Image source @ Visual China
Text | Shang Cain Society, author | Qima, Yu nonsense
According to Red Star News, Tianjin Daily published the same "Arrears Reminder Announcement" for two consecutive days on January 10 and 11:
Guoneng (Tianjin) Natural Gas Utilization Co., Ltd., your company in May 2017 in the "Tianjin Daily" published a corporate publicity advertisement, the advertising fee has not yet been paid, the newspaper has been collected many times, I hope that your company in good faith, pay attention to the contract of the business principles, fulfill the due obligation, as soon as possible to pay the advertising fee. The payment is "Tianjin Daily".
It's 2022, and it's still urging for advertising fees in 2017, and the announcement of Tianjin Daily represents the embarrassing situation of print media today.
In the pre-Internet era, newspapers, television stations, periodicals, etc. were important advertising channels, but after the advent of the Internet and mobile Internet era, China's advertising industry was also rapidly transformed by the Internet, And Internet advertising has accounted for half of China's advertising market, and the share of newspapers and periodicals has been insignificant and has fallen into a survival dilemma.
To some extent, Internet advertising has represented the word "advertising".
We are familiar with many domestic and foreign Internet giants, it seems to be doing search, e-commerce, social, local life, media, entertainment, etc. in a certain field, in fact, they are basically doing advertising business, with increasingly abundant traffic, growing technology and accumulated massive data at the same time in building an Internet advertising world.
In the PC era, Baidu relied on the search advertising model of bidding ranking to become an Internet advertising tycoon, and Baidu's strength in that period largely depended on its super ability to turn traffic into real money.
Later, search advertising was replaced by more accurate and effective e-commerce advertising, and Ali and Pinduoduo became the king of advertising revenue in the new era.
With the rise of content decentralization and the centralization of distribution, information flow advertising has become the mainstream, bat, ByteDance and other Giants and other Internet upstarts have used their own advantages to large-scale layout of information flow advertising, and the Internet advertising market with a scale of nearly 500 billion yuan has been full of smoke.
Half of the wealth and even the lifeblood of many Internet companies also come from advertising, to some extent, it is not an exaggeration to regard some Internet companies as advertising companies.
With the intensification of the competition in information flow advertising, in order to improve the accuracy and efficiency of advertising, major Internet companies have tried their best to make users addicted and attract more attention, and even only use users as a data body for one action, while ignoring service users. In the long run, the public can't help but be deeply suspicious of the beautiful narratives that Internet companies have been claiming for years.
At present, with the economic downturn after the epidemic and the tightening of supervision that began last year, the overall growth rate of Internet advertising has slowed down, and many Internet companies that rely heavily on advertising have also entered a "cold winter".
But the brakes on advertising revenue have also forced Internet giants to rethink: it's time to make companies more valuable, not just make money.
01 The age of ad scarcity
Many people may not know that Tianjin Daily, which is now embarrassed in collecting advertising fees, has played a large role in China's advertising business.
On January 4, 1979, Tianjin Daily published an advertisement for Tianjin Toothpaste Factory, and since then, the media advertising business has gradually been carried out, kicking off the prelude to the media industry operation.
At that time, Hong Kong's Ta Kung Pao astutely commented: "The emergence of advertising is like a flute, marking the beginning of the giant ship of China's economy." ”
For most Chinese at that time, advertising was indeed a novelty.
On January 28, 1979 (the first day of the Lunar New Year), when Shanghai Television broadcast China's first 1:30-long TV commercial, people thought it was a news report.
This advertisement is from the "Ginseng Yangrong Wine" produced by Shanghai Traditional Chinese Medicine Pharmaceutical Factory No. 2. This kind of tonic was a luxury at the time, but it was all sold out on the same day, and the benefits of advertising were evident.
The movie "My Father and Me" shows the birth process of China's first TV advertisement "Ginseng Gui Yang Rong Wine" in the early days of reform and opening up
People have witnessed the power of television as the first medium, you know, at that time, the popularity of Television in China was only 4.85 million units.
From the current point of view, Ginseng Yangrong Wine may not be a good product, but it has achieved a sales miracle with the blessing of advertising, which can only show how new and scarce the advertising itself was for China at that time.
This overwhelming momentum of advertising continues, and when CCTV struck, a concept called "Biao Wang" was born.
The so-called "bidding king" refers to the fact that at the end of 1994, CCTV pioneered the prime time (the current advertisement for the nightly weather forecast festival) for national bidding, and the enterprise with the highest bidding amount will get this resounding name.
Shandong Confucius Banquet Wine won the first bid king with 30 million yuan, and the sales revenue reached 270 million yuan 2 months after the launch of the advertisement on CCTV, while its annual revenue in the previous year was only 350 million yuan.
The brand communication and cargo effect of "immediate results" have intensified the competition for bidding kings, and the bidding companies have risen from 93 in the first session to 134 in the second session, and then to 198 in the third session.
The price of Biaowang has also skyrocketed at an incredible rate. In 1995 and 1996, Qinchi Distillery won the bid for two consecutive terms, paying a price of 66.66 million yuan and 321 million yuan.
Qinchi Distillery thus changed from an unknown name to a nationally renowned liquor brand, with sales revenue of 950 million yuan and profits and taxes of 220 million yuan in 1996, which were 5 times and 6 times that of the previous year, respectively.
Boss Wang Zhuosheng said: "We drive a Santana to CCTV every day, and it is a luxury Audi. ”
In 1990, the national television advertising revenue was 561 million yuan, and seven years later it rose to 11.444 billion yuan, with an average annual growth rate of 53.83%. In 1998, CCTV was ranked among the "World's Top 100 Television Companies" with a value of 495 million US dollars.
By 1999, there were 20 TV stations with annual revenues of more than 100 million yuan, and TV buildings in various places sprung up, resulting in countless jobs and countless wonderful programs. From the first TV commercial, to the first radio advertisement to the champion of CCTV, the power of advertising in China can be seen.
It was the most glorious era of advertising in China's newspapers, radio, television, periodicals and so on.
02 Advertising scuffle in the pre-Internet era
Along with advertising in China, there are also advertising agencies.
In 1993, after the state fully opened up the right to operate advertising, the advertising industry entered a stage of spurt development.
In Beijing, the first to obtain a private license was Beijing Dacheng Advertising (1993), founded by Jiang Hong, then vice president and secretary general of the China Foreign Economic and Trade Advertising Association. In the same year, Zhang Xiaoping in Guangdong was attached to the state-owned enterprise for 8 years as an independent Guangzhou dark horse advertising; Gao Jun, the founder of Meigao Advertising, chose to move the company from Guangxi to Shanghai (1992). They are the three most representative local private advertising companies before and after the opening up of the advertising industry in 1993.
When the advertising industry was booming in the 1990s, and also before the era of digital marketing, the functions of advertising agencies had five main categories: planning advertisements on behalf of clients, producing advertisements, publishing advertisements, feedback advertising information, evaluating advertising effectiveness and providing advice.
In general, if the client wants to run an advertisement, it needs a satisfactory advertising content, a communication and influential publication medium, and a follow-up publicity strategy. This all needs to be done by the advertising agency for the client.
For example, whether the advertisement is published in newspapers and magazines or in television broadcasts involves several different advertising mediums. The forms of advertising created for these mediums are also different, whether it is comics, animations or micro-films, or it may be broadcast. The implementation of these creatives requires advertising companies to complete them according to the division of labor and processes to ensure the efficiency and quality of advertising planning and creative services.
So why do you need an advertising agency to consult for you?
Because like the past CCTV, the good days of "one winning the bid to solve a thousand worries" are gone.
In 1998, CCTV specially cancelled the title of "Bid King" and bid quarterly, which means that the enterprises advertising on CCTV have entered the era of "Post-Bid King".
In fact, CCTV advertising is also a barometer of China's economy, and the "post-standard king" era is a reflection of China's entry into a period of excess economy.
According to a survey released by the relevant departments at the time, China's oversupply and supply-demand balance of goods has reached 100%.
This suggests that the shortage economy is a thing of the past, and with the increasing number of platforms available for advertising (television, radio newspapers and the Internet), people are beginning to generally accept the existence of advertising as part of their business life.
It was also during this period that small advertisements for "certificates and seals" began to appear on the walls of telephone poles, bus stop signs, and buildings, and some lawbreakers began to use their crooked brains to turn public places into their own "advertising boards". Advertisements appear frequently in people's sights.
In the case of weakening advantages and increasing competitors, enterprises that want to do publicity naturally need a professional company to do advertising consulting.
After entering the 1990s, there was a nationwide boom in the establishment of advertising agencies. At the end of 1991, there were 1156 professional advertising agencies, and by the end of 1994, it had jumped to 18375, an increase of nearly 16 times in four years. By 1997, there were 548,000 advertising employees; the annual turnover of professional advertising companies exceeded 19.41 billion yuan.
Although China's advertising companies have developed rapidly, Compared with foreign developed countries, Bi Jing is in the initial stage. There are not many advertising companies that really have the ability to fully represent the advertising business and have a certain strength, which gives foreign advertising companies a certain "opportunity".
In 1986, China International Advertising Company, together with the American Yanrobikai Company and the Japanese Dentsu Corporation, jointly established China Denyang Advertising Company, which was the first joint venture advertising company in China, taking the lead in bringing international professional advertising and brand practice experience and models to China.
There are six major advertising groups worldwide: Omnicom, WPP, Interpublic (IPG), Publicis, Dentsu and Havas. They entered the Chinese market in 1993.
Judging from the market competition situation at that time, foreign advertising companies mainly served foreign-funded enterprises, such as Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, etc.; local advertising served local enterprises, and the boundaries between the two sides were clear, just like the confrontation between the two armies, and no one crossed the central axis.
At that time, China's advertising industry was a restricted industry, foreign capital could enter but could not hold, and most multinational companies chose to "limited" joint ventures with state-owned advertising companies.
Take, for example, perhaps the most familiar advertising company, "Shengshi Great Wall International Advertising Co., Ltd.", which is a professional Sino-foreign joint venture advertising company jointly founded by China Great Wall Industry Company (which belongs to the aerospace industry), China Tianma Tourism Industry Company (which belongs to the tourism industry), and a British company "British Shengshi International Advertising Company", which operates various types of advertising design, production, publishing and comprehensive agency at home and abroad.
These Sino-foreign joint ventures have a wealth and many years of experience in the advertising industry, and the business capabilities of local companies are naturally dwarfed by theirs.
In the 1990s, many of the most classic advertisements that we are familiar with are mostly from these joint ventures, such as Haifeisi, Piaorou, Olay, Shufujia, and Hushubao, which are also household names to this day, which is the blessing of foreign advertising companies at that time.
Also brought into China by foreign-funded enterprises is the "advertising agency system".
The so-called advertising agency system emphasizes the reasonable division of labor within the advertising industry, and can also be regarded as the result of the game between media, enterprises and advertising companies.
On one side of the advertising agency is the media, on the other side is the enterprise (advertiser). The entire advertising plan, as an integral part of marketing, is not simply to send out advertising, advertising companies are agents of advertising media and advertisers can not replace things.
Specifically, as a professional advertising agency, there are rich connections in the industry, so if Party A wants to invest in advertising, the best way is not to go directly to Party B, but to find an advertising agency in the middle, so that it is possible to get a relatively reasonable price in the industry.
That is to say, advertising agencies play a bridging role in the agency system, connecting advertisers and media, and then withdrawing deductions from both parties. After all, it's a complex and trivial affair for advertisers to successfully complete a nationwide large-scale advertising campaign. A series of work such as investigation, creativity, planning, production effect, media selection, etc., if not undertaken by professionals, is time-consuming and costly, and the advertising cost implemented within the enterprise is higher than the implementation cost of the entrusted advertising company.
During the period from 1990 to 1999, under the cultivation and competition of the fertile soil of the advertising industry, the Chinese business of local advertising and international advertising companies entered a stage of rapid development.
Under the impact of multinational joint venture advertising companies and private advertising companies and "chasing deer in the Central Plains", the business of a number of small and weak state-owned companies has gradually shrunk and withered, and has since bid farewell to the times.
During this period, there were many classic advertisements, such as the dynamic zone created by Ogilvy for the young market and asked Jay Chou to endorse, plus the slogan "M-Zone dynamic zone, my territory listens to me".
After winning the China Mobile competition, Ogilvy & Mather built the new "Dynamic Zone" into the most influential consumer brand of China Mobile. There were more than 10 million users in the year of listing, and more than 100 million after three years.
This confrontation between the two armies seemed to last forever, but after the turn of the millennium, it was broken.
The reason was that at the end of 2001, foreign-funded enterprises led by Japan Dentsu began to fight a price war with domestic enterprises and began to implement the "zero agency fee" rule. Prior to this, the advertising industry adopted the "agency system" mentioned above, that is, according to the Detailed Rules for the Implementation of the Advertising Administration Regulations, advertising companies bore 15% of foreign advertising agency fees and 10% of domestic advertising.
Once the agency fee drops to 0, then the order is bound to increase rapidly, and the truth is also true: after the launch of the "0 agency fee", Beijing Dentsu has developed rapidly, becoming the highest-revenue advertising company in 2003, and the market share of joint ventures such as Shengshi Great Wall, McCann Bright, and Shanghai Ogilvy has also increased significantly.
After entering the millennium, on the edge of the cliff of digital marketing and Internet marketing, a price war broke out.
Behind this price war lies a potential condition: in China, there are more and more advertising companies, the number of advertisers is also increasing, and the demand for brand exposure is increasing day by day, so advertising has begun to become diversified, pervasive and occupy more and more space in people's lives.
It is conceivable that there will be no "standard king" at this time, because no medium has a monopoly position, advertising began to become scattered and diverse, and it was at this time that people began to have an antipathy or even resistance to advertising.
In terms of consequences, this price war that has beaten you to death can be described as "a chicken feather", because when China fully accelerated into the Internet era, the advantages occupied by advertising companies were much worse than before, so no one left a final benefit.
03 The world of advertising built by giants
Entering the Internet era, the so-called "Internet advertising" came into being.
We are familiar with many domestic and foreign Internet giants, unicorns, etc., seem to be doing search, e-commerce, social, local life, media, entertainment, etc. in a certain field, in fact, they are basically doing advertising business, with increasingly abundant traffic, growing technology and accumulated massive data at the same time in the construction of an Internet advertising world.
The world's first true online advertisement was born in 1994, a Banner advertisement on HotWired by AT&T, worth only $30,000, but the click-through rate exceeded 44%, setting a precedent for display advertising.
Since then, the major Internet companies have shown their magic, and you have drawn it one by one:
In 1995, Netscape introduced CPM (Cost per Thousand Impressions) advertising billing method, that is, for every thousand people who see it, the advertiser pays;
In the same year, Yahoo ran the first keyword advertisement, which can present different ads to different audiences, becoming the "originator of precision marketing";
In '97, a programmer named Ethan Zuckerman wrote the world's first pop-up ad code;
In 1998, there was a search engine company called Goto.com in the United States that invented a business model of bidding ranking, which determines the order of search results according to the amount of money paid by the bidding website;
In 2006, Facebook launched in-feed ads, that is, inserting ads in user news, which will match different presentation methods for users for different content sources;
In 2008, Youtube launched a video patch advertisement, that is, the advertisement in front of the video;
......
These advertising methods basically circle the framework of future Internet advertising, and later the Internet advertising war is to fine-tune and superimpose on the basis of these advertising forms.
Domestic Internet companies that have risen with the wind have used various forms of advertising without omission from the beginning:
Portals such as Sina and Sohu have launched vertical classified ads; QQ has launched pop-up ads; Baidu has launched an auction ranking system; Sina Weibo has also launched information flow ads; and major video websites have opened video patch ads.
Since its birth, the Internet has brought a large number of free information and services to netizens in various forms, but there is no free lunch in the world, and in the business world, when a commodity or service is not charged, the value will shift to another higher level. The free information and services that netizens get are ultimately paid for by advertisers.
However, every time netizens use a certain service of the Internet, on the one hand, they bring traffic, on the other hand, they also improve the system algorithm of accurately positioning advertisements of Internet enterprises, making an Internet platform more valuable, and invisibly carrying out labor exchange.
Under this model, how to truly convert huge traffic into revenue through more effective means is regarded by many Internet companies as the first priority.
There are only a few ways for Internet companies to monetize, such as advertising, value-added services, and e-commerce, but the most direct and effective is advertising.
04 The fall of the "Search Advertising Overlord"
Many excellent Internet companies have died out without finding a monetized business model, such as some well-known search engines in the 90s, Such as Infoseek, LookSmart, and Inktomi.
Baidu founder Robin Li was once one of the core engineers of Infoseek, so after the establishment of Baidu, Robin Li tried his best to find a way out for Baidu to monetize, that is, bidding ranking.
At Baidu's board meeting in 2001, Robin Li's plan to do bidding rankings was unanimously opposed. He was furious, slammed his phone on the table, and shouted: "If you don't do bidding rankings, then don't do it!" ”
It turns out that bidding rankings do bring a lot of real money to Baidu, in the PC era, Baidu was the No. 1 of Internet advertising revenue for a long time, when search advertising was the highest market share in various advertising forms, and Baidu could monopolize nearly 80% of the revenue share.
Because before Baidu, the most representative is the display paid advertising model of Sina, Sohu, etc. - as long as the advertiser's advertising content is displayed, the advertiser has to pay for it. Baidu is a new advertising model, through the user's initiative to search, recommend to users more wanted information, accuracy and efficiency greatly improved, compared to the portal, the income is also greatly improved.
According to the data of Ai Media Consulting, in 2014, the initial entry into the mobile Internet era, Baidu's advertising revenue exceeded 49 billion yuan, ranking first among major Internet companies, followed by Taobao's 37.5 billion, Tencent's only 8 billion at that time, and Google China and Qihoo 360, which were also search engines, were also in the TOP10.
The strength of Baidu during that period was largely reflected in its advertising revenue.
But while search advertising is leading the way, a more efficient form of advertising is gaining momentum, that is, e-commerce advertising.
In 2014, the market share of e-commerce advertising reached 25%, second only to 33% of search advertising, and the growth rate of e-commerce advertising was much higher than that of search advertising, because the effectiveness of the precision e-commerce advertising model was stronger than that of the pan-search advertising model.
For example, at that time, if you searched for Baidu and Taobao with the keyword "iPad" respectively, you would find that the first three results of Baidu search were Baidu Encyclopedia, Zhongguancun Online Quotation and Baidu Pictures, and Taobao's search results were the list of quotations given by merchants to iPads.
This shows that the people who use Baidu search are users who want to understand the various information of the iPad, and the people who search on Taobao are more users who want to buy iPads. As an advertiser, it's natural to want the most willing users to buy.
Baidu discovered this problem many years ago, and in October 2007, it entered the C2C e-commerce, launched "yes", and broke out a "Baibao War" with Taobao - Taobao and Baidu terminated the bidding ranking cooperation, and Taobao completely blocked the crawling of Baidu's search engine.
Baidu and Taobao seem to be in the field of e-commerce offensive and defensive warfare, but in fact, they are also competing for traffic that can be more accurately monetized, after all, traffic is equal to advertising revenue.
However, Baidu has never been able to put a large amount of accurate traffic previously led to e-commerce into its own pockets, and "yes" ended in failure in 2012.
2016 was, to some extent, a turning point in Baidu's fate.
This year, there was a "Baidu hemophilia tieba was sold incident", and a Putian hospital recommended by the gullible bidding ranking led to the death of Wei Zexi, a patient with synovial sarcoma, which made people focus on the keywords of "Baidu advertising bidding ranking". Under the general questioning of the revenue model and the strengthening of supervision, Baidu's search advertising has been greatly affected.
In contrast, it was also in this year that e-commerce advertising jumped to the first place in search advertising.
05 Half of the river even the lifeblood is advertised
In the traditional PC era, search engines such as Baidu, Google, and Qihoo 360 have mastered the core traffic distribution function, but with the rise of the mobile Internet, traffic has come to the mobile phone, and search technology cannot crawl the content in the App like crawling web content.
One app after another has become a search "black hole", and under the full screen of Apps, Baidu is difficult to search for and distribute.
Baidu's use time on the mobile terminal began to gradually lag behind WeChat, mobile Taobao, mobile QQ, etc., at the same time, the endless vertical search products gradually encroached on Baidu's comprehensive search, such as Zhihu in the professional field, WeChat online search, headlines based on news and entertainment search.
After the rise of e-commerce advertising, the most representative Taobao department of Ali has become the biggest advertising beneficiary.
When Baidu entered the e-commerce industry and fired at Ali's hinterland, Ali also did something that made Baidu feel threatened - it launched Alimama and directly cut into the Internet advertising market.
Alimama subverted the rules of the game of search engines, buyers and sellers can directly trade online, many resources that could not enter the market in the past have been discovered, small and medium-sized enterprises are transparent throughout the transaction, the delivery is faster and more accurate, and the entire online advertising market can also be re-allocated efficiently.
Since then, Alimama has launched marketing products such as Taobao Express, Diamond Booth, and Dharma Disk to improve the conversion rate of advertising.
For example, the earliest Taobao express, goods appear in a conspicuous position on the mobile phone Taobao / Taobao search page, when the buyer conducts a keyword search, to prioritize to get the attention of the buyer. At the same time, only buyers need to pay for clicks, and the system intelligently filters invalid clicks, which is different from the way that search ads have to pay as long as they click, and there are a large number of invalid clicks, which is naturally more popular with advertisers.
In recent years, the decentralization of content and the centralization of distribution have determined the rise of information flow advertising.
After entering the era of mobile Internet, Facebook, the "originator of information flow advertising", took the lead in using information flow in mobile terminals, and the mobile terminal with a large palm could not find corners to place advertisements, and could only be mixed in the information flow, so Facebook's overall advertising revenue and structure were completely changed.
But it is not called information flow advertising by sandwiching ads in the information, it is based on more accurate algorithms, which can push the most appropriate advertisements (not the most appropriate, in fact, the degree of annoyance to the minimum) to users with different interests at the right time.
In order to meet the accuracy of such algorithms, Facebook collects data wherever possible, even disregarding the privacy and security of users, and builds a huge advertising business with this data, which has been questioned.
After Facebook has achieved a big victory in information flow advertising, the major domestic Internet has also been fighting in the information flow advertising jianghu, 2017 is the first year of the outbreak of Information Flow Advertising in China, baidu with information flow content such as Tieba, News, short videos, Tencent with WeChat Circle of Friends, QQ Space, and ByteDance with short videos, news information, etc. have vigorously increased the information flow.