which went up on October 15 and has drawn 32.36 million views so far. Mogujie says its Double 11 marketing budget has shifted from 20% online and 80% offline last year to 40:60 this year. "There's no way we can compete with Tmall and JD.com on scale," the company said. "More social-marketing moves will keep coming through the rest of the year."

NetEase Yanxuan used NetEase Cloud Music to release an ad jingle on November 4, NetEase Yanxuan Has Purchase Limits (《网易严选限购了》), which makes fun of buying things on Double 11 and regretting it afterwards. The song promotes the store's own November 8 sale — an attempt to cut in ahead of Double 11's traffic.

The two most direct rivals, Tmall and JD.com, in fact want different things out of this year's Double 11.

As we argued in the first article in this series, Alibaba has stopped stressing GMV — gross merchandise volume — in its earnings reports and turned to "making content." This year it wants Double 11 to show off its international, fashionable side.

Over the past two weeks Tmall has rolled out a string of marketing moves it would not have tried before:

October 28: two songs made with the Rainbow Chamber Singers and the band Travelling, 《我就是这么诚实》 ("I'm Just That Honest") and 《双十一购物指南》 ("A Double 11 Shopping Guide").

November 1: a call for people to draw fish to feed the Tmall cat, for a chance at tickets to the Double 11 gala.

November 3: a launch event for its "must-buy list," with SNH48, Wang Zijian and Ma Weiwei performing.

Then the Double 11 gala on November 10.

Along the way came an HTML5 ad said to have cost a million yuan, 《穿越宇宙的邀请函》 ("An Invitation Across the Universe"), which drew 200 million views within a day of release, until WeChat blocked it. Answering QDaily's questions by email, Alibaba CMO Dong Benhong also dwelt mostly on content-marketing examples.

But a Nielsen report from October found that discounts are still what shoppers respond to most. Newer methods such as content marketing and livestreaming have limited pull overall, though they do well with 26-to-35-year-olds.

The same report put awareness of the Double 11 shopping festival at 83%. With that number in hand, the platforms appear to think there is less need to keep selling Double 11 itself — including its oldest tag line, 50% off.

JD.com has started telling you to "shop rationally." In two TV spots that went up on November 2, a man and a woman each say they have something to say about Double 11: calm down and buy something good.

But "calm down" doesn't mean stop buying. JD.com's standing tactic is to stretch the shopping festival out, and this year more than ever. From November 1 it ran promotions across the whole site. Qian Shuying, a doctoral student, spent 400 or 500 yuan during last week's half-price book sale on books listed at 2,000 yuan. "It's obvious with JD.com this year — the ads are there telling you not to wait for Double 11. My demand for books has already been spent," she said.

JD.com's earliest Double 11 teaser this year, 《红的故事》 ("The Story of Red"), is told from a delivery worker's point of view and goes for warmth. JD.com says this "sets it apart from the competition" — though you may remember that back when JD.com was attacking Tmall's weak logistics, its line was "Fast Is Satisfying."

Tmall has dropped the 50%-off talk too. Alibaba CEO Zhang Yong put it this way: "Double 11 has come far enough that we no longer use low prices as a selling point." In keeping with that, Tmall this year put up a set of 49 "cat head" posters carrying 49 international brands picked by its marketing department — Beats headphones, Zwilling, Nike, Evian, Maserati, custom high-end snowboards and others. In Jin Min's words, they are the kind of brand "you look at and know you'll use for a long time once you buy it."

The cat-head ad first appeared at last year's Tmall mid-year sale. Tmall now treats it as important brand property, and its job is to build the platform's position around what it calls "global quality." In practice Tmall sets the rough shape of the ad — the cat head — and each brand's agency submits its own Double 11 design. New Balance's agency, W, started working up its poster in August and ended with a steampunk illustration.

The result is that the blanket of hot red that used to cover Double 11 advertising is now hard to find, replaced by each brand's own visual choices. JD.com's Double 11 ads, meanwhile, have taken on a lot more blue, to underline "rational consumption." Visually, all of this softens the blow.

"The big platforms are moving from pure price competition toward competing on quality and experience. That's where this is going," is how Zhang Huimin reads the changes he has seen this year. In fact almost everyone we interviewed traced the shift in advertising to "consumption upgrading." Hence Tmall's theme this year, "Indulge, enjoy," JD.com's "Buy something good," and Mogujie's "We only sell good-looking things."

Brands taking part in Double 11 feel the end of 50% off more directly. All of the 20-plus Double 11 brands GroupM China is handling this year are still offering their deepest discounts of the year, but none is going straight to half price. "Tmall also lets brands join a 40%-off session or a 30%-off session," Zhang said. "And this year it's more about traffic from content — brands care more and more about content and social."

You have probably already seen various "Double 11 must-buy lists" on WeChat official accounts, the sort that make it easy to forget you are reading an ad. Barring surprises, it is either part of Alibaba's own must-buy list campaign or part of a brand's Double 11 warm-up.

By Zhang Huimin's reckoning, brand clients now put more and more weight on marketing inside the platform, because it converts to sales more directly. "By the daytime of Double 11, everyone has already bought what they had to buy. After that they browse the way they would in a mall, and whichever 'shelf' appears first gets the customer." Because on-platform traffic matters so much on the day, brands are willing to carry the Tmall Double 11 logo in their own outdoor and online video ads.

The Mentholatum ad that ran before Doctor Strange, for instance, closes by reminding the audience that "Double 11 is coming." And Youku, part of the same Alibaba group, worked a Double 11 mention into its promotion for the final season of the British series Sherlock.

Tmall is trading its Double 11 traffic for ad space with brands on a large scale, probably the biggest use yet of the "Tianhe Plan" ad program it set up this year. "Go to an airport now and a third of the outdoor ads carry the Tmall or Double 11 logo. Same with the pre-roll ads on video sites like Youku and iQiyi," Zhang Huimin said.

Some of the money goes where you can't see it. On October 22, Alibaba held this year's Double 11 press conference in Hong Kong and launched Tmall.hk, letting Hong Kong shoppers pay with Octopus cards and Hong Kong dollars — a first step toward pulling more of the world into the Double 11 rush.

For the US market, you may have noticed that the first performer announced for this year's gala was Katy Perry, who will also serve as global promotional ambassador for the "2016 Tmall Double 11 Gala." The trend showed up last year: the 2015 gala brought in Daniel Craig, who plays James Bond, and President Underwood from House of Cards.

Winning on raw traffic has become hard, and the industry knows it. Alibaba has hinted more than once that traffic on this year's Double 11 may not be as big. Pushing better — or pricier — brands is, seen another way, a method of raising the average order value in order to drive the final one-day sales number.

Since last year, Tmall's Double 11 has used a promotion it calls "deposit inflation": you pay a deposit before the day that counts for more than its face value, then settle the balance on Double 11 itself. In practice this locks in inventory early and pushes stock out. If you have opened Taobao lately meaning to buy something, you have probably gotten a message like this: don't buy yet — put down a deposit and it'll be cheaper on Double 11.

Eight days out from Double 11, Gao Xinyi posted on WeChat Moments that she had already spent more than 10,000 yuan on pre-orders, mostly travel: round-trip flights to the US, hotels under the Hanting brands. She is a product manager at an internet company.

Nie Ziqing, who works at a state-owned company, has made a habit of stocking up on household goods during Double 11; right now her cart holds 300 yuan of them. Vicky, who works at an ad agency, has three pre-orders sitting in the Taobao app. "Friends and coworkers joke about planting cravings in each other, hurting each other," she said — which is how Line Friends ended up on her list. The other category is international brands that don't usually discount much, such as Topshop.

Not everyone is keen. Yan Jiayu, who works at the New Zealand embassy, has put nothing in her cart this year. On the day she may consider some small appliances and household goods; as for heavy winter clothes, she bought those over the past two years, so "there's no need for now."

"You have to fight for the deals on Double 11, and I never win," she said. "It might also be that there are so many places to shop this year — it feels like the e-commerce sites are always running a promotion. So Double 11 gets watered down too."

We'll publish the next article on Double 11 itself. Every player says it doesn't care too much about the transaction number, but you know they are all hoping to break last year's record. Let's see how it turns out.