From Pechoin to Momo, is soft advertising better or hard advertising?

From Pechoin to Momo, with the same budget and the same communication effect, the conversion rates are different. The core reason lies in whether the two companies are advertising from the perspective of "advertising". Advertisement itself is a content. What we should think about is how to make a good advertisement, not how to embed an advertisement.

There have been many hot topics in the advertising circle during this period. First, there was NetEase Cloud Music's "Music Review Train" , New World's second "Four-Hour Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou " event, and Pechoin's "Republic of China Style" advertisements, followed by "I read Durex 's copy , but I use Okamoto", "Pechoin's 30 million+ reading conversion rate is less than 0.00008", and discussions about the "incomprehensible" Momo video advertisements .

All these phenomena directly point to a core question faced by advertisers - is it better to do advertising in a soft way or in a hard way? Why are the dissemination so widespread but the sales volume so different? Today, I will share my views on these core doubts based on some well-known cases.

What is the essence of advertising?

All things have their essence. Today, if we want to understand whether soft advertising or hard advertising is better, the first thing we need to clarify is the essence of advertising.

• Advertisement, which means to make it known in Chinese, refers to a propaganda method that transmits information to the public openly and widely through a certain form of media for a specific need.
• The American Advertising Association defines advertising as paid mass communication, whose ultimate goal is to convey information, change people's attitudes toward the advertised products, induce them to take action and benefit the advertiser.
• The definition of advertising in the Webster Dictionary is any form of advertising activity carried out with the intention of directly or indirectly reinforcing the sale of goods, spreading an ideology or information, or calling for participation in various gatherings and rallies (Webster Dictionary 1977 edition).

From these three explanations, we can find out three key words to explain advertising: advertisers, promotional methods, and sales. If read together, it means "a promotional tool to help advertisers achieve their sales goals." This is exactly in line with the famous saying of David Ogilvy, the father of advertising - "Everything is for sales, otherwise we are nothing" (this sentence has always been Ogilvy's service concept).

Therefore, the essence of advertising should be a means of publicity. In other words, advertising is advertising, and it is itself a content. What we should think about is how to make a good advertisement, rather than how soft or hard the advertisement is, or whether the public will accept it. In principle, you don’t need to consider whether the public will accept your advertisement, but should consider how to make your audience accept it.

Once the nature of advertising is clarified, the doubts mentioned above can be easily explained. Next, we will use the advertisements of brands such as Mimi Meng , Durex, Pechoin, New World, Momo and even Coca-Cola as examples to illustrate my point of view.

Why are the conversion rates of new media ads so low?

The first climax of new media advertising was the long picture on Weibo by @天才小熊猫, which told a long, interesting and clever story and then implanted the brand into it. Because the brand implantation was very covert and the story was very interesting, each advertisement post by @天才小熊猫 could reach tens of thousands of reposts and millions of reads. Because of this seemingly good data, many advertisers are competing to place advertisements. At the same time, it also opened the "soft advertising era" of new media advertising. A large number of big Weibo accounts abandoned the previous direct hard advertising model and switched to the embedded advertising model such as @天才小熊猫.

However, in this model, we only see superficial data effects - Weibo reposts, number of comments and readings, rather than actual product sales or APP downloads, or user registration data. According to a friend, he launched a round of Weibo KOL advertising for a certain car brand that year with about 1 million followers. Most of them were from top Weibo accounts, and they also adopted this model. However, the final number of user registrations for test drives was very low (less than 500 registrations), not to mention leads (users who are contacted by phone to make test drive reservations and are defined as potential car buyers based on certain standards) and the number of car buyers.

Admittedly, the reason for this result is that the problem is that these Weibo KOLs use "how popular this Weibo post is" as their creative starting point, and the brand is just used as an implanted object to create advertisements. Do you think such advertisements can generate conversions?

However, no one is aware of this problem, and everyone simply attributes the change to the decline of Weibo. So, on December 9, 2014, an advertisement from the famous WeChat account @顾爷 went viral on WeChat Moments , and everyone saw new hope - former Ogilvy advertising man Xiao Ma Song recalled - that winter, we were all stunned by Gu Ye’s advertising talent. To some extent, Gu Ye created a new form of advertising creation: telling a story seriously, then coming to an incredible but logically self-consistent conclusion, and finally showing you an advertising message.

Xiao Ma Song agrees with Gu Ye’s advertising model, but I disagree, because I think Gu Ye’s “advertising” is not “advertising”. In other words, this is actually just a "post-end sticker". The entire article above is just a piece of content created by WeChat KOL to attract traffic and has nothing to do with advertising. Moreover, the effect of this kind of "advertising" is minimal.

A little more advanced than the "Gu Ye-style advertisement" is the recent "Pechoin-style advertisement" - a Pechoin advertisement in the style of the Republic of China, "Nineteen Thirty-One", has been going viral in recent days. The advertisement was produced by the self-media "Local Climate Investigation Group" in the form of a long picture. The background is set in old Shanghai. The story content is like a spy movie, and the heroine is a female spy. It was not until the end that it was discovered that it was an advertisement for Pechoin's customized Mother's Day gift box "Moonlight Box", and the female spy's mission is "to go against time."

This ad was indeed widely circulated, but later it was discovered that the conversion rate was still very low. Some people pointed out that the monthly sales volume of the "Moonlight Treasure Box" product on Tmall was only more than 2,000, and the sales conversion rate of the advertisement with more than 30 million readings was less than 0.00008. However, the cost of producing the Republic of China-style advertisement and placing KOLs is conservatively estimated at around 300,000 yuan. Add to that the millions-level advertising such as Taobao's focus pictures, and the total budget is estimated to be around 3 million yuan.

The same case is also the case with Xin Shi Xiang. Last year, the “Four-Hour Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou” event was overwhelming and flooded the circle of friends. What’s interesting is that after seeing the promotion, most people only know that this is an event organized by New World View, but they don’t know that it is an event co-organized by New World View, Flight Butler , and Yizhibo . After the event, New World View gained 1 million views and 100,000 new fans, while Flight Butler gained nothing. According to Huxiu, the purpose of "Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in Four Hours" was to encourage people to download Flight Butler, but it did not achieve any expected results. The final number of downloads made Flight Butler very angry, and he did not even pay the balance. The two sides argued for a long time and finally blocked each other on WeChat.

Indeed, through summary, we found that these cases all made a core problem - what the advertisers did was not real advertising, but advertising implantation - implanted in @天才小熊猫’s Weibo long picture, @顾爷’s WeChat article, @新世相’s activities, and Republic of China-style scene stories. In other words, these "advertisements" are not created for a brand, but for a certain story or a certain scene. Although this type of "advertisement" will be recognized by the public because of its exquisite carving and production, the problem is that the real audience is people outside the circle, and people outside the circle may not necessarily become your customers. Moreover, when they see this "advertisement", what they actually remember is not the brand but the work itself, not to mention the ability to guide users to consume!

Why are classic advertisements all hard ads?

When talking about classic advertisements, the first thing that comes to mind is Coca-Cola. Many of Coca-Cola's advertisements are often very straightforward. Even when they use creativity to express themselves, they often highlight their own brand very clearly. From this perspective, all Coca-Cola does is hard advertising. This kind of hard advertising does not have the uncomfortable feeling of soft advertising - sneaky, stingy, disgusting, furtive and half-hidden. On the contrary, this feeling is frank and direct, making people feel comfortable after reading it without feeling cheated.

What’s interesting is that the channels that Coca-Cola chooses for its hard advertising are also very “brainless”. Television, buses, subways, and elevators are all places with the largest traffic and the widest coverage. They are not like us, who just blindly invest in new media advertising. And, on the contrary, Coca-Cola's advertising conversion rate is often amazing.

In the summer of 2013, Coca-Cola China was nicknamed the "nickname bottle" because of the words "tall, rich and handsome" and "naive" printed on the Coke bottles. Coca-Cola became a national topic and quickly entered our daily lives. Not only did sales increase by 20% over the same period last year, but the company also won the grand prize at the China Effie Awards, the advertising industry's grand festival. The 2014 "Lyrics Bottle" also set off a summer carnival. Not only did it attract a lot of attention on social media , it also brought about an increase in sales that year.

If you look at Coca-Cola's advertising strategy, you will find that it does not miss any place where it can advertise. Even its own Coke bottles have become a hub for advertising creativity. And the most obvious feature is that advertisements are often very direct, without too many bells and whistles, and never cover up anything.

The same strategy reminds me of the domestic brands Nongfu Spring and Momo. With the slogan "I won't accept any gifts this year, and if I do, I'll accept Naobaijin", Shi Yuzhu turned a product that no one had ever heard of into a household name, and it has been sold for more than ten years. Perhaps referring to this advertising strategy, Momo recently promoted its new product Momo Video through a set of very straightforward advertisements - the advertisements appeared everywhere in subways, buses, cinemas , elevators, and even university cafeterias - the content of the advertisements was also very "hard", with a set of very postmodern words on the left, such as "My expression is very appetizing", and below it is "Get to know me through video", and on the right is Momo's slogan - "Video social networking is on Momo".

On the surface, many people said that they couldn’t understand it at all. They didn’t know what Momo meant by “My expression looks good when eating”, and they even suspected that they were getting old. But after experiencing Momo's short videos and live broadcasts, and then watching Momo's advertisements, I understood - for a person with a rich imagination, all of Momo's advertising slogans are like video images, vivid, direct, and rich in information. Users share and record their lives through videos, and all advertising slogans are a microcosm of what users present in their videos.

Admittedly, this set of Momo advertisements is not for the general public like us, but for its target users - the younger generation who enjoy video social networking. There is no need to hide anything when facing these people. Just tell them directly - get to know me through video. Similarly, Coca-Cola and Melatonin also treat "advertising" as content, rather than creating content and then implanting the brand.

To sum up, from Pechoin to Momo, with the same budget and the same communication effect, the conversion rates are different. The core reason lies in whether the two companies are advertising from the perspective of "advertising". Advertisement itself is a content. What we should think about is how to make a good advertisement, not how to embed an advertisement.

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