Hu Ge and Yang Zi Tengger, who is the favorite star of the online platform？

Text | Xinghui

Editor | Shi Can

Recently, the sound of learning to meow has always sounded in the elevator.

"Seven Cats, Seven Cats Meow Meow Meow…" Tengger’s rugged tone was accompanied by the background melody, and the brainwashed lines were repeated over and over again, "bombarding" every office worker indiscriminately. Under the cat’s meow, all living beings are equal.

Image source Weibo @Tiying Media

This elevator advertisement comes from the digital reading platform "Seven Cats Free Novel", and the singer Tengger’s title in it is the spokesperson of the Seven Cats brand. Coincidentally, in August this year, the comprehensive reading platform "Fanqie Novel" officially announced actor Yang Zi as the brand spokesperson.

Earlier, China Literature Limited had officially announced actor Hu Ge as the spokesperson of Reading Literature IP, and actor Song Yi also served as the ambassador of Reading Literature Recommendation Group… Whether it is a free reading force or a paid online position, celebrity marketing is no longer a new thing.

Why have big-name spokespeople become the norm in the online industry? Today’s online marketing has evolved to what stage?

What kind of celebrity can become an online spokesperson?

Teacher Tengger came to brush his face again.

After learning to call the elevator advertisement was launched, people in Weibo Square often lamented the "magic" of this advertisement. Some people were troubled by the loop of the elevator advertisement, while others sensed a subtle contrast from the reincarnation of meowing: "When I got out of the elevator, I started to search for’Tengger learns to call the cat ‘."

The reason why Seven Cats chose Tengger’s endorsement is obviously inseparable from the latter’s wonderful path of "becoming popular again" over the years.

As a well-known Mongolian singer, Tengger’s heroic grassland-style songs were sung all over the country in his early years. However, his popularity in today’s Internet space is not due to his pure majestic style, but because of his subversive "Uncle Meng" image.

Since the original song "Peach Blossom Land" became popular in 2013, Tengger’s style of painting has shifted step by step. He returned to the public eye, went on variety shows, played cross-border, and covered many popular songs in contrasting ways, such as the cover of Zhang Shaohan’s masterpiece "Invisible Wings" to sing the hard atmosphere of "Wings of Steel"…

Image source Bilibili

On the eve of Double 11 in 2019, the news that "Tengger will sing" Love Circle "on the same stage as Hanazawa Cilantro" spread all over the Internet, causing his cross-dimensional character to come out of the circle again. Although the news was eventually clarified, Tengger did interact with the two-dimensional field frequently since then.

In the tide of netizens playing stalks or imitating, Tengger himself settled in Bilibili and gradually occupied a place in the front line of youth culture. An interesting fact is that as of get the manuscript ready, Tengger’s Weibo fans were about 1.148 million, while Bilibili fans far exceeded the former, up to 1.839 million.

From this perspective, it is not surprising that Seven Cats chose Tengger. In fact, before the free online platform took action, Tengger was already called a "treasure for young people" in the marketing industry.

For example, game companies that also point to the online generation circle have frequently invited Tengger to help sing. The music marketing events of products such as "Honor of Kings" and "The Strongest Snail" have the figure of this real-world friends. The Tengger version of "Mangseed" released by "Fantasy Westward Journey" has gained over 12 million views in Bilibili, and there are still netizens who often "come again billion times".

To the Seven Cats, Tengger was not a celebrity spokesperson for the idol line. His advantage was his interdimensional humorous persona, which was backed by a high reputation, good popularity, and the scarcity of being close to young people.

In contrast, Tomato chose Yang Zi for another reason.

On August 3, Tomato Free Novels officially announced Yang Zi as the brand spokesperson. As a familiar actor, Yang Zi has continued to be active on the screen in recent years, starring in "Ode to Joy", "Honey Sinks Like Frost", "The Rest of Life, Please Instruct", "Sauvignon Blanc" and many other film and television dramas. What they have in common is that they are adapted based on the novel IP.

Fanqie Novel official account

During the official endorsement, Yang Zi said this sentence: "Different characters are different lives." In this context, the actor’s past role performance is a bridge, guiding the audience back to the source of mainstream IP content – that is, the major original online platforms.

Regarding this cooperation, Fanqie Novel also said: "We hope that through Yang Zi’s endorsement, we can better shape readers’ awareness of the reading platform and create a newer and more interesting reading experience for readers."

Similarly, after the 2015 adaptation of "Langya Bang" became a hit, the star Hu Ge in the play collaborated frequently with the original source, China Literature Limited.

As an old friend of Reading Literature, Hu Ge not only played the well-known IP role, but also was a reader famous for his reading interests. Therefore, from his early endorsement of QQ Reading to his subsequent role as the spokesperson of Reading Literature IP, Hu Ge has continued the positioning of "reading advocate" with a slight literary attribute, echoing the cultural tone required for reading literature.

Image source Weibo

Overall, online platforms choose celebrities with different ideas, with different focuses on popularity, resume, and personality. However, the vision is ultimately the same, that is, to use users’ awareness of celebrities to strengthen their awareness of the platform.

When celebrity endorsers became the new "standard" for online platforms, more important marketing trends emerged.

From warlord to celebrity marketing

Web promotion is a profound knowledge.

At different stages of development, online platforms have different marketing goals and technical carriers, and they show very different appearances. For example, the most common and basic form of online marketing is like the game industry’s ancient user acquisition through ads, with short and eye-catching text with rough pictures, and strive to attract readers’ interest in the shortest time.

On the male channel, they can be 10,000 kinds of bizarre reversals, where the dragon king, the rich man and the old ancestor come together. On the female channel, they have turned into jaw-dropping tyrannical literature. The lady knows whether she is wrong today, but the readers who swipe the advertisement must know and reflect.

source network

In this way, graphic advertisements have brought curious glances to large and small online text sites, and they have grown brutally lively. To this day, these gimmick copywriting is still a source of joy everywhere on the Internet, and has bred many famous scenes.

After that, a landmark turning point was the ouster of the "Crooked Mouth God of War".

In 2020, a series of advertisements labeled "Crooked-Mouth God of War" suddenly became popular. The so-called "Crooked-Mouth God of War" comes from the crooked smile displayed by actor Guan Yunpeng in many online advertisements, which often appears at the climax of the plot.

For a time, the original film, editing and parody version of "God of War with Crooked Mouth" swept through Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili, Weibo, Hupu and other major platforms. These advertisements have a strong routine color, repeating the scenes of the protagonist pretending to be a pig to eat a tiger and slapping the face in reverse, accompanied by copied and pasted dramatic conflicts and highly similar villain remorse.

The crooked-mouthed God of War was always a useless son-in-law at first, but the ending had unpredictable identity options: God Doctor, Dragon King, God of War, Patriarch… It was such a simple and direct plot framework that made countless netizens unable to stop, embarrassed and happy.

Image source Bilibili

The wry-mouthed God of War, which has become popular in the banter, is a representative of the maturity of online short video advertising.

In the context of the short video pandemic, online short video advertisements have come into being. They go a step further than graphics, using Facebook’s character library to extract core scenes from long, cool articles and shoot short dramas that are one to two minutes long. These advertisements strive to stimulate user interest in a very short time and actively cater to the fragmented public reading habits.

It is worth noting that the popularity of short video advertisements on the Internet does not mean that graphic advertisements disappear. In fact, the two complement each other, embedding short video platforms, browser recommendations, application information flows, and many other scenarios in parallel, to build an information flow empire of Shuangwen marketing, and you can see seven dragon kings smiling at your evil charm by moving a brick at random.

After introducing the emerging media power of short videos, online marketing has further helped new and old platforms to explore market growth. In fact, the years when in-feed ad gradually innovated and grew, it basically corresponded to the rapid growth of free reading platforms under Internet giants such as Douyin and Baidu.

With the slowdown in the growth of the platform, online marketing has undergone new changes, the core feature is the rise of brand status in the appeal of communication. Online giants have tacitly increased branding efforts, opened up marketing dimensions other than customer acquisition and conversion, hoping to keep the country while fighting.

So we can see that Qimao has tested the waters of Xiaohongshu, live broadcast and other brand operation channels, implanted variety shows such as "Yearning for Life" and "Ace to Ace", and appeared in front of young netizens more and more frequently.

Tomato also made frequent attacks online and offline. In July, it just cooperated with the traditional literary circle and the online literary circle to hold a live broadcast conversation. In August, it appeared at the 2023 Shanghai Book Fair with a series of works…

Image source Weibo @Tomato Free Novel

Recently, the celebrity spokespeople who have tacitly embraced the two reflect the current emphasis and investment on brand marketing on online platforms.

If we want to describe, the evolution of online marketing is not a segmented line, but closer to a gradually expanding network. New media and new needs are entwined on it, and the main axes of seeking increment and maintaining stock have been highlighted one after another, prompting online platforms to go offline and to the public.

Free to pay, each with a story

When it comes to star marketing to assist in brand building, the relatively long-established paid online platform is undoubtedly a pioneer.

As early as May 2016, China Literature Limited showed a big deal on this matter. That year, QQ Reading officially promoted Hu Ge as the spokesperson, and at the same time launched a large-scale offline promotion. Hu Ge’s large poster can be seen in many crowded subway stations in Beijing, Shanghai and other places.

Image source Writer’s Assistant official account

You know, in the field of digital reading at that time, such promotion was rare. Since then, Reading Text has also launched the special concept of "IP spokesperson" early, which has attracted a lot of attention from the online literature industry.

It is worth noting that although free online platforms are now following up on star marketing, there are still differences in the strategic priorities of the two camps. Even if the same star appears to shoot a promotional short film, the two sides have different expression priorities.

For example, at the same time as the official spokesperson, Fanqie Novel released a short film "Fanqie Novel Today", which depicted several typical reading scenes, exposed the pain points of digital reading, and showed Yang Zi to express the reason for "Fanqie Novel".

In the short film, Fanqie Novel shows the familiar situations of payment restrictions and author interruption, relying on Yang Zi’s interpretation to emphasize the advantages of tomato free reading, one-click promotion and other products. Yang Zi’s image of shuttling through it is very close to the celebrity spokesperson in people’s traditional imagination.

Image source Fanqie Novel

On the other hand, the short film in which Reading invited Hu Ge to appear focuses on the next link in the online text industry chain.

After Guan Xuan served as the spokesperson of Reading Literature IP, Hu Ge appeared in the short film as a storyteller who loved stories and recommended three popular online works to the audience, namely "Shanghai Prosperity", "Great Doctor Ling Ran" aimed at the medical industry, and "The First Sequence", a fantasy adventure.

China Literature Limited official account

Although it is related to online text recommendation, the focus of this short film is not on the digital reading end, but on the reconstruction of several representative scenes in the story in the form of images and the visualization of words. Here, Hu Ge’s role seems to be closer to a "cultural promotion ambassador".

He introduced to the camera: "Through the paid data of hundreds of millions of readers, [Reading Text] selects the best stories suitable for film and television adaptation, and expects them to appear on the screen and burst out with more powerful charm."

In summary, the difference between the two kinds of star marketing reflects the difference between the development strategies of the two online publishing camps. There is an inherent time difference between the free online publishing platform and the paid online publishing platform in the formation time, which to a certain extent leads to the difference in the current business form.

The former focuses on product iteration and platform construction at this stage, and stars are the guides to shape user cognition; the latter turns its attention to the downstream IP adaptation chain more, aiming to play the advantages of paid network text reserve IP, and stars are more like amplifiers that extend IP appeal.

After saying goodbye to going it alone and embracing celebrity marketing, today’s online platforms have begun to borrow power from outside the circle, each with its own story to tell.

Combined with the "2022 China Digital Reading Report" released by the China Audiovisual and Digital Publishing Association, the scale of China’s digital reading users reached 530 million in 2022, an increase of 4.75% year-on-year. At the same time, the overall revenue scale of China’s digital reading market was 46.352 billion yuan, an increase of 11.5% year-on-year. Among them, copyright and advertising revenue have gradually become the driving force for the development of the industry scale, and are responding to the long-term direction of paid and free online texts.

If the platform can broaden the market through innovative marketing paths, the local online industry is expected to burst into more fresh vitality, further attract readers and creators, and then leave more Chinese stories worth telling.