It's cold, and "slow down" is still the keyword for the advertising business of Internet companies.

The advertising growth rate of the BAT three, which predicted last quarter that they would "continue to be under pressure", fell by about 10 per cent year-on-year; advertising revenues of companies such as Sohu.com Ltd and Momo Inc have reached a level of negative growth of 30 per cent; and Weibo Corp, who also benefited from social advertising last year, also experienced negative growth of 23 per cent year-on-year for the first time.

However, in addition to negative growth, there are still new changes worthy of attention--The value of e-commerce to advertising marketing is becoming more and more obvious.

Starting from the fourth quarter of last year, the top three in advertising revenue were no longer just BAT seats. Pinduoduo successfully surpassed Tencent and Baidu, Inc. in second place. Pinduoduo also maintained this position in the second quarter of this year. At the same time, JD.com ranked fourth in advertising revenue, surpassing Baidu, Inc. in the first quarter of this year.In the second quarter, JD.com successfully overtook Tencent and Baidu, Inc. to move forward to third place.What we can sense is that Douyin e-commerce is also "ferocious", but because the byte beat has not yet been listed, there is no public data, so it is not included here.

In other words, starting from the second quarter of this yearThe top three Internet advertising revenues have been swept by the three major e-commerce platforms.

The strong drive of e-commerce, to a certain extent, shows that in the context of the impact of the external environment has not been eliminated.Advertisers prefer to be close to the transformation link of the deal, forming a very short link between "camp" and "sale".Platforms with only content or social attributes are dwarfed by the attractiveness of advertisers in this era of survival and growth.

The thirst of advertisers is quenched by e-commerce.

Although the top three are all e-commerce platforms, their respective advertising business development is not exactly the same.

BABA has been firmly in the first place in revenue for a long time and belongs to the leading player who is difficult for others to catch up with in the short term. In the second quarter, although its advertising revenue dropped 10.12% from the same period last year, its revenue of 72.263 billion yuan far exceeded that of other big companies. Even if Pinduoduo surpasses Tencent and Baidu, Inc. to the second place, his revenue of 25.173 billion yuan still has a gap of nearly 47 billion yuan with BABA.

Pinduoduo continues to rise to second place, mainly because he is in the stage of vigorously introducing the brand.

Prior to this, most of Pinduoduo's platform were brand dealers, but since last year, Pinduoduo has set up a "Super Star" group, the main task is to pull brands to set up flagship stores. During the period of June 18 this year, Pinduoduo also opened a "brand special show". According to official statistics, the first batch of domestic and foreign brands registered more than 500, involving all categories of clothing, food, housing and transportation. So many brands come to the station to do e-commerce and promotion, which naturally leads to a lot of advertising business.

Therefore, in the second quarter, Pinduoduo became the company with the fastest growth in advertising revenue among all comparable Internet companies with a year-on-year growth rate of 39.23%. In terms of the extended time period, in an environment where most companies were already under continuous pressure last year, their annual advertising revenue grew by more than 50%.

The advertising revenue of JD.com, who ranked third, surpassed Tencent and Baidu, Inc., mainly because it has further opened up the ecology to cooperate with more brands in recent years, and has also continued to take positive actions in marketing.

For example, JD.com CFO Xu ran stressed on the earnings call last year that the improved Marketplace ecosystem has driven the influx of third-party merchants of almost all categories. This year, JD.com proposed a comprehensive upgrading of marketing services, with "global" as the core theme, a major integration of all products, tools and services.

In the second quarter of this year, JD.com 's advertising revenue was 20.742 billion yuan, an increase of 9.25% over the same period last year. Xu ran once again mentioned the ecosystem on the conference call-through further improvement and opening up, there are more new brand merchants on the platform who cooperated deeply with it, and participated in the 618 promotion event in the second quarter. In particular, businesses in the electronics and cosmetics categories have allocated additional advertising costs to promote sales recovery.

In addition to the three traditional e-commerce businesses, Kuaishou Technology has also boosted advertising revenue due to the craze of bringing goods in short videos and live streaming of e-commerce.

In the second quarter, Kuaishou Technology's advertising revenue was 11.006 billion yuan, a year-on-year growth rate of 10.48%. In the financial report, Kuaishou Technology made it clear that the online marketing service revenue contributed by e-commerce merchants on the platform showed a healthy growth trend and stronger resilience, which greatly promoted the growth of overall advertising revenue in the second quarter.

However, Kuaishou Technology's advertising revenue growth in addition to the e-commerce business is also driven by brand advertising business. Since 2020, Kuaishou Technology has begun to focus on brand advertising to attract advertisers by providing more customized solutions and innovative brand marketing methods. In the second-quarter results, Kuaishou Technology said that the growth rate of its brand advertising even exceeded the growth rate of overall advertising revenue.

In addition to the above four growth due to e-commerce business, only Bilibili Inc. achieved double-digit growth in other advertising business in the second quarter, with advertising revenue of 1.158 billion yuan, up 10.40% from the same period last year.

Of course, this growth is related to the low maturity and scale of Bilibili Inc. 's advertising business, which is being commercialized in an all-round way at this stage. At present, Bilibili Inc. is still in the stage of improving the advertising business infrastructure. First of all, its growth comes from the spark platform serving the main commercialization of UP, which was launched in July 2020 and is still continuously upgrading and improving its control power at this stage; secondly, it comes from the improvement of the conversion rate of traffic in the station. Chen Rui specifically said on the phone conference that Story-Mode vertical screen advertising has brought a new increment, and its eCPM is higher than that of other similar advertisements.

What's the future?

Although the future trend is difficult to predict, but in the "pressure" situation is still difficult to change in the short term under the background, the marketing field has shown a very obvious trend of change.

First, as "reducing costs and increasing efficiency" has been the theme of various companies, the marketing at this stage also pays more attention to the clarity, accuracy and science of the whole process.

The budget of advertisers is tight, and they are unable to carry out large-scale marketing in an all-round way. therefore, on the basis of defining their own characteristics and specific marketing objectives, they must plan more carefully the marketing methods, which channels and types of advertising to choose, and who they can reach.

In order to meet the needs of advertisers, the marketing platforms of major companies are upgrading their methodologies, products and tools, emphasizing the digital realization of science, efficiency and accuracy. For example, through the integration of products, tools and resources, make the process smoother, save manpower and time costs; when advertising, use phased data feedback to calculate at any time, modify and optimize the marketing strategy. And the platform is also subdividing the users to see whether they are currently in the understanding, interest or purchase action, and then give different marketing methods accordingly. The application ideas of Omur5A model (opportunity, understanding, attraction, inquiry, action, support) put forward by huge engines and 5R funnel (exposure touch, shallow interaction, deep touch, transformation action, repurchase loyalty) of Tencent advertisement are all the same.

Second, under the demand of "reducing costs and increasing efficiency", everyone is pursuing a "closed loop" as soon as possible.

For example, it is often mentioned in the marketing field that the linkage between the public domain and the private domain can form a "global closed loop". Popularly speaking, it is emphasized that advertisers should first reach in the public domain, obtain customers more efficiently, and then use the private domain position composed of brand accounts to undertake traffic, so as to do transformation and repurchase. The closed loop formed in this way avoids the problems of top-heavy marketing, spending money on drainage but failing to use it many times later.

For example, the concept of "closed loop of quality marketing", which is quite common, emphasizes that brands can put their budget in the three baskets of brand advertising, effect and social marketing, and e-commerce advertising at the same time, shortening the conversion link and achieving the superposition of performance. And this also puts forward requirements for the platform-only the content ecological or social attributes are far from enough, the platform must have a sales field in order to truly be called the trinity of quality, efficiency and sales. In fact, this is why the advertising business of e-commerce platforms and platforms with e-commerce business can grow relatively steadily.

Third, in the context of stock competition, it is no longer realistic to look for "flow depression", and people tend to find "marketing value depression" through "integrated marketing".

A typical case is that digital marketing is now a routine operation, and everyone knows that through crowd-oriented, content-oriented and other technologies to do thousands of people information flow advertising, can stimulate the interest of the target population. But as a result, the competition becomes fiercer.

Therefore, at present, various platforms have also come up with more combinations of ways to play: for example, search advertisements can be linked to explore the deep value of this part of users who have clear needs and are willing to search actively; you can also do exposure in the mall, e-commerce bidding, so that brands can enter the scene of more user consumption, so as to get a certain new increment. Douyin's "global interest ecommerce" is actually talking about the brand should take into account short video, live broadcast, search and mall, in order to find new growth.

In essence, the change of marketing trend is that advertisers are driving all parties involved in marketing activities to "change with the times". Although there are no other new media forms that can surpass the Internet, and advertising will still be an important way to realize cash on the Internet, we have to admit that the difficulty of marketing has increased a lot. the businesses, products and strategies of big companies must be upgraded accordingly.