Analysis of short video advertising materials!

In early 2003, Beijing Ogilvy & Mather won the order for China Mobile's "M-Zone" brand national launch communication activities through a pitch. But the team is not in a hurry to open the champagne for this big order, they are even considering whether to give up.

The reason is that the company only gave three weeks to complete the production of the TV commercial. In that era, it took at least three months for a similar work to be published. Fortunately, everyone was happy with the final result. Ogilvy Beijing withstood the pressure, and its slogan “This is my turf, listen to me” quickly became popular.

The print advertising materials of the Dynamic Zone at that time

If you tell this story to current advertising service providers, most of them will be envious. At present, a three-week production cycle is a luxury of "slow work and fine work". The significant shortening of the production cycle of advertising materials is an indisputable fact, which is particularly evident in information flow advertising.

Taking Douyin as an example, in 2020, an average of 800,000 information flow advertising materials were released on the platform every day, which is a considerable scale. Data shows that just one year later, this number has doubled several times.

The ducks know first when the river water warms in spring. Wu Meng, head of Chando's e-commerce, mentioned that during the Douyin 818 promotion this year alone, the team has released more than 1,000 advertising materials on the platform.

The reasons for the explosion of advertising materials are nothing more than three points:

First, short video traffic is still expanding rapidly. The long-term viewing of more than 600 million daily active users produces more advertising inventory, and the expansion of inventory requires more materials to fill;

Second, the rapid consumption of fragmented content forces content production to speed up operations. After all, repeated exposure to the same advertisement will only lead to user fatigue.

Third, enterprises and service providers fall into a "prisoner's dilemma". New materials can often achieve better communication effects. When an advertiser launches new materials in batches, its competitors will also be forced to participate in the competition.

As a result, the material life cycle is also significantly reduced, by more than half.

At present, it is generally believed in the industry that the popularity of a short video can only last for about five days on average. But the actual delivery situation of some advertisers may be shorter - a chicken breast brand mentioned that according to their statistics, the average validity period of its advertising materials has been shortened from five days in the past to only two days.

If you are familiar enough with performance advertising, it is easy to understand the logic: the volume of material running represents business growth, so advertisers and service providers naturally have the urge to speed up and increase the delivery of advertising materials. However, even a good cook cannot cook without rice. In this situation, the ability to supply high-quality creative materials becomes the lifeline of business growth.

Therefore, service providers must work at full capacity to produce content - taking a four-person production team as an example, they now generally have to produce 5 to 7 short video ads every day to meet current video production needs.

To some extent, the digital advertising system is like a giant machine that devours and consumes advertising works at an accelerated rate. The raw materials are advertising works, and the finished products are sales conversions. The efficiency seems to be good at the moment.

But if we continue to operate in the current way, then satisfying the ever-expanding appetite of this behemoth will one day become impractical when it exceeds the critical point.

So, change must happen.

The significant reduction in production time and material life cycle are just basic issues faced when making advertisements. If you dig deeper, you will find more fine-grained problems, such as materials.

The production of short video advertising materials relies on the source material. For a medium-sized production team, at least 100 short video ads need to be produced every day, which means that the amount of materials needed reaches 300 to 500. Materials are generally obtained in three ways: self-portraits, own materials, or purchased copyrighted materials.

Selfie refers to customized shooting for advertisers. The earliest short video advertisements basically adopted this method, but its cost is relatively high. For example, set design is a huge cost item. Some relatively powerful service providers will rent large factories to open up different rooms, and even build first-class cabins of airplanes and subway scenes to meet various shooting needs.

"Some even set up a scene in Hainan to shoot the sea view, and another scene in the Northeast to shoot the snow scene. How long can this situation last?" Lu Ting, head of the channel visual creative business department of ByteDance, asked in return.

This is a practical problem, especially considering that there is no guarantee of explosive sales after the materials are produced and released. Once the effect is not good, the cost of selfies paid in the early stage will easily become a sunk cost.

It is worth noting that service providers often become the ones who bear the losses.

According to Wu Dongyang, CEO of Hengli Yiying, there are currently two settlement methods commonly used by the company: fixed price and "base deposit + consumption" model. When the base deposit is lower than the cost and the consumption is not high, the latter settlement method carries the risk of losing money.

For this reason, remixing based on owned materials or purchased copyrighted materials has become a common means of controlling costs.

For example, editing out the wonderful highlights of the live broadcast, or re-editing existing materials to generate new materials. This "killing two birds with one stone" approach has become a common operation in short video marketing.

According to Qi Jianglong, head of copyright and creative customization operations at ByteDance, the proportion of mixed-cut materials in short video advertisements is increasing rapidly. In his view, this is a necessity. After all, no matter how labor efficiency improves, there is always a limit to the materials that service providers can shoot independently, and ultimately they will not be able to meet the needs of large-scale production of advertising materials.

Although remixing saves the hassle of working with selfie materials, the management, screening and editing of large amounts of material still requires a lot of manpower support. Regardless of the method used, a team of about 80 people is generally required to produce 100 short video advertising materials in a single day, which represents a huge manpower expenditure.

"We are becoming more and more like a labor-intensive industry," lamented Qi Zhonghan, COO of Zhongwei Wanxiang. High labor costs are placing a huge burden on service providers who are already under considerable cash flow pressure.

Some service providers have begun trying to reduce costs. There are two typical ways: first, building video teams in other places to streamline labor costs; second, dividing the company into two groups, video accumulation and creative video, with each group performing its own duties. The latter focuses on producing a small number of high-cost quality videos, while the former produces short-term and fast-acting advertising materials at low cost and in batches.

But strictly speaking, these measures seem effective, but they only treat the symptoms and not the root cause. They have not significantly improved the labor efficiency of short video marketing, nor have they changed the fact that the business is becoming heavier.

Unlike the previous situation where handicraft workshops took charge of everything, the large-scale industrialized production pattern formed after the Industrial Revolution has a major feature based on the refined division of labor in the industrial chain. For example, many mobile phone manufacturers currently do not produce all components independently, but meet their needs by purchasing raw materials from outside.

Similarly, if advertisers and service providers want to become "modernized", they also need to build their own supply chains in terms of material supply, etc., and completely free themselves from the tediousness of taking on too much.

In summary, the challenges faced by advertisers and service providers in terms of materials mainly include three aspects: efficiency, connection and compliance.

Among them, efficiency is the core issue.

In the past, service providers’ management of materials was very extensive and primitive—they stored materials on hard drives or network disks, and relied on memory and manual screening when they needed to use the materials. This model works fine when the amount of materials is relatively small, but it can easily break down when the scale of material production and the amount of material used increase exponentially.

At present, the mass production of advertising materials has directly increased the amount of materials used. Therefore, whether it is an advertiser or a service provider, if a company wants to develop short video marketing, an efficient material supply channel is indispensable.

In addition, the obvious mismatch between supply and demand also plagues the entire industry.

"The materials from major copyright suppliers are mainly high-quality 4K materials. There are fewer vertical video materials and the scope of the materials is relatively limited. Many of the required materials are not easy to find," said Zhao Ziyuan, founder of Qinglan Culture.

Her words reflect the current situation: the materials provided by major copyright suppliers generally do not meet the lifelike, native and down-to-earth usage requirements of short video scenes. At the same time, the specifications of the materials are difficult to adapt to the vertical screen scenes of mobile phones.

In addition, unlike the concrete search habits of graphic advertising designers, the search for video materials often has a sense of picture. For example, short sentences such as "touching the wheat field with hands" and "a family running hand in hand" are keywords that designers will type in, which tests the technical capabilities of copyright suppliers in terms of labeling, semantic recognition, etc.

In addition, compliance is another issue that cannot be ignored.

On June 1 this year, the new Copyright Law officially came into effect, which put forward higher requirements for copyright compliance. In the past, the short video marketing industry was relatively unregulated in the use of materials. However, as the compliance environment becomes stricter, issues ranging from material copyright to facial image authorization have become pitfalls that service providers need to try their best to avoid.

How to solve various problems such as efficiency, docking and compliance? At present, it can be seen that the entire industry is trying in four directions:

• The platform directly builds a copyright content pool. In the past, service providers would often set up a platform-type department dedicated to shooting various materials to provide support for the delivery end. This department is not assessed on profits, but it can easily become a burden on the service provider's profits.
• In fact, compared with service providers, platforms that undertake a large number of customers and advertising needs should become builders of industry public infrastructure such as copyright content pools: on the one hand, the scale effect will dilute the construction cost; on the other hand, the integration of copyright material supply, content production and advertising placement can make the material flow faster. In this regard, TuChong and IC photo rely on digital advertising platforms to provide companies with a large amount of copyright material support.
• The connection between content materials and commercial materials. On short video platforms, a large number of experts and users produce content materials every day, many of which are high-quality and have the potential to become commercial materials. For example, the short video contributor cooperation project recently launched by TuChong strives to achieve the goal of connecting content materials with commercial materials.
• The benefit of doing this is not only that it can reverse the lack of vertical screen video materials, but also that it can add new sources of income for content creators.
• Based on trend insights, material production is guided by demand. The mismatch between supply and demand of materials often leads to a strange phenomenon: the demand side cannot find suitable materials, and many materials on the supply side cannot bring ideal returns to creators because no one uses them.
• Therefore, the platform can guide material production through data. For example, when it is discovered that the service provider's search volume for yacht materials has increased dramatically, creators can be informed and encouraged to shoot related materials and upload them to the platform. This approach of guiding material production by demand with the support of platform data is more targeted, thus alleviating the problem of supply and demand mismatch.
• Use technology to reduce material production costs . Qi Jianglong mentioned that the conditions for the production of short video advertising materials are now available for intelligent production.
• For example, after providing a short video script to the platform, the platform will directly recommend usable materials to advertisers and service providers based on its semantic understanding of the script, and the material can be directly generated after simple editing. This mode directly saves the step of searching for materials. Although there is still room for technological improvement, this idea also outlines the prospects for future production of advertising materials.
• In addition, the Bytedance platform has also launched a creative diagnosis function. The service provider uploads the material to the platform, and the platform can predict the probability of successful running of the material based on past data. This function can screen out materials that obviously affect the running effect in the early stage, so that advertising materials have a higher probability of increasing volume.

Therefore, the materials that were originally ignored by the industry actually have a lot of room for improvement and huge commercial potential. After solving the problems of efficiency, connection and compliance, the materials can be opened up in quantity and improved in quality.

In May this year, a certain car brand launched a new car and produced a TVC advertisement for it.

For some scenes that require higher costs to shoot, it selected six videos from TuChong’s gallery. Judging from the final effect, the quality of works obtained by editing purchased materials is not inferior to that of real-life shooting.

However, not every advertiser realizes the importance of outsourcing materials like this car company.

"Our industry is being squeezed. Clients won't pay for the materials, it's the agencies that pay for the materials," said Zhao Ziyuan.

These words reflect the current situation of the industry. Advertisers are often results-oriented, do not pay enough attention to materials, and are unwilling to spend money on them. In the end, the agency becomes the one who pays for the materials.

But in the long run, this model is unsustainable - the agency's purchase of materials from formal copyright holders means new expenses. If advertisers are unwilling to increase their budgets for materials, it will inevitably mean that the agency will make up for it from other links. If the agency is not standardized in the use of copyrighted materials, it will eventually lead to legal and public opinion problems, and the advertisers themselves will be blamed.

Service providers are the "cheetahs" in the entire system. They are deeply involved in the industry and have the most sensitive sense of smell and a keener grasp of trends. The change in their own development focus can, to some extent, be seen as a harbinger of development trends in the advertising and marketing industry.

As practitioners become more experienced and platform capabilities become more mature and transparent, the benefits of information asymmetry at the data, algorithm and other levels will be limited, and the importance of the content itself will increase rapidly.

As people's attention to content increases, the construction of new supply chains such as copyrighted materials has become a core component of the entire chain. Therefore, the construction of content capabilities including copyrighted materials will also become the general direction of platform capability development in the next stage.

"I watched helplessly as the service provider shifted from paying the most attention to the optimization team to starting to poach the video team last year." From data to content, the phenomenon Lu Ting observed reflects the reality of the shift in focus of the entire industry.

Author: Advertising Notebook

Source: Advertising Notebook (guanggaoshouzhang)