10 WeChat Moments Ads to Understand the Keyword Marketing in 2020

Advertising can also be a part of life”, this was a promotional message sent by the WeChat team in 2015.

Shortly after this promotional information was released, the advertising function was launched on Moments. At that time, BMW China, VIVO and Coca-Cola became the first people in the circle of friends to try out the new thing.

2020 marks the fifth year since the Moments advertising function was launched, and it is also the third time that WeChat has launched the "Moments Users' Favorite Ads Selection" campaign.

This time, users selected 10 of the most popular advertisements from the selected advertisements in the four quarters of 2019. What kind of marketing insights can brand owners draw from these 10 advertisements?

01 Who did the user pick?

After a week and four seasons of Moments ads were reviewed by multiple WeChat users, 10 of them were chosen as the center.

Compared to the 10 commercials that debuted three years ago, the "contestants" that debuted this time have obviously improved a lot in their "business capabilities", and the categories they cover are more representative than three years ago. There are car brands such as Mercedes-Benz and Buick, food and beverage brands such as Shuijingfang, Coca-Cola, Yili, and McDonald's, as well as high-end luxury goods and home appliances such as Van Cleef & Arpels and Dyson.

Of course, there are also cosmetics and skin care brands that are popular among female users, such as Estee Lauder, L'Oreal, etc.

Compared with previous times, the brands selected this time show two changes.

First, the frequency of celebrity interactive ads has increased, and second, the presentation and quality of ads have been greatly improved compared to the past.

Almost all of these brands present different forms of advertising interaction, either forming a strong creative correlation with their own logo and brand, or focusing on interaction with celebrities.

For example, Estee Lauder's interactive form is a floating gesture + text prompt "Wipe Mi Mi's tears"; Mercedes-Benz uses a circular logo + text prompt "Draw a circle to unlock, Mercedes-Benz cheats". From the picture, the logo looks a bit like a steering wheel; and Shuijingfang cleverly uses the idiom "adding finishing touches to a dragon", a picture of a dragon and a phoenix flying in the clouds with a classical atmosphere, plus a line of text prompts "adding finishing touches to the auspicious beast".

Obviously, this year's users seem to prefer "interaction" in their selection, especially celebrity interaction and creative interaction.

As one of the few advertising selections in China that uses user preferences as the criteria, the "Friends Circle Users' Favorite Advertising Selection" event has always been highly valued by B-end industry professionals and C-end consumers.

Data shows that in this event, more than 1 million WeChat users participated in the voting, and the top ten advertisements received a total of more than 2 million votes . Such a large user base and rich advertising samples are actually rare in the industry.

So, we want to take a look at why users picked these brands through these 10 winning ads.

02 Pursuing long-term advertising effects

To understand why these 10 advertisements were picked, we must first talk about the positioning of WeChat Moments ads.

There are actually some differences between Moments advertising and traditional Internet advertising, and this difference is closely related to the temperament of WeChat.

As we all know, changes in the media environment, especially the socialization of media, have to some extent accelerated advertising and marketing's expectations for traffic. The most typical example is that under the temptation of platform dividends, more brands are clustered together.

Of course, there is no disadvantage in this kind of crowding. With large traffic, it is no problem even if the brand becomes familiar to the public. But there is a prerequisite. This is for emerging brands, or they cannot be called brands, but should be called products.

Rapidly emerging popular Internet platforms often gather fresh traffic, which is very helpful for a brand or product to quickly accumulate from 0 to 1 and quickly explode, such as the various types of milk tea that have become rapidly popular on certain platforms.

But the reality is that you can achieve from 0 to 1 on these platforms, but it does not necessarily allow your brand to accumulate from 1 to 10.

Emerging platforms generally face greater pressure to monetize, and inevitably pursue short-term results in advertising and marketing, which indirectly shortens the brand's growth path and deviates from the set consumer perception.

To use an analogy, advertising and marketing that pursues short-term effects is like a brand being ripened by fertilizer. The fruit may appear full, but in fact it does not taste sweet. Users may be attracted briefly but can easily be lost. This is why most "Internet celebrity brands" do not last long.

As far as the current Internet platforms are concerned, most of them are pursuing short-term effects of advertising and marketing, but Moments advertising is an exception.

As early as the beginning of the launch of Moments advertising, industry insiders pointed out the impact it would bring. The first and foremost was that Moments advertising had the potential to reconstruct the situation in which traditional media dominated brand advertising.

Facts have also proved that since the launch of Moments advertising, not only brand advertising but even performance advertising has shifted to the WeChat camp.

Luggage, hotels and travel, sportswear, jewelry and diamonds... More and more brands are appearing in the circle of friends. Among them are the big advertisers that dominated the screen in the TV era, as well as luxury brands that are proud of their status and rarely place advertisements.

For example, among the advertisements selected this time, a large part are big advertisers that dominated the screen in the television era, including Yili, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, L'Oreal, etc., while the other part are luxury brands, including Van Cleef & Arpels, Cartier, Gucci, Maserati, etc.

With its unique digital ecosystem, WeChat has built a traffic pool for brands that can achieve long-term effects.

In this traffic pool, brands can make full use of various tools in WeChat, such as official accounts, mini-programs, cards and coupons, to achieve multi-scenario connections with consumers. In addition to the role of connecting users, Moments ads are also given longer-term expectations - shaping the brand tone and educating consumers about the brand.

To put it more simply, these brand owners are keenly aware of the long-term effects of WeChat in advertising and marketing, so they have taken advantage of everything from official accounts, mini-programs to Moments ads.

We can see that none of the selected brands exists independently in the WeChat ecosystem. Behind a seemingly simple Moments advertisement is a marketing chain that has been opened up.

For brands, the public and private nature of Moments advertising can achieve long-term advertising effects, and this link becomes a track for brands to build their own traffic pools.

03 Forge ahead bravely while exercising restraint

As Zhang Xiaolong said, for WeChat users, an unintentional action may cause a change in the direction of the flow of information.

This is the largest social product on the Chinese Internet. Every move it makes attracts attention. Every internal test can attract users' attention, from major interface revisions to small things like the launch of an emoticon.

This is even more true for advertising and marketing.

Since the launch of WeChat Moments ads, a subtle division has emerged in online advertising on the Chinese Internet. While other products are thinking about how to make their ads more eye-catching, WeChat Moments ads are doing the opposite, embedding themselves into users' social squares in an immersive way.

WeChat, which allows advertising, has not lost its usual restraint. Instead, it has helped some brands achieve wider popularity through high-quality advertising.

In particular, the emergence of "celebrity interactive advertising" has exploded in multiple circles in a short period of time. For example, Yang Chaoyue's advertising creativity with McDonald's Golden Arches, and the recent trajectory sliding photo-taking with VIVO and Liu Wen.

Many users have encountered their idols in Moments, and they are also very happy to interact in the comment section of advertisements. There is no other reason for this, because the expression form and advertising creativity of Moments advertisements are quite stylish.

Ultimately, this always restrained temperament not only maintains the quality of the circle of friends, but also helps the brand win the favor of users.

We know that the influence of social platforms on consumer decisions is increasing, and people are becoming more and more accustomed to obtaining information and establishing connections from mobile devices. The rise of social products represented by WeChat has not only changed the way people communicate, but also built a new digital world.

For brands rooted in the real world, entering the digital world is only a matter of time, but this does not mean that their digitalization of advertising and marketing can be unimpeded. Users' aversion to the barbaric expansion of the Internet has never been eliminated, and the same is true for online advertising.

WeChat’s restrained approach allows brands to stand out from the noisy and crude information flow ads and return to the discussion of advertising creativity and value.

This WeChat Moments advertising selection from C-end users is an example.

In the marketing world, discussions on advertising value and creativity often come from field observations by industry professionals. There are rarely such large-scale "public elections" of advertising. After all, just mentioning the word "advertising" is already noisy enough. Who would dare to let consumers rank them first, second, and third?

In the long run, the ultimate result is that when advertising communication becomes more and more refined and fragmented, advertisers are also facing more and more confusion. They don’t know whether their advertisements on the terminal are effectively reaching their target customer groups.

However, the emergence of Moments ads has changed the trend of online advertising towards vulgarity, and has achieved rapid progress in brand effects with its usual restrained tone.

04 Growth Logic in Multiple Interactions

After talking about WeChat’s restraint, let’s take a look at the characteristics of these 10 selected Moments ads.

In fact, looking at these 10 advertisements, they are inseparable from two key words: social and interactive. Moreover, this interaction is multiple, and the threshold of social interaction is also worth considering.

Specifically, in terms of form, the selected advertisements are almost all celebrity interactive styles, and in terms of internal logic, each advertisement has a strong social interactive attribute.

• First, we know that WeChat Moments ads are placed and disseminated based on groups with strong relationships. Therefore, the strong social attributes of WeChat Moments itself ensure that the efficiency of each ad being truly reached is greatly improved.
• Second, ads provide social interaction between friends. Each @ means a new level of communication.
• The third point is group interaction under the fan effect. The application of celebrity interaction mode will stimulate users' desire to express themselves, because the circle of friends itself is very private, but the public effect of celebrities is very strong. The combination of the two will form a visual stimulation that is different from the visual stimulation brought by Weibo and video website advertisements.

The overlap of these three interactions forms the unique growth logic of Moments advertising, while the control of social scale is between the public and private levels.

In fact, in the five years since the birth of WeChat Moments advertising, the mobile Internet has made rapid progress and the advertising industry has undergone generational changes.

What followed was the rise of short videos and the sedimentation of content communities. Mainstream brands were embedded in one emerging Internet product after another, being flooded with big data and brainwashed by noisy advertisements, but they still faced realistic problems such as growth and exposure.

The biggest reason for this may be that the brand’s digital assets are always subject to the control of others. Whether it is interaction or effect, all connections with consumers are difficult to be included in their own traffic pool. Therefore, except for Internet brands, other physical industries seem a bit passive when it comes to digitalization.

But after WeChat launched a series of features suitable for brands, both luxury goods and fast-moving consumer goods flocked to it, because in the eyes of brand owners, WeChat not only has the advantage of an open ecosystem, but can also layout the digital ecosystem according to its own brand tone.

Moments ads can be directed to WeChat official accounts, while mini-programs enable direct purchases of goods. In addition, luxury brands like to connect to their official websites in official accounts, and fast-moving consumer goods are keen on digital card voucher redemption.

From these perspectives, WeChat gives brands sufficient freedom and the continuous accumulation of digital assets. The most important point is that WeChat has built an interactive scenario that is diverse enough for both consumers and brands.

With the combined effect of these factors, WeChat has become a suitable venue for brand communication.

The revelations brought by these 10 democratically elected ads are actually the delegation of freedom in WeChat’s interactive logic, the mutual achievement between users and brands, and the beginning of marketing’s move towards long-termism.

Author: Wu Duidui

WeChat public account: Wu Duidui (esnql520)