When I opened Yibo yesterday afternoon, the homepage that was supposed to be full of awl-face covers actually contained some serious and heavy themes: "Dad, I don't want to go back and take over your factory", "Dad, does it embarrass you that I'm not married?", "Dad, do you care about me seeing a psychiatrist?" and so on.
Click on any live broadcast and you will see a conversation between a father and a son or a father and a daughter. Some debates are fierce, some are full of embarrassment, and there is also a girl who cried when she could not get understanding from her father.
This live broadcast, similar to a reality show, is a Mid-Autumn Festival event organized by Xinshixiang and Cobos Robots: "Why don't you want to go home?"
In this festival where every family sells limited-edition mooncakes and everyone posts family photos, they want to talk about something different that touches people’s real pain points. The relationship with their father is such a pain point for many people working hard in first- and second-tier cities.
Among similar topic promotions, the most successful one was probably the SK-II advertisement in April this year that hit WeChat Moments and Weibo - "She ended up going to the Blind Date Corner".
“When I saw the SK-II advertisement, I was thinking, this is what we should do.” Wang Zaixing, a partner of Xinshixiang, recalled in an interview.
So in planning this serious dialogue event with his father, Wang Zaixing wanted to target SK-II. In addition to the live broadcast, Xinshixiang will also streamline the content into a short film of a few minutes.
If you have read Xinshixiang’s articles, you will know that such topics are what it is good at. This WeChat public account with 1 million fans always uses literary and artistic language to talk about the various anxieties of urbanites.
Nowadays, Xinshixiang is trying to expand this content positioning from articles to new forms such as event planning, live broadcasts, and videos.
Although judging from the current results, this time "Why Don't You Want to Go Home" cannot be called a "hit", and its spreading power is far less than that of the "Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou" two months ago. However, compared to the internet celebrities who are used to singing, putting on makeup, telling jokes, and selling goods, things like Xin Shixiang are indeed a breakthrough in live broadcast content.
Perhaps if you want to make a living without relying on your face, you really need more talent and effort. Behind these 10 live broadcasts of serious dialogues between fathers may be the most complex and expensive planning since the live broadcast format appeared in China.
According to Wang Zaixing, it took 2 months from the idea creation in mid-July to finding brand partners and forming a temporary video team. In order to better present the interview content and post-produce it into high-quality videos, this time each of the 10 father and son pairs was equipped with a director and two cameras. The 10 live broadcasts for one hour on this day cost about 1 million.
From the cost, you can imagine how much communication and coordination work is required to ensure that 10 events across the country can be carried out smoothly at the same time, and there will be no glitches in such a sensitive dialogue. This may subvert many brand marketers' understanding of live streaming - a cheap, convenient and casual marketing method.
From the perspective of content creation, the emergence of live broadcast as a new media technology should mean more possibilities for content creation. If you want to use a live broadcast platform to create good content, its threshold is no lower than that of traditional graphics and text carriers.
In an article we wrote before, "What is the correct way for brands to engage in live broadcast marketing?" "In the article, it was mentioned that overseas, from McDonald's live broadcast of artists creating burgers to Facebook live broadcast of NASA astronauts, these brands have spent a lot of thought and preparation on live broadcast content. But in the country, creative live content has not appeared.
But Wang Zaixing believes that the future will definitely not be like this.
Wang Zaixing started paying attention to live broadcasts about half a year ago. "I joined some Internet celebrity groups in March, and I found that live streaming websites are emerging one after another, and the prices of Internet celebrities are constantly increasing. The monthly monthly salary for Internet celebrities was initially 1,000 to 3,000, and later to 8,000. I think it is problematic that the price of such homogeneous content continues to rise. I have been thinking, where are the opportunities for the new era?" Wang Zaixing said.
From Xinshixiang's first trial of live broadcasting in June this year, broadcasting 13 night owl occupations in Beijing at 4 a.m., to the industry-famous "Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou" live broadcast two months ago, to "Why don't you want to go home during the Mid-Autumn Festival", Xinshi has invested more and more in live broadcasting, and it is also constantly changing the outside world's impression of live broadcasting.
Wang Zaixing still remembers that when he first tried to cooperate with a live broadcast platform, he was very unwelcoming. "StaffI can't even talk about it, and there is no beauty at all. "But such an "amateur" live broadcast attracted nearly 300,000 viewers at 4 a.m., which greatly exceeded the expectations of the live broadcast platform.
This is why in this "Why not go home" event, Yibo gave strong support in the recommended position, placing this content that is so inconsistent with "live broadcast" at the top of the homepage.
“A person in charge of the operation of a live broadcast website told me that they (users) eat too much meat and should also eat some vegetarian food,” Wang Zaixing said. His understanding is that consumers need differentiated content.
Of course, Xinshixiang can produce some differentiated live broadcast content with dissemination power, largely because its live broadcast does not exist independently, but is based on a complete content communication system, including a very active fan group, its own communication channels such as WeChat public accounts and Weibo, and a clear content tonality.
The "Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou" campaign in cooperation with Flight Steward was a typical attempt: First, a provocative article was used to call people to put down their work on a Friday morning, rush to the airport, and then launch a live broadcast.
After this event hit Weibo and WeChat Moments, many brands took the initiative to contact Xin Shixiang, and the live broadcast platforms were also willing to actively cooperate, and even talked to Xin Shixiang about the possibility of purchasing live broadcast content in the future.
Covacs Robots, the sponsor of this father’s live dialogue event, started to pay attention to the new world because of the “Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou” activities. But what is different from "Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou" is that this time there is a topic selection and planning first, and then sponsors are found.
Many brands are now willing to actively participate in live broadcasting, especially technology companies. But in the process of finding sponsors this time, Wang Zaixing still encountered many obstacles. He initially targeted mobile phone brands as sponsors, but that didn't materialize in the end. According to Wang Zaixing, after the plan came out in July, he talked to 5 manufacturers. Some of the proposals were not approved in the last round because the other party still valued the celebrity effect more, and some brands wanted to add brand elements to the live broadcast. These all violated Xinshixiang's principle of creating sincere "amateur" content.
We finally reached a cooperation with Ecovacs because it happened that the company was planning how to focus on family topics for the second half of the year. As a domestic smart home appliance brand with rapid sales growth but not very high brand awareness, it is willing to tryTry new ways to strengthen brand recognition and emotional connections with consumers.
During the negotiation process between Wang Zaixing and the merchants, he always "educated" the PRs to know how to "let the brand take a step back." Sincere content is more valuable than simple and crude exposure.
For Xinshixiang, its more important goal than making money is to establish influence in the live broadcast and video industry and make itself a brand with comprehensive content production and operation capabilities.
“Luxury goods are not willing to try live broadcast now, not because they are not interested in this technology, but because there is no good content to match.” Wang Zaixing believes that this is the future of Xinshixiang in the field of live broadcast.
However, it is a difficult and long road to truly change the concept of brand promotion and make differentiated live content mainstream.
"It's really tiring to do this. I've barely had a good night's sleep recently." Wang Zaixing said.
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