New trends in marketing and promotion in 2019!

When "What's Peppa Pig?" was all over the WeChat Moments in January, the marketing competition among various brands during the Spring Festival had already come to an end. No one expected that a movie trailer would become a dark horse and defeat the billion-level investment of major fast-moving consumer goods brands.

In the remaining Spring Festival marketing, there are either the same old reunion stories or the rich spending money to get red envelopes; the former has almost no memorable brands, and the latter is the game of the rich companies such as BAT. In short, there are no more promotional cases that make a small investment for a big gain and make people's eyes light up.

1. Stereotyped Hot Spot Marketing

Of course, it is not just the Spring Festival period. Almost all hot spots (especially festivals) have similar problems, that is, the stories that brands can tell are similar, and it is difficult to stand out from a large number of similar marketing stories and obtain additional traffic.

Spring Festival marketing is all about going home, reunion, and Chinese New Year traditions; Valentine's Day marketing is all about sweet dates and single men and women; Children's Day marketing is all about reminiscing about childhood...

These hot topics and holiday marketing themes are highly directional. When a large number of brands are telling the same story, there are very few marketing actions that users can remember. You might as well recall how much of the brand’s marketing content did you remember among these holiday hot marketing campaigns?

The reason for the homogeneity of advertising content is not only the limitation of content direction, but also the brand's instinctive avoidance of risks. If an advertisement with slightly alternative content is shot, the consequences will be difficult to predict for larger brands. It may become famous overnight like "What's Peppa Pig?", or it may attract a lot of controversy and criticism. Besides, the Spring Festival period is not a place for PK creativity like the Super Bowl. Therefore, a generic and bland advertisement may be the safest choice.

So how can we achieve a marketing breakthrough in our brand amidst the monotonous holiday promotions? We can find clues from the trends shown by the screen-sweeping advertisements in recent years.

2. Two small trends in screen-sweeping ads

1. Long ads are more viral

Although people's attention span is getting shorter and shorter, causing many advertisements to become simple and crude, in the social environment of WeChat Moments, only in-depth content can cause widespread automatic forwarding.

Whether it is pictures, texts or videos, as long as users share them to their friends circle through forwarding, it means that they endorse and approve the content, so the forwarded content will become more and more refined.

This is why the screen is often filled with long texts and pictures of tens of thousands of words and long videos of 3-5 minutes. Although the short video shooting function has been available on WeChat for a long time, we still rarely see short videos shared in Moments. Some shorter and lighter content has even been digested by emoticons.

This year's "What's Peppa Pig?", last year's "Three Minutes" by Apple, and earlier still, "Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes" by China Merchants Bank... the commercials and graphic works that really triggered large-scale screen-sweeping in WeChat Moments are all long content, and long advertisements have the virality to spread.

Short content is either limited in length and can’t tell a complete story, or it has a single stimulus point and can easily make people bored, so it’s difficult for users to accept it in the social context of the circle of friends.

Even the five-second silly commercials that have been popular recently, represented by JD.com’s electrical appliances, will be organized into a compilation video of several minutes and promoted together at the communication level.

2. Reality stimulates communication

Many brands’ commercials do not focus too much on a specific story. On the one hand, this is because a specific story itself is a screening process for the audience, and the brand wants to cover more potential users, which ultimately leads to a “big and general” advertising story. On the other hand, even in purely product promotion commercials, the brand still has the urge to show the selling points of the product. This conflict causes the content of the advertising story to appear more deliberate and virtual.

In the early years, most advertising films were made by first identifying the potential target customer group, extracting a number of user portraits, and then creating lifestyle content based on the user portraits and usage scenarios. A typical example is the "Vancl" advertisement and its variants from nearly ten years ago. This model can easily lead to self-satisfaction and wishful thinking in creation, and cannot be applied to real people's lives. At a time when the overall aesthetic level of users is constantly improving, this kind of rough content is difficult to impress users.

However, in recent years, it is obvious that PGC/UGC content "adapted from true stories" is more popular on social networks. Although the subject matter of the advertising story may screen out some users, the empathy factor at the core of the story can indeed move everyone. Therefore, on the premise of a good story, a specific story can still be widely disseminated.

Judging from the content of my personal circle of friends, the proportion of fiction and jokes is far lower than that of the previous two years, while the proportion of information and in-depth reporting content is increasing. "Realism" will be an important factor in stimulating the public to forward, and "realism" does not necessarily need to be adapted from a true story, it only needs to be rich in life details to appear more real and credible.

3. Three tips for content breakthroughs

In the context of the two minor trends of long content and authenticity, if brands want to stand out from the cookie-cutter marketing content, they can consider the following content suggestions.

1. Focus on a specific story

Rough and general story templates are no longer able to resonate deeply with users. Advertising stories need to dig deeper to stimulate users, and there is even a lack of some specific or even bizarre story settings.

For example, last year Apple invited Peter Chan to direct the "Three Minutes" commercial, which broke away from the common clichéd plots such as family reunion dinners and hanging Spring Festival couplets, and instead expressed the story of the Chinese Spring Festival through a mother and son spending three minutes together on a station platform. This year's "What's Peppa Pig?" was the same, focusing on the story of a grandfather making Peppa Pig for his grandson and expressing many social issues surrounding the Spring Festival.

However, looking at the Spring Festival product promotion content of most brands, most of them only show vague images such as reunion scenes, New Year's Eve dinner, and hanging Spring Festival couplets, and most of them are not memorable.

2. The story should have a sense of life

Compared with realistic story content, fantasy stories do not have much presence, especially during the social festival of the Spring Festival. Fantasy advertising story scripts themselves are a bit out of touch with reality.

For example, the Pepsi New Year commercial "Bring Home the Joy" that is shown every year, this year's Spring Festival tells a story about space "Star Reachers". Although the commercial is "partially based on a true story", it is too "fantasy-like" and always makes people feel distracted. In the end, it did not receive much discussion and response, let alone surpass "Monkey King Family" of previous years. On the other hand, "Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes" by China Merchants Bank Credit Card is a fictional story in itself, but it cuts into the real life of the international student group. Coupled with the solid script, it eventually became a hit.

The sense of life can be focused on special small groups or can be reflected in ordinary daily life, but the most important thing is to establish the underlying connection between the advertising story and the user's life. This year, the effects of breaking through the circle and spreading works such as Pepsi's space-themed "Star Catcher" and OPPO's "Fantasy New Year" seem to be average.

3. Keep the editing rhythm tight

Compared to slow-paced commercials, commercials with dynamic shots and tight editing are obviously more popular.

This year, Apple invited Jia Zhangke to shoot "A Bucket", which has a slower pace than last year's "Three Minutes", but it did not reach last year's level of popularity; Alipay invited Ann Hui to shoot "Seven Miles", which is obviously not as fast-paced as "What's Peppa Pig?"; and Pepsi's "The Astronauts" is even more dragged out, making people lose the patience to watch it.

Shooting commercials with the slow pace and light editing that art film directors usually use may not be a good choice, as leaving too much blank time can easily distract ordinary audiences. In fact, what is more popular on social networks are comedy stories with a fast pace and dense jokes, such as "What's Peppa Pig?"

Although most holiday commercials are somewhat clichéd, more and more brands have shown new ideas in recent years, including traditional daily chemical brands such as Procter & Gamble. In today's context of high traffic costs and media fragmentation, good ideas and good content may be the most cost-effective sources of traffic.

Source: Spread Gymnastics (chuanboticao)