The low profit margins of hardware force the industry to accelerate development; long-term traffic operations explore new channels for trillion-dollar OTT marketing

With the sweeping wave of large-screen smart living rooms, the living room economy based on the audio-visual revolution has shown new vitality, while color TV manufacturers whose thinking is still stuck in hardware sales have been collectively eliminated from the table. While smart TVs give living rooms more scene possibilities, the rapidly growing large-screen traffic has also become the most potential marketing gold mine.

Not long ago, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin stated that the Beijing Winter Olympics has become the most watched Winter Olympics so far, attracting 2 billion followers on social media. Compared with the 2018 Winter Olympics on Korean platforms, streaming ratings increased by 349%, reaching the peak of ratings for major events in recent years.

Under the combined influence of the epidemic and the Spring Festival, more users chose to stay at home to watch the Winter Olympics during the Olympic Games. Most people chose to watch the games on a large screen in the living room that can be shared with family and is more immersive. The survey shows that 52% of consumers choose to watch the Winter Olympics on smart TV platforms, which exceeds the total number of consumers who choose mobile phones, traditional TVs, PCs, and tablets.

Image source : Miaozhen Marketing Academy

According to statistics, watching TV series and variety shows are the three main needs of users for large screens in the living room. At the same time, secondary scenarios such as online education, cloud games, and AI fitness are also developing rapidly, gradually becoming high-frequency and high-dependence application scenarios for some users. The living room occupies an increasingly important position in the minds of users, making smart large screens the most imaginative traffic entrance after mobile Internet, and also putting forward higher requirements for industry participants.

The content operation market is impacting the trillion-dollar market

When the tide recedes, it becomes clear who is swimming naked.

Compared with the complex and difficult to understand parameter marketing in color TV hardware sales, the content ecosystem construction, application scenario exploration, and marketing and operation support of smart TVs are so clear at a glance that as the prices of color TVs continue to tilt towards consumers and hardware profits become gradually transparent, a large number of color TV brands, including almost all emerging Internet TV brands, have quickly faded out of consumers' sight.

After God closed the door to hardware profits for the TV industry, he used the three fulcrums of content, applications, and marketing to overturn the ceiling that blocked the rise in industry value.

Content has brought a huge market of over 100 billion to the big screen in the living room. According to the latest report from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPA), the number of global streaming service subscribers increased to 1.3 billion in 2021, and the home/mobile streaming entertainment market reached US$78.5 billion (about RMB 498 billion), a year-on-year increase of 14% compared to 2020 and a significant increase of 41% compared to 2019.

In China, according to the "2021 Large Screen Industry Trend White Paper" released by Gouzheng Data, the number of OTT TVs in 2020 has exceeded 250 million, and there is a broad space for content operation. Among them, Coocaa Technology, the first unicorn company in the OTT industry, has gained a large number of fans with its massive content reserves and precise content recommendation mechanism of "one thousand faces for one thousand people". By the end of September last year, the number of activated devices had reached 110 million, accounting for more than 1/3 of the market share.

Coocaa Technology has complete content and activities to support important time points such as the Winter Olympics and the Olympic Games. For example, during the Winter Olympics, Coocaa Technology continuously played original self-made news, historical events, hot event reviews, today's highlights and other programs on the video site, creating a sports feast for users.

Image source: Coocaa Technology official website

During festivals such as the Spring Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, National Day, and even Double Eleven and 618, the "Living Room Carnival" launched by Coocaa Technology has repeatedly become popular. Last year, it even launched an offline fan carnival event, allowing consumers to experience the charm of the smart large screen up close, becoming a successful example of OTT large-screen content and event operations.

Thousands of screens, thousands of faces, long-term traffic operations create new marketing channels

The huge user base and high-frequency and long-term user activity naturally give smart TVs extremely strong marketing attributes, making the large screen in the living room the best display stage for products. Actively exploring new forms of large-screen marketing and digging deep into the value of large-screen marketing have become a consensus in the OTT industry.

Taking Coocaa Technology as an example, based on the accurate portrait of users, not only can its content recommendations be more "multi-screen and multi-faceted", but personalized marketing can also be made possible.

With the help of big data and artificial intelligence, Coocaa Technology has created accurate user portraits of the user population, so that it can provide intelligent identification marketing and precision delivery solutions, so that each advertisement delivery can be matched as much as possible on demand and accurately reach potential target groups. On the one hand, it reduces users' aversion to marketing ads, and on the other hand, it minimizes the possibility of resource mismatch due to ineffective delivery and improves the conversion success rate.

Not only that, under the long-term operation strategy of the OTT platform, Coocaa Technology is no longer simply focused on the exposure of single traffic, but is more committed to building a stable and long-term traffic pool in the home scene, reaching the terminal, stimulating interest, and promoting recognition, and ultimately achieving the brand marketing process.

Image source: Coocaa Technology official website

For Chinese people, the Winter Olympics is an excellent window to show the country's image, national cohesion and competitive spirit to the world; for Coocaa Technology, the Winter Olympics-related large-screen activities are also a way to convey its own positive brand image. In richer scenarios and marketing forms, it is a good opportunity to win user recognition from a cultural level, and it has opened up a new high-value channel for the color TV industry in an era of low profit margins for hardware.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.