Who understands fans better? This is the problem that short video ads need to solve

In order to promote its Changyou notebooks, HP invited four popular trendy personalities on Momo to shoot four video advertisements with different styles and high standards. As a result, after these four short videos of Taobao store owner Zhang Yiyi, trendy parkour boy Power Jun who loves skateboarding, gaming expert Wang Peng who loves fitness and video games, and independent photographer Amano who always discovers and captures the beauty of life were released to all Momo platform users, their exposure was no less than that of the advertisements with the same theme released at the same time by Yang Yang and Bo Bangni.

Do short video celebrities really have a chance to steal the jobs of celebrity endorsements? In the Internet age, will the prediction that 4A advertising companies are living off their past success come true?

Technology is no longer a monopoly barrier, video advertising enters the flat era

Almost all short video platforms are exploring ways to monetize videos.

Momo's celebrity advertising platform "Momo Star" focuses on the route of short video celebrities directly making original videos for advertisers. The above celebrity advertisements are a test before its official launch; Miaopai chose to use the "Golden Chestnut Award" to continue to deeply cultivate small and medium-sized content creators, and let them freely find ways to realize their value through traffic support and capital investment in such teams; Jinri Toutiao launched its first commercial short video in June this year. The 90-second animated short video "Huang Doujun" voiced by Huang Bo was launched, which implanted car and mobile phone advertisements and cooperated with its own news aggregation information flow model for dissemination; Meitu is different from the above platforms and focuses more on vertical segments. For example, its beauty camera uses AR technology to directly cooperate with various beauty brands, allowing users to bring their own dissemination, marketing and consumption attributes in self-generated videos and experiences...

Although the styles of each major platform are different, they have one thing in common, that is, the two major elements of traditional video advertising - celebrity endorsements and 4A advertising companies - are no longer indispensable.

Especially 4A advertising companies. As the low-threshold field of advertising copywriting has been conquered by big Vs who are more familiar with the needs of fans, and the marketing channels of traditional media have been covered by Internet channels, video advertising, a field that requires considerable technical content, has become the last moat for advertising companies to retain advertisers.

However, in the new round of short video monetization offensive, advertising companies were completely bypassed. The reason is precisely this high technical threshold in the past, which has gradually been mastered by emerging short video forces represented by Internet celebrities after the rise of short videos, live broadcasts and online movies in recent years.

This can also be seen from the rapid increase in the production costs of short videos. According to statistics, the current cost of short videos is between 3,000 and 6,000 yuan, while the production costs of top MCN teams with higher professional standards have soared to more than 40,000 yuan. Looking at the winning short videos of Miaopai's "Golden Chestnut Award" and Toutiao's "Golden Second Award", the short videos of such MCN teams are almost the same in video production level as the professional commercials of advertising companies.

Moreover, these top short video creators not only have lower production costs, but also have their own fan attributes and dissemination functions, which makes them more affordable than advertising companies with a middleman model.

Similarly, although celebrity endorsements also have their own fan attributes, in addition to relying on advertising companies to produce videos, their own channels on video social platforms may not be stronger than those of Internet celebrities. On the contrary, they are more suitable to appear in TV commercials. In addition, their own personalities do not have the open professional characteristics of Internet celebrities, so there is a possibility that they may be replaced by Internet celebrities.

The three characteristics of short video celebrity advertising, namely, having its own fans, its own channels, and its own creative ability, are essentially the inevitable result of the flattening of the Internet channels. But this alone is not enough to truly become a disruptive force.

Who understands fans better? This is the boring thing that short video ads want to break

There is such a joke in the field of OA office system customization: every customized office automation system satisfies the company's top management, but the employees who actually use it complain bitterly.

Enterprise software service providers are not unaware of the problem, it’s just that business owners are the payers, and the experience of the very small minority of payers is the most important, while the user experience of the majority has been relegated to the back burner.

This paradox also exists in the field of advertising. Although online marketing has, through the Internet's technical paradigm, to some extent solved the problems of traditional advertising such as poor user accuracy, difficulty in timely advertising feedback, and low user engagement, there is still a lack of solutions at the fundamental level of user experience.

Specifically at the level of short video advertising, the simple hard advertising model is no different from the past TV advertising, and in-depth content marketing is the best solution.

Foreign marketing expert Avazu Holding pointed out that the cost of content marketing is 62% or even less than traditional marketing, but it can bring more than three times the effect. Another forecast shows that the scale of advertising driven by short video content will reach 60 billion yuan in 2020, 10 times that of 2016.

The key lies in how content-driven can best meet the needs of fans. This tendency has already begun to emerge in the four celebrity advertisements launched by Momo.

According to the setting of "Momo Celebrity", brand owners can invite their favorite influencers to shoot original videos for them according to their needs, and publish these videos to their personal dynamics in the name of the influencer, guiding their fans to watch, interact and share, and provide high-return conversions through the conversion portal they carry. In essence, influencers have the triple attributes of an advertising company + celebrity endorsement + channel release. At the same time, the platform, as an intermediary, can also provide more recommended positions and traffic guidance.

In terms of content, the four celebrity ads are different from traditional celebrity-endorsed ads. Instead, celebrities create copy and produce videos based on their own areas of focus and fan attributes. In addition to the inevitable implantation of HP's brand concept of "go if you want to have fun", the slogan that used to be the core selling point of traditional video advertising copy - the one-sentence model - is no longer obvious. Instead, it is replaced by a close description of the celebrities' own characteristics. At the same time, the short video content, rhetoric and visual features that were loved by fans in the past are also consistent.

This type of celebrity advertising is highly unified in terms of personality and fan attributes, and is one step closer to the fan base than past celebrity-endorsed advertising copy that overly focused on brand exposure and ignored the celebrity's personality. The reason for this is that after removing the "middlemen", celebrities and their teams are better able to grasp the needs of their fans and the tone that corresponds to their own personalities.

After the thresholds of technical capabilities and user needs have been broken, the next threshold for short video creators will be how to break the rules and allow advertising creativity to be better realized in content marketing. This is a key point that advertising companies have accumulated more experience in the past, but short video creators still need to work hard on.

How to increase the conversion rate of short video ads? Platform is key

It has become possible to surpass traditional video advertising in terms of creation and creativity, but difficulties still exist in fan broadcasting and audience conversion rates.

Whether it is the patch model or content implantation, the biggest challenge for short video monetization, especially advertising monetization, is still the conversion rate issue. For example, although celebrity advertisements have their own fans and channels, the breadth of fans and the depth of dissemination are still limited. The key to solving this problem lies in the platform. The user attributes of the platform itself will ultimately become the key to determining the advertising conversion rate.

The different positioning of the platforms will ultimately determine the differences in their respective short video advertising monetization models.

For example, the Momo platform, which launched "Momo Celebrities", has more than 90 million monthly active users, of which 85% are young people under the age of 33. This year's Chinese Valentine's Day, Momo teamed up with Kingdee Chocolate to create the 2017 Chinese Valentine 's Day marketing campaign with the theme of #A Love Song Moves Your Heart#. This festival marketing also invited four video celebrities on Momo to shoot customized short videos for Jindi, and at the same time integrated Momo's natural video social scenes and user behavior habits to perfectly integrate brand promotion with the Chinese Valentine's Day. In addition to the special event page, it also linked resources such as nearby people, nearby dynamics, and attention to location information flow native ads , and accurately positioned the target users of the sweet strategy in all aspects to promote the Chinese Valentine's Day for Tmall stores. The high concentration of video social networking needs, as Momo's core positioning, also makes it focus more on celebrity content marketing. In addition to supporting user interactions such as comments, reposts, and likes, all video content produced by Momo celebrities carries a complete brand conversion path, providing full value chain services for brand owners.

On the contrary, Toutiao, for example, obviously cannot simply copy the above model. Although it has over 100 million monthly active users, its news attributes result in relatively scattered user types, preferences, and needs. It is more suitable for information flow advertising , which uses algorithms to find potential users for video ads. Therefore, it is more suitable for more straightforward creative short video hard advertising and patch models.

At the same time, among the three commercial models of customer-paid advertising model, purchase-paid e-commerce model and user-paid reward subscription model, Miaopai, another major short video player, is positioned in vertical segmentation. Therefore, its desire to make breakthroughs in advertising monetization ranks below incubating small and medium-sized vertical video creators. In addition, the monetization of short videos in the future may be more inclined to the purchase-paid e-commerce model which is easier to achieve in vertical segmentation.

This will also bring about a possible trend in the creation of short video content. That is, although most mainstream short video content creators currently adopt the existing strategy of distributing content across all platforms due to traffic demands, fan acquisition and monetization pressure, due to the different existing positioning of each platform, their monetization models on different platforms will also be different. And then, due to the differences in monetization models, they will eventually form deep stickiness and targeted creations for a single platform, and eventually form a division.

However, there is one trend that is certain. After flat online marketing finally enters the field of short videos with higher technical content and creativity index, 4A advertising companies are bound to become more marginalized. Posting on Weibo, writing jokes or doing live broadcasts can still be maintained, but celebrities who do not have more energy to delve into short videos will also be "left behind" in this wave of short video celebrity advertisements based on content creation.