Tencent Social Advertising Zhang Minyi: Redefining "Precision" in Social Scenarios

Why am I talking about "precision"? This seems to be incompatible with the content. WeChat launched Moments ads 18 months ago on February 2, 2012. Many friends and industry colleagues would ask me a question, "When you were working on Guangdiantong, you were doing precision advertising; now you are working on WeChat Moments, you are doing social advertising, what is the difference?" Recently, many industry trendsetters have expressed their opinions and written articles, sparking industry discussions, and more voices have begun to ask whether "precision" is the mainstream? There are even voices discussing whether to give up "precision"?

My direct supervisor is a PhD from MIT who has worked at Google for many years. During discussions, he often asked me a fixed question: "How do you define it?" I think our definition of advertising is very clear, but the definition of targeted advertising is not clear enough. In the earliest days of the "Guangdiantong" era, our definition of "precision" was often linked to effectiveness. For those who have experienced PC-based information flow advertising, Guangdiantong and performance advertising with us, even until now, many advertising budgets still include precision advertising. In fact, the precision advertising in these budgets is almost equivalent to performance advertising. That is, the simple and clear ROI achieved after precisely targeting the right target audience.

At the same time, another concept that affects the definition of "precision" is big data. Many times, when we mention "precision", it is mentioned after the emergence of the concept of "big data". That is to say, I can find the person, a small group of people, or a small group of people you want from a huge crowd of people, and I can do it with extreme precision.

Let me share a piece of data. Almost 40% of almost all users’ online time is spent on QQ and WeChat. WeChat spends more time on this, and QQ has high stickiness and activity among young people. To be honest, the core capability of Tencent and Tencent social advertising is indeed data. The term "big data" is a "banned word" in my team. I have always emphasized that data is data. The reason why I removed the word "big" is because it depends on how you define big and how accurately you define it. The “big” is naturally formed by the data, while the “accuracy” lies in the traffic and population found by the data. However, from the perspective of traffic and crowds, it is meaningless to just say "big". If we talk about data, we are talking about the two concepts of "data" and "depth". "Big" is a vague concept, but we can indeed achieve accuracy as a whole.

"Data" is what we have always emphasized and is the reason why we can be "precise", because we not only have data from the Tencent platform, but also data from many ecological partners in these vertical fields that Tencent controls or invests in . At the same time, we have a sufficient and very complete platform for connecting with first-party data, as well as third-party monitoring and testing data, which can all be connected together. Tencent can be said to be absolutely leading in terms of the breadth of data coverage.

Another one is "depth". On our WeChat or e.qq.com delivery end, we can see many more, hundreds or even thousands of main keywords, and we can even mine keywords in a targeted manner. We can get the user’s basic data and his interest attributes, from the user’s business interests to his status. In fact, this is what everyone has called precision in the past three years. I have a very deep understanding, I have a very deep understanding of my customers, and I have a very accurate grasp of user behavior. I think these two points are indeed capabilities that we are proud of, but these alone are not enough.

Big data is often about finding the right people, but here, our theme of "precision" today is very relevant to the theme of the Jinbang Award. It is not only about finding the right people, but also about making good use of the data. It is not enough to just find the right person, because finding the right person is only one of the conditions, and true precision is not accurate enough here.

Over the past nearly 20 months, Moments ads have brought us a good summary. The monthly active users of Tencent's WeChat and QQ are both over 600 million, and we cover 90% of the population. But now everyone sees ads in WeChat Moments every day, and each person basically only sees one ad a day. No one has the ability to carpet bombard the entire network with ads, and this is basically impossible. However, we still need "saturation attack", and the premise is "precision". In fact, many offline campaigns are also defined through programming and precision.

Let’s first discuss the first two points. The first is insight. No matter what platform you advertise on, insight into the battlefield environment is a prerequisite. However, in the past, people have paid too much attention to accurate user portraits, while the user life cycle and segmented industries are often neglected. Many customers ask for user portraits when communicating with us because they want to understand the real consumption behavior on the platform. That is what they are best at and there is no problem with that.

However, we always raise one point, why don’t you look at the user life cycle? User portraits are always sliced ​​and static. The gaming industry, the financial pillar of Tencent’s platform, is built on maximizing the management of the user life cycle, using Tencent’s own social platform. We finally learned that many clients’ own CMOs and marketing experts actually know the value of the user life cycle, and they also have a book of accounts, but they basically only rely on their own CRM systems to run the data. If partners view Tencent as a media, then only a very small number of media can provide clients with the length of user life cycle, or even the tracking of behavioral changes over a long period of time. This includes more comprehensive data about user IDs, user social behaviors, user human-computer interactions, as well as transaction status. Only Tencent has such capabilities.

So what we want to emphasize here is that we hope everyone must have accurate insights before coming up with precise creative ideas. And the precise insights we gain are to enable everyone to see the management concept of maximizing the user's life cycle and life cycle value. Imagine the famous 3C brands that are in huge marketing troubles. The problem they face is that their privileges and territory are predatory occupied by domestic brands, and the user cycle comes to an abrupt end. At this time, should this brand find its successful market experience from the past five years and accurately target people who have purchased this 3C brand's products? Or do we need to prepare precise materials for the right precise groups of people in response to the user lifecycle management crisis facing brands? This is what we mean by the importance of insight mining for user lifecycle management. This is a dynamic, real-time insight that can solve business goals, and it is also the prerequisite for "precision".

The second is the insight into the entire industry. In fact, we can see the data and behavior of the entire industry on Tencent’s platform, and the coverage is very comprehensive. This is part of our overall business battlefield environment.

These two points are indispensable as insights, otherwise your creativity will definitely lack differentiation and specificity.

Tencent’s current advertising space is mainly mobile native advertising space, including QQ browser ads, WeChat public account ads, and native social scenarios - Moments and QQ Feed ads, as well as native social scenario ads. If you check QQ Weather, you can see special functional scenario advertisements targeting PM2.5 and temperature drop levels. These are things you can see every day. This is the second scene we are going to talk about.

Non-intrusiveness, valuable relevance, and natural conversions that progress layer by layer are Tencent’s requirements for native advertising. These requirements are a double-edged sword and a restriction for advertising, and they place great demands on creativity. Non-interference is the bottom line, and valuable relevance is a must, but these two points will have more restrictions. However, if they are achieved, they can better trigger the third point, a natural transformation that progresses layer by layer.

To give a real example, there is an information flow advertisement placed on QQ Space. The top is the content sent by the father, the bottom is what the best friend said, and in the middle is a 21Cake birthday marketing advertisement combined with the user’s birthday push. This is an ad that talks to the user, calls out the user's name and targets the specific scenario in which the user is in. This is a very conversational ad. The entire advertisement, from the original material to the creativity that triggers continuous clicks, makes you feel like you are communicating with someone who understands you. It provides highly targeted and relevant scenario marketing and product communication to users. For this type of advertising, you don’t need to worry about the click-through rate ; the click-through rate is not a problem.

The dialogic nature it embodies is what content creators should focus on. A truly good advertisement is a caring greeting, and it is also the concept that advertisers convey on the Tencent platform. The user may not pay today, but she knows that this is a caring advertiser talking to her.

As you all know, when WeChat advertising was launched, the slogan was "Advertising is a part of life." It is impossible for us to avoid advertising. You will see advertisements when you browse your Moments, but we hope that everyone on the Tencent platform can feel that we are advertising with our heart. This kind of intention was created by our content and creative partners together with us. They grasp our requirements for social advertising and native advertising, make good use of interpersonal communication scenarios, and achieve natural conversions that progress layer by layer. In terms of brand promotion and business conversion results, it can bring good business returns to advertisers. I believe that carrying out a saturation attack on this basis will be much more effective than forcing 600 million users to see the same face on the same day.

Our creative director admitted that in social scenarios, we have seen a lot of social ads and Moments ads with very long comments, and advertisers really want to see such comments. There are also advertisements that are criticized by a lot of people. If you are the advertiser, you will feel devastated because your friends are all forwarding it and your advertisement has 50 criticizing comments. In fact, 5 million people in China are criticizing your advertisement. This is a very scary thing. But no other platform has such capabilities. We have been looking at extreme cases and summarizing some superficial experiences.

First, there must be a need for linking, because when you are on WeChat Moments and in social scenarios, native advertising must be able to target a certain need of the user. The probability of success of simple brand placement on Tencent’s platform is very low, because Tencent’s platform advertising is not a scenario that requires forced reading and attention. I was discussing with Mr. Jiang just now in the audience. He asked me how you can avoid giving people choices. I said that this is quite difficult, but you have to know that if you want to attract users' attention in a situation where there are choices, you have to do two things. The first and most basic one is to express needs, and the other is pure visual attraction, which can also attract users' attention. For example, when you browse your friends circle, you will see that the National Day holiday has just passed and everyone went out to travel to the United States and Japan. There are many beautiful photos, but only the first two photos can attract attention and make people click to see them. This is visual attraction. Therefore, pure visual appeal is also an element of success. Content is actually very useful, but clicking on it requires visual appeal.

The second thing is preference demand. This preference is his preference at this moment after having a basic user portrait. This is the highest level. This directional and precise system is supportable, but it will pose huge challenges to creativity and content. When it comes to really creating advertising materials, it’s impossible to tailor them to suit each individual situation. But for everyone, it is important to understand that with the development of programming, everyone can create content or form dynamic creative methods.

Dynamic creativity is not just a mechanical, systematic job for engineers, but requires many artists and 4A creative teams to disassemble and decompose the core elements, and needs to be driven by content experts. It is impossible to disassemble a dynamic creative idea down to the pixel, but it can be broken down into three or four layers, or five or six layers of main components. How to disassemble it, how to direct it, and what the logic is are all closely related to the content. I believe that in the future you will see more and more excellent cases in the Golden List Award cases. Only in this way can we meet the needs of each individual and truly meet the preferences of users and satisfy their personalization, thus providing large-scale, personalized advertising services.

The third thing is the ability to touch the user's psychology. The most successful advertisements often have this element. The user is impressed by the pure material and visual attraction, but the whole process is not a forced process. When the user clicks, you first win a period of time in which the user actively chooses the content in almost full screen, and this period of time is worth cherishing by everyone. The final and most successful case in this stage is the one that resonates with people.

This is not a new concept. When users choose the transition you provide, it will be a big deal and they will be willing to accept your information. But you should never show users a 30-second video as a sticker, because 30 seconds cannot guarantee that users will not go to the bathroom or skip your video. Here we see many good cases, but also a lot of waste of user attention. Many targeted groups are very precise. We have captured 5 million targeted groups in very vertical fields from 600 million users. The click-through rate is extremely high and the user relevance is extremely strong. However, the subsequent materials and the depth of interactivity of services are very poor, and the opportunity is missed.

If we can seize this opportunity, we will be able to bring great value to everyone on Tencent's social platform. Users will be willing to interact deeply with your brand and content information. They will not just take a look at it, but will click on you, add your official account , interact with the information content, and even interact with the brand on the public account. We now have more and more such interactive innovations.

The case started to be discussed in August and September last year. This is not an advertisement with a huge budget and a huge scale. It aims to break through by point attack. We interviewed many of UFS's target customers - chefs. The most uncomfortable and softest day of the year for a chef is the Spring Festival. They cook New Year’s Eve dinner for everyone, but the probability of going home for New Year’s Eve dinner is not high every year. This is not a difficult user portrait to obtain. We waited patiently until the Spring Festival, during which time we worked with our creative team, partners, service providers, and middlemen, and even did AB testing on the copy , and finally made such an advertisement.

"For every reunion dish, there is a group of people who are working hard and dedicating themselves..." This copy, plus video material. I have watched it no less than twenty times now, but I dare not finish it. I cry every time I watch it. It is really very touching. This is a very vertical service case for the B-side.

Seizing the best opportunity and using the most appropriate and emotionally impactful materials can create great interactions, and what everyone knows in the end is winning commercial value. From then on, this public account system, and even the entire public account system of professional chefs, was activated with just one advertisement.

Until June this year, when Unilever’s top global management came to Tencent for exchanges, this advertisement was still the most important and successful case, and we continued to share it with everyone. Because this is the case we have seen so far, which is the most accurate example of creativity, insight, scene and even time in the most comprehensive social scenario.

On a big stage like the Golden List Awards, which focuses on content marketing, I would like to emphasize to everyone that as a young advertising service team, the entire Tencent social advertising platform is still a very leading social platform. Its positioning is "empowering business, always with people." Our advertising products, our entire team, and our advertising services are meant to serve Tencent users. This is a very persistent mindset for the entire Tencent.

Secondly, in the process of service, we emphasize capacity building and empowerment. We believe that we can always be the best partner of the Golden List Awards. We hope to provide more advertisers with a more suitable platform and canvas, leaving space in creativity and content, allowing professionals to give full play to their talents, achieve more Golden List Awards, and achieve higher commercial value and user value.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

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