World Cup Ad Slots Start at 165 Million Yuan. How Did Three Internet Companies Turn Them Into "Naobaijin" Spots?

"Getting a consumer to watch the ad once is like getting them to watch it 10 times."

"Looking for a job! Talk directly! To the boss!"

"Before you travel — why check Mafengwo first? Before you travel — why…"

"Do you know? Do you really know? Are you sure you know? Are you really sure you know? If you have a question, go to Zhihu. Go to Zhihu, ask Zhihu, answer on Zhihu, read Zhihu, search Zhihu, scroll Zhihu — if you have a question, go to Zhihu."

Over the past week, these three ads — endlessly repeating spots from Boss Zhipin, Mafengwo and Zhihu, all running during match breaks — have left a sizable scar on the minds of fans following the World Cup.

Young people who had grown used to ad-blocking plug-ins and paid video-site memberships came back to the television set for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, only to be bombarded again by ads in the style of Hengyuanxiang and Naobaijin, some of them from brands they knew well. It made a number of them angry.

Boss Zhipin's World Cup ad

When It Matters Most, Why Do Ads Turn Back Into "Naobaijin"?

Russia is only five hours behind China, and that "prime viewing time" pulled in more live viewers. Unlike the Spring Festival Gala, the World Cup holds fans' attention, which means an ad shown there is more likely to be remembered.

This is the first year CCTV has sublicensed the World Cup broadcast rights, but CCTV still controls the ad inventory: Youku, which paid around a billion yuan for rights, has to carry CCTV5's feed. So any brand that bought a CCTV World Cup slot had a shot at being seen by at least 33.52 million people. In today's fragmented media environment that is rare. The World Cup is without question one of the last true mass media events left.

A few days into the campaign, the comments under @Boss Zhipin's official Weibo said the ad had "ruined the World Cup." One comment with 296 likes read: "Not only is this ad cold, it plants the anxious, negative mood of our restless society into the ad and inflicts permanent damage on viewers' eyes, ears and minds. It is the worst ad I have ever seen in China."

Under @Mafengwo Travel's pinned Weibo post, one user replied: "Congratulations, you won. We'll remember your ad. But believe me, I will never use your product."

Boss Zhipin took the worst of it. Coming on top of the company's bad press last August, the frantic, dim-witted job seekers in the ad struck netizens as something out of a pyramid scheme. A hashtag, #BoycottBossZhipinsVulgarWorldCupAd#, appeared on Weibo on June 16 and has since drawn 260,000 views.

The pile-on quickly became a story of its own. The WeChat account "Sanbiao Longmenzhen" called them "ads that commit premeditated murder." Several ad-industry accounts — "Jiang Chacha," "Ad Blacklist" and "Ad Copywriting Circle" — all published pieces attacking them.

In the United States, the habit in recent years at big sporting events like the Super Bowl has been to sell longer, one-minute slots, so that a brand can tell one complete, well-made story that then keeps traveling on YouTube and other digital platforms.

We have written about many such cases — Always's Like a Girl, Budweiser's Super Bowl ad last year. Even when they are divisive, what people argue about online is the values behind the ad.

2015 Super Bowl ad: Always — Like a Girl

Length is no excuse. CCTV's rules didn't offer slots that long, but these were the conventional 15 seconds.

Fox sold six-second ads during the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, on the theory that a shorter ad improves the viewing experience while still letting a brand deliver one short, precise message. Creative work with six-second ads has produced plenty of good examples.

In the late 1990s, when China's creative advertising business was just beginning, the endlessly repeated "For gifts, give only Naobaijin" was the ad people remembered most.

Twenty years on, the industry has plenty of agencies and plenty of creative people. Handed a global event, it has gone straight back to "Naobaijin."

Brands Figure That If 15 Seconds Costs 165 Million Yuan, You'd Better Say It a Few More Times to Get Your Money's Worth

Mafengwo was on the first list of World Cup ad buyers CCTV published this January, where sponsorships started at 165 million yuan; CCTV took in 3.9 billion yuan from that first round. Boss Zhipin and Zhihu were not on the list, but both later got sponsorships through other channels.

"The World Cup is very expensive, and 15 seconds is very little room. Since we chose a medium where every inch costs gold, we wanted the most efficient way to tell new users what Zhihu actually does."

The person running Zhihu's campaign, the head of its marketing department, told QDaily that by the size of the media buy, this is the biggest marketing push in Zhihu's history.

Most of the World Cup slots CCTV sold run 15 seconds; only a few heavy spenders, such as Mengniu and Vivo, could stretch to 30. Because this is a sporting event, CCTV has to fit as many advertisers as possible into the precious halftime break.

"The World Cup is an enormous pool of traffic. You have to create conflict in that pool and make a huge splash — if all you make is a bubble, you're wasting the client's resources," said Ye Maozhong, who made the Zhihu ad, in an interview with QDaily.

Ye Maozhong Strategic Marketing, founded in 1989, is one of China's earliest homegrown ad agencies, and the shop behind both the Zhihu and the Mafengwo World Cup ads. Its founder, Ye Maozhong, entered advertising in the late 1980s, and you will know his work: "Visit Heilan Home twice a year," "Everyone on Earth knows," "Wash it for better health," "How can you catch a cold at a moment like this," "As far as our thinking reaches, that's how far we can go" — and the Renrenche ad with Huang Bo shouting through a megaphone.

Ye Maozhong is practically a synonym for hiring a celebrity, shooting an ad, buying CCTV time and building a national brand; the weeks before Spring Festival are his busiest of the year. Companies that want CCTV to build or rebuild their brand trust him. He has also published several marketing books, all carrying the same signature portrait of himself on the cover; the latest, Conflict, came out last year and sells for 108 yuan.

An effective ad, Ye Maozhong says, "must show the brand name at least three times, and must drill it into the audience's memory within 15 seconds." That is why the word "Zhihu" appears nine times in Zhihu's ad.

"Whether the people who see the ad love you or hate you, what matters first is that they know you, that they know who you are," he said. The argument about him outside the agency excites him. "During the World Cup buy, what we have to think about even harder is how to spend 100 million yuan and get the effect of a billion." "Getting a consumer to watch the ad once is like getting them to watch it 10 times."

When that "plain" way of thinking meets a client blunter still than Zhihu — Zhihu's copy at least changes a little from line to line — an ad that repeats exactly the same line six times is easy to produce.

Feng Rao, who runs Mafengwo's travel research center, told Economic Observer that the World Cup fits the moment when Mafengwo's product gets used: viewers learn about a new destination from the tournament, and the first thing they want is a travel guide to the place, to see what there is to do there.

In Ye Maozhong's words: "Mafengwo resolves the conflict that comes before you travel." He repeated that idea six times in the ad.

The three-part, 15-second Hengyuanxiang spot — "Hengyuanxiang, sheep sheep sheep" — also ran six times over back when it played on CCTV.

Underneath It All Is How You Measure an Ad. Numbers Come First, and Internet Companies Count Too Precisely

It is no coincidence that all three ads built on repetition came from internet brands.

Because internet companies sell an abstract service rather than a physical product, they have a particular need to hammer their features home in a campaign, and the growth pressure that comes with raising money pushes them to chase every countable number. The result is an ad strategy of high-frequency exposure that throws out storytelling altogether.

The Zhihu marketing head thinks the current public argument about the ad is lopsided: "A few self-media accounts and Weibo posts say something, and everyone takes it as the nation's verdict. Looking at every kind of product data since the ad started running, the results have been quite good."

The World Cup is only the opening channel for this round of Zhihu ads; the whole campaign is aimed at the summer, runs through August, and will also take in outdoor advertising, online video and other media. "Look at our product data: for the core 18-to-35 audience, summer is also when organic user growth tends to be larger."

Open the App Store now and Mafengwo sits at the top of trending searches. The App Store's trending-search algorithm counts downloads, which means Mafengwo's ad really did bring in a lot of new installs in a short time.

Boss Zhipin posted on Weibo on June 18 that it had reached No. 1 on the App Store's free Business chart (it has since dropped to No. 3). The comments under that post were still a wall of abuse.

The Boss Zhipin ad was made by Red Production, a Beijing agency founded in 2013. In a talk last year, founder Yue Huaping sorted ad clients into two kinds, "big-brand big players" and "awareness players." Boss Zhipin belongs to the second kind: "The first job is to build awareness. What method, what tone — those come second."

After the criticism appeared online, Yue Huaping reposted netizens' parody images on Weibo: "Paid posters, come repost it, it'll make you even angrier." And: "In three years, three Red Production ads carried Boss Zhipin to No. 1."

Red Production doesn't only make brainwashing ads. It has also worked for Xiaomi, Dell and NetEase Games, and it can make very good work. The Xiaomi brand films that ran on the Spring Festival Gala for several years, the ones people remember, came from Red Production too — which shows, to some degree, that whether an ad turns out good or bad is finally the client's call.

The "big brands" Yue Huaping talks about do care about conversion and sales. Their problem is that they have never been able to measure what an ad converts.

The most common sponsors of big sporting events are carmakers, packaged-goods companies and beverage companies.

Not many people, halfway through a World Cup match, will see an ad and go buy a pack of sanitary pads, or drive a new Mercedes home from the dealership.

In the end a brand can only measure the effect through ratings. The Coca-Cola ad Hilltop that closes Mad Men is a classic not because it sent sales soaring, but because "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" spoke to a whole generation.

Internet companies watching download counts are different: a viewer really might see an app they've never used and install it on the spot. And on the back end you can watch the download numbers climb through exactly that window. Growth ends up the only measure, and the only goal.

This is also why the creative advertising business has always been wary of Facebook and Google. When short-term data decides everything, every kind of brand value and creative work that needs years to build is under threat.

"Today's internet brands all seem to have walked into a short-sighted trap: traffic and crisis management have become what these brands care about most," said Liu Shuo, Beijing general manager of the digital marketing company Social Touch. "That's probably not what the brand owners want either, but capital-driven new brands lack cultural depth in their genes."

Because this was its first time advertising on a medium with this much traffic, Zhihu's marketing department was running market research to pin down where Zhihu sits in users' minds while also choosing an agency. The head of the department said: "We felt Zhihu has too many features to point to, and he — Ye Maozhong — could help a lot, by looking at us from a neutral, objective position."

For Zhihu, which came to him with a huge budget, Ye Maozhong's insight went like this:

Zhihu's advertising tone in the past was built on a niche audience: we found the people who responded to depth of knowledge, said things they and we both understood, struck feelings they and we both understood, and deepened the core group's attachment to Zhihu. That core group then acted as opinion leaders, spread the brand a second time and widened Zhihu's audience. So "a serious Q&A community" and "your seriousness, seen by the world" were both really deep conversation with core users. The advantage of growing that way is steadiness: high stickiness, high loyalty. But when Zhihu needs to get onto the fast lane of scale, it isn't hard to see that going from niche to mass, the core conflict is no longer more professional, more finely tuned answers to questions of knowledge. It is the internet user's enormous conflict of "needing to get valuable information when most platforms are full of information of wildly uneven quality."

If all you look at is downloads, it is hard to call that judgment wrong.

But the brand's audience doesn't necessarily like it. Cai Meng, co-founder of the local social creative agency Verawom, also shared "Ad Blacklist"'s post to his Moments. He said he was one of Zhihu's earliest users, and that after watching the ad he wanted to "uninstall Zhihu."

Compared with Boss Zhipin and Mafengwo, what Zhihu's ad really enraged were its old users. Over its seven years this online Q&A community ran copy in a very different register — "a serious Q&A community," "take it seriously and you win." Its offline event was a "clinic that treats not knowing what you don't know." The figures who have appeared in its ads include Hemingway, Schrödinger and Picasso. This May, Zhihu had just released a brand film called Discover a Bigger World, more than four minutes long. Now its World Cup ad is Liu Haoran asking over and over, "Do you know? Are you really sure you know?"

Zhihu's 15-second ad with Liu Haoran

The problem is the ad, not Liu Haoran. There were signs of his deal with Zhihu in early June. Fans noticed he had suddenly registered a verified Zhihu account and followed the question "What makes people sing off-key?", which set off a small flurry at the time. The top-voted answer to the Zhihu question "What do you make of Liu Haoran endorsing Zhihu?" was itself a video teasing him for singing off-key.

After the ad starring him went live with the World Cup's opening, the highest-ranked answers to "What do you make of Zhihu running an ad on CCTV's World Cup?" and "What do you make of the Liu Haoran ad Zhihu ran during the World Cup?" were denunciations, without exception: worst ad ever… dumbest ad ever… read Zhihu, delete Zhihu… In a Q&A community that claims 150 million people, nobody seemed willing to say one good word.

Client, Agency and Consumer All Made the Ads This Stupid — But the Consumer Is Always the Passive Party

The trouble with the World Cup itself is that this globally watched event, like the television medium it depends on, can no longer control where the conversation goes on the internet.

Even a fairly conservative idea can turn into a brand crisis because of one sudden trending topic. Mengniu's World Cup ad with Messi, "Born to Be Strong," became raw material for netizen parody after Messi's team faltered in its opening match.

"What stayed with me most was the Olympics two years ago. Unlike several Olympics before it, at Rio in 2016 what viewers actually remembered was not world champions like Xu Haifeng, Deng Yaping, Wang Nan or Liu Guoliang. More viewers remembered Fu Yuanhui's 'primordial power,' the semifinal 'Lin-Lee showdown,' 'bravely winning silver' and 'happily taking bronze,'" said Liu Shuo of Social Touch.

During this World Cup, Social Touch handled PR and social promotion for a Mengniu marketing event: Mengniu picked 88 young Chinese soccer players to train and compete in Russia. But from the audience's side, people clearly preferred making fun of Messi to paying attention to that news. Mengniu chose to let it cool and did not respond.

Now that Messi may be going home, Mengniu keeping the ad on air looks more awkward still.

Consumers, Liu Shuo said, long ago learned to block information pushed at them and to go find content themselves; when viewers curse an ad today, it is also "not because the brand did a bad job, but because technology has made feedback easier."

Faced with that reputational risk, some brands have turned conservative and no longer dare to make an ad that steps out of line. Budweiser, which stirred up controversy at the 2017 Super Bowl, went this year with a thoroughly wholesome film about its breweries.

Others have started going backwards, deliberately making ads unbearable, shooting one "Naobaijin" after another, as if enough traffic could cancel out the audience's bad experience.

Asked how he judges whether these ads succeeded, Ye Maozhong said that after the ads he previously made for Renrenche and Mafengwo ran over Spring Festival, the feedback from client executives and investors was that "growth far exceeded expectations." "This is Zhihu's first buy. The feedback I got just today is that they will spend even more heavily during the World Cup knockout rounds."

On the stupidity of Chinese advertising, Cai Meng thinks no one is innocent — not the client, not the agency, not the consumer.

But, he said, "Consumers are always the last to change; they take what they're given. Someone has to change this on purpose. If we wait for every consumer to reach the point where they can't stand it, that's another 50 years."

Cover image from a video screenshot