8 trends in brand IP marketing in 2020

Looking back at 2019, various popular IP content emerged like mushrooms after rain, and successful brand marketing also came to the forefront.

Looking at this year alone, The Untamed, with over 7 billion views and 190 hot searches, has broken through the circle and grown; Produce Camp 2019, with over 3.7 billion views and 477 hot searches; Joy ​​of Life, with 6.79 billion views on Tencent Video alone and over 11.8 billion readings on Weibo... While phenomenal hits and IPs are emerging frequently and constantly breaking records, these high-quality content have also become dark horses in the marketing field with the support of video platforms and the empowerment of technological changes. Brands such as Uni-President Laotan Pickled Cabbage Beef Noodles, Mengniu Chunzhen Small Waist, and Amway Nutrilite have also further achieved value resonance.

Nowadays, when judging whether a piece of content is popular or not, in addition to the visualized number of clicks and popularity, sustainable commercial value has become an indispensable criterion. Of course, traditional viral marketing that is based on the "target theory", pursues one-way exposure, or brainwashes users is already outdated. What is gradually becoming the mainstream trend nowadays and in the future are those double-arrow interactive marketing that pays attention to user feelings, emphasizes emotional value, guides the audience with their minds, and can use high-quality IP to achieve from "being seen" to "being liked".

The video market, which has gone through the stage of refining content, is currently in the process of migrating from "quantity" to "quality". Many high-quality content and super IPs are winning the hearts of fans and the market. Faced with the traffic dividend in the content market, how should brands seize new opportunities? What does successful brand marketing require?

Looking back at 2019 and looking forward to 2020, the new trend of brand IP marketing can be seen from eight dimensions.

1. “Values”: the spiritual core of the brand and the long-term companionship of users

There is no doubt that the end point of all marketing is "people".

As content becomes more refined, users' aesthetic taste for content is constantly improving, and they have also formed a certain understanding of content marketing. This determines that in the marketing process, brands must not only cooperate with content, but also understand the core of the content.

In 2019, the second season of "Amazing Life" returns with a heart-warming story. In terms of brand cooperation, Airbnb, which understands and respects the content and values ​​of the program, did not compete with the program content. Instead, it changed its thinking and used the points of convergence of the values ​​of both parties as a starting point to construct its own brand value concept through the program.

Under the value concept of "explore yourself by exploring the world" in "Amazing Journey", Airbnb uses "encountering is an adventure" to trigger the connection point with consumers, and integrates the brand characteristic of "home anywhere" into every adventure story in the program, connecting the brand itself with the values ​​of the program. It does not affect the overall content narrative of the program, but also naturally brings the audience into the story scene. As the story progresses, the emotions between the guests and Airbnb hosts deepen, and the audience's perception and acceptance of the brand culture are further triggered.

The brand and content values ​​are in line with each other, and they continue to build a warm brand personality, accompanying the audience with a distinctive and stable brand image. Through long-term companionship with the audience, they establish emotional resonance with them, which has given both the brand and content more narrative space.

The same highlight moment also happened in "Forget Me Not Restaurant". Yangshengtang (Nongfu Spring), which cooperated with "Forget Me Not Restaurant", was "low-key" in the program and filmed two public service advertisements about Alzheimer's disease outside the program, "Love Will Not Forget". While shifting the audience's attention from the program to caring for the Alzheimer's people in real life, the brand value concept was naturally conveyed to the public.

There is no doubt that documentary and humanities IPs can significantly help brands convey trust value and break through in marketing. As a brand, based on the understanding and knowledge of the program content, through marketing that is more in line with its own demands and has emotion, warmth, and spiritual value, it can not only achieve appropriate integration with the content, but also make it easier for users and the public to gain a sense of resonance through the companionship of the brand and content.

2. Multi-IP cross-border co-creation rewrites the new logic of entertainment marketing

In addition to the "value" approach, the focus of brand marketing today is actually to grasp the changing trends of users and content and to establish value resonance with the audience. Only in this way can the brand move from being "seen" to being "liked" and continuously enhance its brand power.

Taking this year's hit drama "The Untamed" as an example, in order to fully unleash the marketing value of its IP, Tencent Video used the original IP of "The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation" as a starting point and cultivated and developed a series of related film and television dramas, animation and other content carriers. In a creative mid-roll advertisement of "The Untamed", Wang Yibo's character, Lan Wangji, ate the Uni-President old-style pickled cabbage beef noodles left for him by "Wei Wuxian" in a noodle shop. This marketing method cleverly combines the two-dimensional Wei Wuxian's old-style pickled cabbage beef noodles that have been on the market with the three-dimensional scenes of "The Untamed". The Uni-President old-style pickled cabbage beef noodles also achieved a cross-dimensional dialogue between the brand and its fan audience.

This youthful and highly interactive approach, which focuses on brand linkage around one IP, multiple IPs or different forms of the same IP, and links marketing with book fans, drama fans and anime fans, will undoubtedly deepen the brand's memory points in a wider audience market in a more novel and interesting way, allowing the brand to go from being seen to being liked, and even further expand its range of communication.

Obviously, when the boundaries between marketing and content are broken and even become complementary, top high-quality IP can empower brand marketing, and phenomenal brand marketing can also bring its own content dissemination power. The two sides will interact with each other and prosper together.

3. IP multi-touchpoint full-link marketing, revitalizing the new value of content marketing

A phenomenon that cannot be ignored is that in traditional entertainment marketing, brands care more about their own exposure, and most of what they do is to use the popularity and traffic of content for single exposure, while the brand value and core beyond the content are not extended.

However, as the audience's consumption habits of content have changed, they will discuss while watching content, post content they like on short video platforms, and buy peripherals from their favorite stars. There are more and more entertainment consumption scenarios based on content and user minds, which naturally provides brand marketing with more and better ideas and tools.

In the summer of 2019, Tencent Video's IP drama "The King's Avatar" aroused strong resonance among young people with its positive energy, passion and high-energy content.

Suning.com, which cooperated with the TV series "The King's Avatar" as a content partner, not only matched the brand proposition of "Burning! Right now" with the high-energy plot to achieve a deep connection between content and brand tone; it also opened an offline experience store, allowing fans to interact with the characters and stars of the show who came to visit the store on the day of the shopping festival to enhance user favorability; in addition, Suning.com also produced creative advertising videos and released them through WeChat Moments, which not only activated fans' attention and discussion, but also directly converted this enthusiasm into purchasing power.

Similarly, when Mengniu Chunzhen Xiaoman Yao cooperated with "Creation Camp 2019", it also developed an innovative gameplay: 101 contestants were shaped into "Red Grapefruit Boys", and Mengniu Chunzhen Xiaoman Yao became the "Chief Support Officer" with its personalized brand image. After winning the favor of young users, users and fans can directly vote for their favorite contestants through a combination of online mini-programs or online scanning voting. Brands can also use the fan economy to achieve in-depth dialogue with users in content, social channels and offline sales scenarios.

The marketing commonalities of these two cases are: that is, connecting multiple scenarios such as content, entertainment, social interaction, consumption, etc., linking online and offline, allowing users with scattered and scarce attention to connect with IP and brands everywhere, achieving more communication and reach between brands and users, and successfully connecting the transformation of brand marketing from content experience to effect, realizing full-link scenario marketing and all-round benefits.

4. Link up with artists to extend marketing emotions

In 2019, the hit TV series "The Untamed" which was popular in the summer became an example that cannot be avoided when summarizing the market. With the popularity of the series, the popularity index of the two leading actors, Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo, has also soared. Not only have they become the two new top stars in the domestic entertainment industry, their commercial value has also remained at the top of the market.

Through the huge success of "The Untamed" and its actors, it is not difficult to get a glimpse of the star-making ability of top-notch IPs and the artist management and operation capabilities of Tencent Video. From another perspective, the phenomenon of high-quality content creating stars or expanding the influence of stars actually provides brands with another marketing idea.

It is known that during the period when "The Untamed" and "Joy of Life" were popular, Uni-President's Laotan Pickled Cabbage Beef Noodles and Amway Nutrilite, which cooperated with them, have achieved ideal marketing results. So in the future, when brands collaborate with content, why not further try to collaborate with artists for long-term cooperation?

In the past few years, the popularity of the fan economy market has become a fact that needs no elaboration. By cooperating with high-quality content and highly-regarded artists hatched from the content, we can capture the content market while closely connecting to the fan economy market. This will further deepen the brand's value, deepen content marketing and fan economy, and will surely create a larger market space.

5. Cooperate with e-commerce companies to promote content and unlock new ways of brand marketing

In recent years, as a keyword in fashion variety shows, "bringing goods" has become a hot word frequently mentioned in the market.

As a fashion variety show produced by Tencent Video, the second season of "Lipstick Prince" prefers practical content such as celebrity sharing and product recommendations. It innovatively adopts the "single-episode hit partner" model. Each episode introduces one or more brands of different categories to stimulate users' consumption desire by using celebrity products or celebrity recommendations.

At the same time, the program has further realized the cross-border cooperation between variety show content and e-commerce platforms. In addition to exposing the program content, the cooperating brands can also use the program IP to recommend "slots" in Wei Ya's live broadcast room on the e-commerce platform, thereby achieving the integrated effect of "planting grass in the program and purchasing outside the program."

In the content marketing market, cooperation models that can directly "sell goods" through content urgently need further exploration and development. The practice and results of "Lipstick Prince" have indeed provided a new marketing idea for variety show sales.

6. Expand the content market and focus on high-potential short videos

Quietly, "short and concise" content has become the new favorite in the video market.

On December 30, the heartwarming hotpot drama "Dad's Monkey Cheeks" exclusively sponsored by Mengniu Future Star was officially launched on Tencent Video. For Tencent Video, this program is its first short drama to be opened for marketing cooperation. As a brand that is trying customized dramas for the first time, the "short and concise" content format also determines the flexibility of brand marketing in achieving results.

Whether it is the rotating brand announcements by the characters Xiao Ming and Xiao Pang in the play, the brand spirit quotations that appear as the plot develops, or the brand soft implantation that fits the life scenes in the play, Mengniu Future Star, which takes "nutrition and companionship" as its product benefit points, has made a strong connection with the values ​​of "Dad's Monkey Cheeks" which focuses on the dad population through brand-exclusive customized plots and various creative advertising forms, and ultimately achieved the marketing goal of "helping children become future stars through the companionship of dads and future stars."

In the future, the long content market will remain hot and the opportunities in the short content market will gradually increase. Taking advantage of this trend, brands can focus on short content with a wide range of themes, diverse forms and potential around IP to further expand their positions.

7. Creative Interaction: Capture the User's Mind with Immersive Experience

Interaction has become a major trend that cannot be ignored in the content market in recent years.

At the end of 2019, the IP drama "Joy of Life" successfully broke through. Looking back at the highlights of the drama, the brand's creative interaction has become an existence that cannot be ignored.

During the broadcast of the drama, comments and discussions such as "Why is a good girl called Song Tie?" and "Fan Xian, aren't you a time traveler? How come you don't know Chen Daoming?" tickled the users' funny bones. The secondary creations inspired by netizens also generated considerable topic dissemination on traffic pools such as Bilibili and Weibo. Based on user attention, Tencent Video has brought great exposure to its brand partner Amway Nutrilite through interactive barrages, celebrity mini-dramas and other forms, and also provided room for the brand to establish a deeper connection with users.

At the same time, as the series becomes more popular, when viewers with different opinions discuss the plot, interactive voting posts sponsored by Amway Nutrilite will appear below the series screen. This approach not only allows users to understand the proportion of their own ideas, but also makes the brand a companion to users in the process of watching the series, further enhancing users ' favorability towards the brand. The brand has evolved from being seen to being remembered and loved, and its reach has been further expanded.

8. Embrace new technologies and gain high support

Today, technology is reshaping the product form and user habits of video platforms, and opening up more imagination space for users' video experience.

Since the beginning of this year, as a first-tier video platform in China, Tencent Video has actually used its technology system to launch various creative ways of brand marketing and solved the publicity needs of various brands. For example, in TV series such as "My True Friend" and "The Lost Tomb: The Sea & The Mystical Qinling Mountains", the innovative advertising product "Seamless" based on AI technology easily helps brands integrate into the scenes of the drama, achieving "seamless" post-production implantation.

Technologies like "Seamless" enable brands to complete the screening of scene implantation in a short period of time, reduce the communication costs between brands and single or multiple content parties, and make it easier for brands to operate in accordance with their own promotional timing.

As the continuous use of technological means to empower content marketing has become a trend that cannot be ignored, embracing new technologies and obtaining high support will be a major choice for brands in the future entertainment marketing process.

After the favorable performance of the entertainment marketing market in 2019, almost everyone in the industry is summing up and looking forward to 2020. When platforms led by Tencent Video provide integrated channels and methods for brands, content and users, making their interactive connections closer, after eliminating mediocre content and worthless marketing, truly high-quality content and valuable IP marketing will inevitably leverage greater market imagination.

Author: Entertainment Unicorn

Source: Entertainment Unicorn (yuledujiaoshou)