Under the blessing of this node in the summer, the advertising market, which has been shrouded by "pressure" for several consecutive seasons, finally picked up slightly in the third quarter of this year.

According to QuestMobile's "2022 China Mobile Limited Internet Autumn report", the size of China's Internet advertising market in Q3 in 2022 was 166.33 billion yuan, an increase of 5.1 percent over the same period last year, exceeding the growth rate of 3.9 percent of Q1 and-7.6 percent of Q2.

Although there are still many companies with negative advertising revenue growth in the third quarter, it is worth noting that many companies have achieved or maintained a positive growth trend: Pinduoduo "made a fortune quietly", advertising revenue increased by 58% compared with the same period last year; JD.com, Kuaishou Technology, Meituan, and Bilibili Inc. continued to maintain a positive growth rate, while Autohome Inc finally ushered in positive growth in this quarter after five consecutive quarters of year-on-year growth decline.

In the case of no substantial growth or decline in the market plate, advertising giants' income will inevitably rise and fall, and changes in income have also led to the overall rearrangement of seats: once the three BAT firmly occupied the top three in advertising revenue, Pinduoduo rose suddenly in the fourth quarter of last year, surpassing Baidu, Inc. and Tencent, and has been firmly in the second place on the list; last quarter, JD.com, who ranked third, fell back to the fifth place, and Tencent returned to the top three. (note: since byte jump is not listed yet, its income is not counted here.)

The era of rapid growth of advertising revenue is gone forever, and now in the environment of the Red Sea of traffic and growth bottleneck, the internal volume and competition of major Internet platforms are becoming more and more fierce. Behind the rearrangement of seats, what are the changes of the players in the third quarter, and what are the new layouts and new actions?

01 who is growing?

In the third quarter of this year, the "low-key" Pinduoduo contributed a strong performance.
With advertising revenue of 28.426 billion yuan and a year-on-year growth rate of 58%, Pinduoduo has become the fastest growing player in advertising revenue of all comparable companies. At the same time, from the perspective of lengthening the time period, under the impact of fluctuations in the external environment, most of the advertising revenues of other major Internet companies have fallen into single-digit growth or even stagnant in recent quarters, but Pinduoduo has maintained double-digit year-on-year growth rates for four consecutive quarters, and the growth rate continues to rise.

In the financial report, Pinduoduo attributed the source of this achievement to two aspects: one is the distribution of coupons and the routine measures of promotional activities to further enhance the user stickiness of the platform; the other is the continuous development of the "Super Star" plan. to expand the proportion of brand merchants.

Prior to this, Pinduoduo platform is mostly brand dealers, since last year Pinduoduo 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" to give advertising product concessions and flow support to brands that joined the program, attracting many well-known brands such as antelope, Clarins, Nature Hall and so on.According to the statistics of the National Finance and Securities Research Institute, from December 2020 to June 2022, 3000-5000 brands have joined the "Super Star" program, covering various categories such as clothing, food, housing, transportation and so on.The introduction of brands so vigorously has naturally led to the advertising business of Puduo.

In fact, since the beginning of this year, a trend in the marketing industry has been very obvious--Under the influence of the external environment, e-commerce has given advertising a reassurance instead, and almost companies with e-commerce genes have relatively sound advertising revenue.

In fact, this situation is not difficult to understand. According to QuestMobile data, e-commerce advertising is now the category with the highest market share and rising market share among all types of Internet media advertising. Short conversion link and high conversion efficiency are the key points favored by advertisers.

In the third quarter, the driving force of e-commerce remained the same. It can be seen that, in addition to the growth rate of Pinduoduo, although the growth rate is negative, BABA still stands firmly in the first place, with advertising revenue of 64.497 billion yuan several times that of other players. JD.com 's advertising business performance also tends to be "stable", with advertising revenue of 18.954 billion yuan in this quarter, an increase of 13% over the same period last year. Although the growth rate has rebounded, JD.com mainly explained in the financial report that the fee waiver given to 3P merchants has been adjusted after the general environment has improved.

In addition to the traditional e-commerce platform, Kuaishou Technology also benefits from the e-commerce business.

In the third quarter, Kuaishou Technology's revenue from other services, including e-commerce business, grew the fastest of its three businesses, becoming an important driver of performance. Its advertising revenue reached 11.59 billion yuan, an increase of 6.2% over the same period last year.

In the financial report, Kuaishou Technology particularly emphasized the scale expansion of platform e-commerce business, which is the key to the transformation efficiency of platform traffic and closed-loop ecology, and the key to maintaining a healthy rise in e-commerce advertising services. At the financial report meeting, CEO Cheng smiled and said bluntly that e-commerce is not only one of the important engines of the company's future growth, but also the center of Kuaishou Technology's commercial ecology.

Except for the above companies that have benefited from e-commerce.Advertising revenue in the third quarter achieved double-digit growth, one is the expected Bilibili Inc., the other is the unexpected Autohome Inc.

Bilibili Inc. 's advertising revenue in the third quarter was 1.355 billion yuan, an increase of 15.6% over the same period last year. Bilibili Inc. has been growing at double-digit levels for three consecutive quarters this year.

I have to admitBilibili Inc. is indeed because the scale of his advertising business is still relatively low, and there is a lot of room for growth after the gradual improvement of more advertising products. At the same time, Bilibili Inc. is also making all-round efforts to commercialize this year.For example, Bilibili Inc. once again highlighted in the financial report that the vertical video mode Story-Mode has brought about the improvement of user stickiness and advertising efficiency. Li Mi, vice chairman and COO of Bilibili Inc., also said that vertical advertising will be a new growth point of advertising revenue in the future.

In addition, Bilibili Inc. also worked hard on the commercialization of UP. In the third quarter of this year, the spark platform upgraded six major functions. The number of UP owners stationed in spark increased by 121% compared with the same period last year, and the number of UP owners who obtained commercial orders increased by 96% compared with the same period last year.

Unlike the steady growth of Bilibili Inc. 's advertising business, Autohome Inc's performance in this quarter was unexpected.

Since the second quarter of last year, Autohome Inc's advertising revenue has been negative for five consecutive quarters, and Q4 fell 64% in 2021 compared with the same period last year. The financial report explained that this was mainly due to reduced advertising spending due to a decline in the average income of advertisers at automakers.

But this quarterAutohome Inc's advertising revenue reached 556 million yuan, which not only successfully stopped the bleeding, but also achieved a 28% year-on-year increase.Its sudden growth is also closely related to the industry of advertisers-- mentioned in the financial report.Due to the easing of the global chip shortage, the increase in the average income of car customers has led to a corresponding increase in advertising."2022 China Mobile Limited Internet Autumn report" also mentioned that in September, joint venture and local car brands swept the soft wide launch TOP list. From this, it can also be seen that the rooted content platform is more attached to the advertisers of the relevant industries, and the relevant industries are warming up, and the advertising revenue of the vertical content platform is also growing, and vice versa.

02 Break through the fog

Since last year, under the impact of continuous fluctuations in the external environment, the budget contraction of advertisers has become a consensus, coupled with the fact that several major "advertising giants" industries, including online education and finance, have experienced great changes, and the advertising market as a whole has entered a "cold winter". This year's uncertainty remains the same, "reducing costs and increasing efficiency" has become the main theme of various industries, which is also an important reason why advertising marketing is still under "pressure" in the first few quarters of this year.

There has been a slight pick-up this quarter, indicating that some changes are taking place.

Looking back on this yearOne thing is generally emphasized in the marketing industry-how to spend money more effectively.You have seen "experiences and lessons" from previous cases: during the economic crisis in the 1990s, for example, after McDonald's Corp cut back on advertising spending, sales shrank by nearly 30 per cent, but Pizza Hut increased its advertising and sales increased by 60 per cent. Many data institutions have also produced research results: for example, Kaidu BrandZ said that during the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, players with strong brands and companies that insisted on marketing outperformed those that cut back on advertising.

After the advertising budget is reduced, the cost is reduced, but so is the amount that is available and lays the groundwork for the future. Brands have come to realize"cost reduction" is not easy to cut advertising budget, the money to be spent is still to be spent, but the key is not to compete with who spends more and advertising to spread widely, but to pursue practical results and foreseeable value.

CTR's "2022 China Advertising trend Survey" report also mentioned that brand owners will use "barbell strategy" to achieve effective delivery when investing resources. On the one hand, resources are invested in areas with low risk and stable returns, which are mostly related to the long-term construction of the brand, taking into account both products and efficiency; on the other hand, they will be invested in high-risk and high-return areas, such as new product research and development and promotion, meta-cosmic marketing and so on. At the same time, reduce the medium-risk, middle-income "moderate" investment.

After a period of silence, advertisers have become more confident about marketing. In order to meet the demands of the advertisers, the platforms naturally stepped up their actions.

First,The key to avoid invalid delivery lies in "people", that is, to accurately find the target users and improve the conversion efficiency.。Previously, advertisers also put the target crowd package according to user portraits and tags, but this year, the major platforms have been upgraded again, further dividing the crowd in detail, especially according to the user transformation path and the user's whole life cycle.

For example, Tencent advertisement provides a 3s model of crowd asset breadth, crowd asset depth and crowd asset health for target users on the basis of 5R funnel, which helps brands find competitive advantages and disadvantages before investment. to provide a more accurate judgment for business growth after investment. On the other hand, the huge engine divides the relationship between consumers and brands into groups based on the Omur5A model, emphasizing that advertisers can find the "deep interactive crowd", that is, A3 crowd. According to the giant cloud map "Brand recommendation trick" report, there is a proportional relationship between the A3 population and the brand conversion rate, and the possibility of transformation will be further improved after the brand identifies the A3 population and launches it.

Second,The flow dividend is at its peak, effective growth is extremely difficult, and everyone wants to fight for as much as possible from every gap, which is why "global" has become the keyword of the industry this year.

Global is a very macro and general concept, which was put forward by BABA many years ago. At that time, the main problem was to solve the problem of scattered business within the group. Today, the connotation and concepts of the whole world are constantly being enriched and upgraded, and integrated marketing, the integration of marketing and management, the integration of quality, effect and marketing, the linkage of public and private fields, and so on, can almost be related to it, from the field to products and game. each item is aimed at digging cracks and finding new growth points.

Looking at the specific approach, each family is actually standing on its own advantages to do global: for example, Douyin this year focuses on doing the e-commerce part of the shelf, and its global emphasis is on the series and integration of fields from content to search and shopping malls, so as to realize the expansion of the business field. Tencent's advertisement emphasizes the access of Tencent resources and media, and the huge amount of traffic covered by its entire "domain" is an advantage that other players do not have.

In addition, in fact, everyone has made a further expansion of the "global" this year.

Previously, people talked more about the "autopilot loop" and recommended the integration of weeding in the station, but now the general trend of interconnection is obvious.Therefore, in addition to the self-closed loop, each family also began to emphasize off-site transformation, common cooperation and ecological win-win.

This year's Singles Day holiday is a typical case. Kuaishou Technology, who had cut off the chain, re-opened the webcast shopping cart, short video shopping cart, commodity details page and other pages to Taobao Alliance goods in October this year. And Taobao in this double 11, and Weibo Corp, Bilibili Inc., Xiaohongshu all launched a direct cooperation, trying to channel from these content platforms.

It can be seen that under the global concept, whether it is scene expansion or integration, or breaking the traffic bottleneck of a single platform and providing more trading opportunities, these are all good news for advertisers.

Generally speaking, although it may take a long time for the full recovery of Internet advertising, it is still one of the most mature and extensive cash realization methods in the business world for the platform. for advertisers, it is still the field with the most concentrated traffic and the most visible results.. Not only find the solution according to the short-term fluctuation law, but also do not forget to carry on the fine and intelligent advertising management with long-term thinking, both hands are hard, and it is the core of stable development and constant growth.