Chinese New Year Marketing Starts Earlier, Super Bowl Ads Play Coy: With TV in Decline, Advertising Is Still Looking for What Moves People

Digital advertising can be counted down to the last cent, but nobody has settled on what works best.

Eight internet brands, five fast-moving consumer goods brands, three baijiu brands, two home appliance brands, two financial brands and two carmakers bought ads in the prime eight minutes before the 2019 Year of the Pig Spring Festival Gala went on air.

Douyin and Baidu were both there to hand out red envelopes. Douyin turned up in the CCTV special The Happy Road Home, the Moment the Door Opens; Baidu's ad was blunt and to the point.

JD.com and Suning were both still pushing their New Year Shopping Festival sales, the first marketing date on every e-commerce platform's calendar.

Taobao had Xu Zheng star in an ad for its "empty your cart" campaign, and the closing line — "Shop on Taobao, find what you like" — was voiced, as usual, by Jack Ma.

The louder voice and the greater number of slots belonged to Taobao's rival Pinduoduo. Counting the time it shared with the baijiu brand Gujing Gong, Pinduoduo took 88 of those 480 golden seconds.

Douyin and Baidu both wanted to repeat what WeChat's red envelopes had pulled off in earlier Spring Festivals. Douyin was giving away a "collect the notes, split 500 million yuan" prize; Baidu planned to hand out 1 billion yuan. Sina Weibo brought in five celebrities — Wallace Chung, Yang Yang, Jackson Wang, Zhu Yilong and Yang Zi — to pick 100 users and send them 2,019-yuan red envelopes.

Take away the internet companies that had turned the Gala into a red-envelope war, and most of the remaining advertisers were former members of CCTV's "National Brand Plan." Foreign brands had disappeared from the lineup long ago.

This slot before the Gala, where 15 seconds costs about 20 million yuan, has over 30 years drawn money first from watchmakers, then from liquor and pharmaceutical companies, then from manufacturers. Since 2011 internet companies have occupied the Gala, and the Gala has grown more and more dependent on traffic from social platforms to lift its ratings. The 2019 edition had more online tie-in platforms than any before it.

Since the start of the year, the bad news about television has kept coming. According to the latest figures from CTR Market Research, China's TV advertising market shrank 8.1% year-on-year in 2018, and rate-card revenue fell 0.3%.

Provincial satellite channels are struggling to sell airtime. Reports say Hunan TV sold 1.309 billion yuan of prime-time inventory for 2019, a quarter of the figure for the same period a year earlier. Half a month before the Gala aired, CCTV's three-year-old "National Brand Plan," which had lent its imprimatur to state-owned enterprises, was suspended on suspicion of breaching the Advertising Law. And of the satellite-channel variety shows that once won television its revenue back, only one — The Voice of China — cleared a 1% rating in all of 2018, according to industry figures.

Like the NFL's Super Bowl, played on February 3, the Gala broadcast on New Year's Eve, February 4, used to be one of the few chances a year for a brand to address the whole country at once. But young people no longer sit dutifully in front of the television — some take the entire family abroad instead — and the playbook for Chinese New Year marketing has changed with them.

Go back a month from that date, and the Chinese and American internets each had a genuine viral hit:

A photograph of an egg posted on Instagram on January 4 collected more than 52 million likes, and the account that posted it grew past 9.9 million followers. With each update the egg's cracks spread, until it looked ready to hatch. Agencies advised their clients to bid for the right to be the brand that finally broke it open, and for the enormous exposure that would come with it. "Being the first brand to crack the egg is worth at least US$10 million," said Nik Sharma, head of consumer business at the ad agency VaynerMedia. "We're even telling clients to spend the money on this egg instead of a Super Bowl ad."

In China, think back over the past month: apart from What Is Peppa?, which Chinese New Year ad do you actually remember?

The egg and What Is Peppa? have one thing in common. Neither shows much sign of careful planning, and the marketing tie-ins and imitations only arrived after they had already taken off.

Chinese New Year ads keep starting earlier, much as Super Bowl marketing has changed over the past few years. And as the Super Bowl's own ratings slide, American brands are rethinking how to win attention too — with more ads that play coy, for instance. Over the past month we talked to eight people working on Chinese New Year campaigns. They agreed on one thing: fewer and fewer people watch the Gala, but brands today are not short of ways to promote themselves. Their problem is the same one everyone has, which is that getting people to remember anything is harder and harder.

The "Heartfelt Blockbuster" Has Stopped Working

Pepsi has been making star-packed Chinese New Year ads in its Bring Happiness Home series since 2012. This year is the eighth.

Bring Happiness Home more or less invented the tradition of releasing a "heartfelt blockbuster" at Chinese New Year. Back when micro-films and viral video marketing were still in fashion, putting out a celebrity ad before the Gala made Pepsi a benchmark for the industry. The longest film in the series ran 48 minutes.

The series peaked in 2016. That was the Year of the Monkey, and CCTV's Gala did not invite Liu Xiao Ling Tong, the actor many people were sure would appear. Pepsi cast him as the lead in Bring Happiness Home: The Monkey King Family, which took over Weibo and the rest of social media that New Year.

In a way, the reach of The Monkey King Family marked the moment CCTV's Gala handed its marketing authority over to the internet entirely — and behind that shift was a change in where brands were placing their bets.

By 2019 the seven-and-a-half-minute Bring Happiness Home: Star Chaser had pushed the premise further still, swapping an ordinary family for one in space. What has not changed is the cast of six-plus stars. But on the view counts so far, it is nowhere near The Monkey King Family, which drew 830 million views across the web, short-video plays included.

A "heartfelt blockbuster" is meant to move an audience with careful production and a touching story, in the hope they will pass it on to their Moments feed. That gets harder every year, now that everybody makes content.

Zhang Dapeng, the director behind What Is Peppa?, told QDaily in an earlier interview: "Plenty of films get made for the Chinese New Year season every year. But for the past two years there have been plenty of heartfelt films at other times of year too, so people are probably getting tired of the look."

Zhang, a commercial director with ten years of ads behind him, also shot two Chinese New Year films this year for Robam and two for a Douban x Jins collaboration. "Fewer of them [heartfelt blockbusters] actually spread. I think people are still making them — a lot of friends of mine have had jobs like that recently."

"Chinese New Year is one of the busiest marketing seasons of the year, and a lot of brands go after attention by making people cry. But audiences are more and more tired of these weepy ads," said Yang Yun, executive creative director at the creative boutique W+K Shanghai.

W+K acted on that view: for its client Budweiser this year it went light and cheerful, bringing back the Budweiser ants that Chinese consumers already know. A familiar character still counts for something.

As Super Bowl Ratings Fall, American Brands Change Too

The two countries' internets are at completely different stages of development, but more and more brands cutting their ad budgets is a problem the industry faces everywhere in a downturn, and the splintering of digital media is a shared trend as well. Chinese New Year, carried by a mood every Chinese household shares, has become a date brands have to fight over; the Super Bowl, with more than 100 million viewers, is still an event brands cannot give up.

Even so, the ratings are worrying. The 2018 Super Bowl's audience fell 7% year-on-year to 103.4 million. Joseph Ianniello, CBS's acting chief executive, said recently he was "very confident" the 2019 audience would top 100 million.

The trend of Chinese brands moving their New Year marketing earlier, on show this Year of the Pig, is something American brands started doing at the Super Bowl years ago.

The practice probably began with Volkswagen in 2011, and other brands copied it. Before the 2014 game, for instance, 22 ads went out early on social media — close to half of the 50 to 55 Super Bowl ads that ran that year.

The reasoning is easy to follow. The run-up to the Super Bowl is the moment Americans most want to see brand advertising. Releasing the ad on social media first brings in a new source of traffic, and it also keeps consumers from losing interest in the ads the moment the game ends.

This year, though, more brands dropped the habit. Burger King, the carriers Verizon and T-Mobile, the tax service TurboTax and the home security company SimpliSafe all skipped the early tease.

Skittles carried on with last year's idea of fighting the Super Bowl ad war from outside it. The brand does not actually buy time during the game; it makes a great noise about the fact that it is "making a Super Bowl ad." Last year a crowd of celebrities announced that Skittles had made an ad for one devoted fan and shown it to him alone. This year the brand rented a Broadway theater and staged a branded musical for the audience in the seats that night, and nobody else.

One ad for a Google Search feature was about a job-search tool built for service members, who make up 7% of the American population. Ad Age estimated the ad cost as much as US$10 million, yet the Google logo did not appear in full until the end.

The material in 2019's Super Bowl ads shifted quite a bit as well. The marketing trade site Campaign summed up this year's game in three words: nostalgia, robots, and women — both as an audience and as a subject.

The nostalgia may say something about how cautious brands have become. Political themes were everywhere in 2017, but this year's ads steered clear of politics, and brands went back to 1990s touchstones such as the Backstreet Boys, Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan.

Doritos' Super Bowl ad paired the Backstreet Boys with the rapper Chance the Rapper.

Robots were the other popular subject. We have written before about the robots in 2019's Super Bowl ads: they were either improving human life or being conspicuously stupid. Terence Scroope, US director of business solutions at the video ad technology firm UnrulyEQ, said: "This isn't necessarily new, but we're seeing it take up a growing share of this platform. Plenty of brands with nothing to do with technology are using technology too — the potato-chip brand Pringles used voice technology, for example. This may be a response [from brands] to consumers taking more interest in technology."

Women, according to a Nielsen report, are a large and remarkably steady part of the Super Bowl audience: from 2014 to 2018 female fans held at 46% to 47% of total viewers. With political themes largely gone from this year's ads, issue-driven and entertaining ads aimed at women turned up in force — the dating app Bumble brought in Serena Williams, and Olay ran a horror spot called Killer Skin. Both managed to be politically correct and popular at once.

Olay's horror-themed ad Killer Skin

Chinese New Year Budgets Are Shrinking Overall

Measured by reach alone, Bring Happiness Home: Star Chaser was the pick of this year's "heartfelt blockbusters," with 150,000 reposts on Weibo. But the audience had stopped paying attention to the holiday story long ago. The top comment read: "Wow, declaring my love for Yang Yang!"

An ad that cannot afford celebrities, however clever its product placement and however good its story, usually ends up "going viral inside the industry" and nowhere else.

Not everyone has the ad budget a beverage company has, and there are certainly plenty of internet companies hoping brands will buy more of their traffic. As Fu Lei, corporate development director at FCB Shanghai, puts it: "Nobody is short of ways to reach people. What's missing is a clear, imaginative brand idea behind all these formats, resources and impressions."

In the month before Chinese New Year 2019, all those cross-brand collaborations and limited New Year editions you kept seeing were a relatively cheap way to promote something — and a sign of brands that did not know what New Year message to send.

"Overall, [budgets] are down, by 10% to 15%," said Wu Zhijun, chief digital officer at WPP's MediaCom. Brands were more cautious with their 2019 Chinese New Year spending than a year earlier, he said, not only because money was tight but because there was no good channel to reach people through. "The IP itself is scattered — there's no giant IP." Wu described the way brands once bid for Gala slots, and later spent 100 million yuan and more sponsoring variety shows, as a form of gambling, and it used to be the single biggest line in a campaign. "This Chinese New Year alone there are about ten films in cinemas; the competition is fierce. In spending terms, that's a very risky bet for an advertiser."

Two Brands That Spent More, and Why

At least two brands raised rather than cut their Chinese New Year spending in 2019: Wong Lo Kat and OPPO. That follows directly from the state of the categories they sell in, herbal tea and smartphones.

Chinese New Year is already a peak season for drinks, and Wong Lo Kat's case is more extreme than most: the company told the creative agency FCB that the month or so around the holiday accounts for half its annual revenue, much of it gifts and gatherings.

The end result looks like nothing more than a one-minute film called "Good Fortune Is the Start of Everything Good." But what most consumers actually ran into was a Douyin challenge, short videos of Liu Haoran and Zhou Dongyu on Weibo, and product placement in a string of web dramas.

"Total Chinese New Year spending this year was in the tens of millions of yuan, and the main strategy was broad coverage," said Chen Mengyuan, business director at Inspire, which handled Wong Lo Kat's digital media buying. The brand started preparing right after National Day, she said, booked its Douyin inventory a full quarter ahead, and had the ad live as early as December 3. Most of the money went into web-drama placement and social marketing. Television did not come up at all.

OPPO started early too. After the launch event for the R17 New Year Special Edition on December 20, "the airport, the outdoor sites, all of it came down and was replaced with the New Year ads, those nine illustrated posters," said Sun Tao, a partner at Mamaye, the creative agency behind the Fantasy New Year campaign.

Figures from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology show that China's domestic handset shipments came to 414 million units in 2018, down 15.6% year-on-year. That made this early-year push at gift buyers especially important.

You could see the phone makers' spending everywhere, Apple included: it had Jia Zhangke direct The Bucket, though the film did not stand apart the way 2018's Three Minutes had.

OPPO, which can easily afford celebrities, used none in its Fantasy New Year ads. It hired a Spanish illustrator to draw nine New Year pictures mixing Chinese and Western imagery, which is why the campaign went live a week before Christmas. As it rolled out, Sun said, OPPO kept "adding placement opportunities and resources," and it grew into an all-channel campaign.

Brands Advertise Earlier Now, in Step With E-Commerce Sales

Judged by the length of the run-up and the effort involved, brands take Chinese New Year more seriously than they used to, not less — and one of the forces behind that is e-commerce.

For eight years Bring Happiness Home has gone live at roughly the same point, about a month before New Year's Eve, which is the usual lead time for a big Chinese New Year campaign to start warming up.

But a single Gala is no longer the only thing shaping New Year marketing. E-commerce's New Year Shopping Festival, the courier shutdown, the Spring Festival travel rush, even Christmas on December 25 all become part of the plan. That was especially true in 2019, when the lunar new year fell about half a month earlier than usual.

Based on the ads the major brands released over the past two months and on the e-commerce sales calendar, we put together the marketing timeline below.

The big platforms held their New Year Shopping Festival around January 10 this year, 25 days before the holiday itself. So a brand that wanted to join the festival's promotions had to move its teaser campaign earlier still, or run it in step with the sale. And as companies that used to talk about feelings and brand image at Chinese New Year turn their attention to selling, what their advertising says changes too.

"The couriers are going to shut down, so the dates have to move up. Traditional brand campaigns move up too, catching the pre-holiday moments — going home, family reunions — and telling those stories in that window," Wu Zhijun said. Once the holiday itself arrives, he added, "traditional manufacturers slow down, and service companies like Airbnb, Meituan and Alipay start fighting for attention."

And "reunion" and "going home" often do not mean telling a story about going home at all. They mean running blunt, sales-driven ads along the high-speed rail lines during the travel rush. Xu Zheng's Taobao New Year ad is a textbook case.

The ad P&G made with Tmall's New Year Shopping Festival maps onto sales just as directly, as we reported recently. What draws the consumer-goods giants is mainly that Tmall's festival pulls 600 offline supermarkets into a joint promotional frenzy.

Consumer-goods companies were not originally the leading players in the festival. According to Sun Jian, a senior marketing strategist at Alimama, the shopping festival is a "marketing resource" created jointly by Tmall and Alimama, and it mostly attracts food, small-appliance and cosmetics clients. "Food companies spend heavily — the fourth quarter is actually about 30% of their annual budget."

Consumers usually stock up on household and personal-care goods during Double 11, and buy more food and drink at Chinese New Year. But bringing in offline retailers' promotions helps the consumer-goods industry sell more in this window.

The platforms have their own reason to do it. Because couriers stop running every Chinese New Year, the first quarter is normally Alibaba's weakest fiscal quarter for revenue and its weakest for advertising. As the population dividend shrinks and GMV growth slows, Alibaba looks more and more like a media company that makes its money from ads: advertising has gone from 15% of its revenue in 2016 to 42%.

Across the year, the first quarter — the one with Chinese New Year in it — plainly has the most room to grow.

Still, once the couriers stop for the holiday, the habit of not opening Taobao may be hard to break: monitoring data from Aurora Mobile shows that Mobile Taobao's average daily active users between January 3 and 18, 2019 were down 3% on the late-December average.

The New Year Shopping Festival is in its fourth year. It was invented to use online activity to drive offline spending, and Alibaba now puts nearly all of its marketing machinery behind helping brands do exactly that. The other platforms are glad to see a second Double 11 take shape.

So far, though, the festival's results have not been enough for Alibaba to raise its full-year revenue guidance in its latest quarterly report. Shortly before that report, the company had in fact cut its guidance, citing the slowing global economy.

In the End, This Is Brands Hunting for Something Better Now That Television Has Failed Them

For a brand, selling things is what advertising is ultimately for. When a company like Alibaba puts this much effort into running the shopping festival, brands are happy to shift more of their budget to digital channels like it. "Around Chinese New Year, television used to take 70% of the budget; now it's probably the other way around, because the other side is where you can see real traffic," Wu Zhijun said. At Chinese New Year in particular, he said, the reversal between traditional and digital budgets can be sharper than at other times of year.

"Given how internet placement works — the oversight, the transparency of the big platforms, the KOLs — even if we can't fully track what happens while someone is watching, we can at least see the direct effect on sales. That lift is instant, and you can trace it to its source."

"This year we'll do more with O2O platforms, Ele.me for instance," said Weng Yaocheng, who heads the Coca-Cola team at Dentsu Aegis (DCCC). "Our budget definitely won't be smaller than before, because Chinese New Year is such an important start to the year. It may just be that a lot of clients are placing OTV — online video ads — more precisely now, which gives everyone the impression there are fewer ads."

"There's more demand for things that are short, quick and direct, and you can see it everywhere. Advertisers don't necessarily have the patience to shoot a really polished video."

DCCC is the media buying team Dentsu Aegis assembled for Coca-Cola in September 2017. This year Coke built its Chinese New Year marketing around Alipay, its partner for a third year running, with an AR "scan the Fu doll" campaign and more of its brands taking part than before.

In the past, Weng said, many advertisers "bought into the big variety shows," which mostly meant "buying impressions" — a model that made results hard to measure and made it impossible to control how often a consumer saw the ad. He thinks brands now care more and more about frequency capping and cutting waste, which is another way of saying they are looking for ways to save money.

A celebrity, an IP tie-in, a single push from a popular WeChat official account: each counts as one impression. Skittles' New Year campaign in China is a good example. It named Wang Yibo its brand ambassador in late December, released a Chinese New Year rap ad starring him on January 21, and posted "boyfriend's-eye-view" videos of him feeding someone Skittles across several social platforms, while also making a special-edition pack with Tencent's mobile game Tian Tian Ai Xiaochu.

This can, of course, produce a different result: with mass media gone, an ad may reach someone inside a particular circle three or four times while you, outside it, never see it once.

Wu Zhijun sees at least one improvement in that. "A 15-second ad on CCTV is like setting off a firework — over in a flash. With different combinations of traffic stars, KOLs and games, you can keep that firework going for 'half an hour.'"

Graphics: Zheng Shuya

Cover image from Unsplash, Pinduoduo, and YouTube@Pepsi