One evening show, forty years, trillions of business opportunities: the secret history of Spring Festival Gala sales

The Spring Festival Gala, as a cultural event on Chinese New Year's Eve, not only carries the warm memories of countless families, but also witnesses a commercial miracle. From the "Xiaoqing shirt" of the first Spring Festival Gala in 1983 that triggered a fashion trend to the red envelope war among Internet giants today, what changes has the commercial value of the Spring Festival Gala experienced?

Watching the Spring Festival Gala remains the greatest common denominator among Chinese people on New Year's Eve.

Friends, the Spring Festival Gala may be the most powerful live streaming sales platform in the country.

In 1983, at the first CCTV Spring Festival Gala, as the only female host, Liu Xiaoqing did two extraordinary things.

One thing was that she said on the live broadcast stage: "Today is New Year's Eve, and I am here to wish a happy new year to my parents who are sitting in front of the TV in my hometown."

In that era when TV announcers had to strictly follow the script and rarely express personal emotions, the station leaders made an exception and allowed Liu Xiaoqing to send her blessings to her family in front of the national audience. In the end, this New Year's greeting became one of the classic moments of the Spring Festival Gala.

The second piece was on the day of the live broadcast. She wore a red slim-fit lapel shirt that she bought in Hong Kong for 5 Hong Kong dollars. Among the cast and crew members who were dressed in simple black, blue and gray clothes, she looked extremely outstanding.

In the early 1980s, the valve of the planned economy had just been opened. With the help of the Spring Festival Gala, this "Xiaoqing shirt" entered the wardrobes of thousands of households from tailor shops, supply and marketing cooperatives, and various unclear channels, and became the fashion enlightenment of a generation of Chinese women.

In this episode, let’s talk about how the Spring Festival Gala became the most powerful live streaming platform for selling goods.

If the first Spring Festival Gala was a test, then the second one in 1984 laid the paradigm for the next 40 years.

Chen Peisi and Zhu Shimao's "Eating Noodles" made thousands of families laugh in front of their TVs on New Year's Eve, and carved out a place for the sketch genre.

Li Guyi performed "Unforgettable Tonight" for the first time on the Spring Festival Gala. Since then, the song has appeared in almost every Spring Festival Gala for more than 40 years, becoming a theme song.

This year, Zhang Mingmin took the stage to sing "My Chinese Heart", Xi Xiulan sang "The Girl from Alishan", and Huang Ayuan served as the host, setting a precedent for artists from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan to participate in the Spring Festival Gala.

And outside the screen, the power of business has also entered the stage.

The 1983 Spring Festival Gala was a huge success, and the "Xiaoqing shirt" became popular all over the country, which made the chief director Huang Yihe full of confidence. He was ready to make a big move and solicit advertising sponsorship from the whole society.

But CCTV's investment promotion suffered a Waterloo, which was both unexpected and not surprising.

You know, the first TV commercial in New China didn’t appear until 1978. In 1984, most companies didn’t understand the power of mass media. In the early days of reform and opening up, TV program sponsorship was really ahead of its time.

Since no sponsor could be found, the matter was shelved. For CCTV, it would still celebrate the New Year with or without money, and it would still hold the Spring Festival Gala without sponsors.

The incident happened a few days before the Spring Festival. A medium-sized truck drove into No. 11 Fuxing Road, Haidian District, Beijing, and stopped in front of the former CCTV headquarters building. The person who got off the truck spoke in Shandong dialect and specifically asked for Huang Yihe.

At this time, Huang Yihe was busy preparing for the live broadcast of the second Spring Festival Gala in the studio. When he came out, he saw that there were 3,000 Combas brand quartz clocks in the car.

Combas is a watch brand from Jinan. It is also the first company in China to localize quartz clocks. In the 1980s, it was hailed as a golden flower of Jinan's light industry.

This company had business relations with CCTV before. When CCTV held a folk song grand prix, the prizes for the contestants were the fashionable Combas quartz watches of that era, which were purchased by CCTV itself.

After learning that CCTV was having difficulty attracting investment, Kangbasi directly brought in a truckload of products, hoping to sponsor the Spring Festival Gala in exchange for clocks instead of money.

Now it seems like a fantasy to exchange 3,000 yuan for the title sponsorship of the Spring Festival Gala. But in the era when the four major household items were three turns and one ring, the value of a 3,000 yuan quartz clock was no less than that of a 3,000 yuan 4090 graphics card today. Moreover, the Spring Festival Gala had been rejected by the investment promotion, so this move by Combas was considered a generous help.

On the first day of the Lunar New Year in 1984, as the clock struck midnight, the images of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala changed, reflecting the various aspects of the world: workers sticking to their posts, postmen sorting letters, and soldiers guarding the border. The background of these images was the dial of the Combas clock.

Countless viewers watching the Spring Festival Gala in front of their TVs were fixated on the 30-second commercial placement.

This 30-second hard control not only made Combas an instant hit, rising from a local famous enterprise to a nationally renowned one, but also left a unique mark in the history of Chinese business: the first sponsor of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala.

From then on, the Spring Festival Gala embarked on a commercial path.

1984 was a year of special significance in China’s economic history. Just six days before the Spring Festival Gala was broadcast, Deng Xiaoping visited Shenzhen and wrote an inscription for the special economic zone: “Shenzhen’s development and experience prove that China’s policy of establishing special economic zones is correct.”

In this year, Li Jingwei, a native of Sanshui, Guangdong, founded Jianlibao, which became a national beverage; Wang Shi quit his iron rice bowl in the system and started his own business, and later transformed into real estate development to become Vanke; several technical youths from Haidian founded the Soitong Emerging Industries Development Company in Zhongguancun, and later Sina was born from this; Liu Chuanzhi and others from the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences established a company, and Lenovo was born; Haier and TCL also started from this year.

In this year, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce issued private enterprise license No. 001, so it was called the first year of private enterprises in China.

It was also in this year that 16-year-old Li Yanhong won a prize in the National Computer Competition and was hailed as a genius boy. 13-year-old Ma Huateng moved his family to Shenzhen and began to learn computers. 20-year-old Jack Ma took the college entrance examination for the third time and was finally admitted to the Foreign Language Department of Hangzhou Normal University. 16-year-old Lei Jun was admitted to the best local high school. More than 30 years later, as these young people grew up to become China's most well-known entrepreneurs, their companies have also become regular sponsors of the Spring Festival Gala, just like Combas, but the sponsorship price has long been different.

The commercialization of the Spring Festival Gala is a footnote to the era of 1984.

As Huang Yihe, the chief director, said many years later when recalling the 1984 Spring Festival Gala: "Looking back now, the Spring Festival Gala itself is a product of reform and opening up. Without reform and opening up, there would be no Spring Festival Gala. Without reform and opening up, we would not be able to do anything."

The sponsorship in 1984 made Combas an instant hit, with its sales soaring from 140,000 to 450,000 that year. It later became the first company in my country to produce over one million watches a year.

Having tasted the sweetness, Combas became the title sponsor of the Spring Festival Gala's midnight countdown eight times in the following 10 years. Except for 1985, which was called "the most failed Spring Festival Gala in history" and was snatched away by Seagull Watches, Combas has been the top sponsor of the Spring Festival Gala for a long time. Its performance has soared along with its popularity. By 1989, its annual output exceeded 2 million, with an output value of over 100 million.

Although this midnight time signaling giant declined in the 1990s amid brand wars and siege of counterfeits, its rise story is enough for all companies that want to get rich overnight to see the power of television media and the commercial value of sponsoring the Spring Festival Gala.

With Kangbasi leaving the Spring Festival Gala, CCTV's commercialization has passed the wild era of "naming rights can be obtained in a short time" and has begun to mature.

This transformation is closely related to a woman named Tan Xisong.

In 1993, 43-year-old Tan Xisong joined CCTV as director of the advertising department.

Before she joined CCTV, the advertising investment system was in a mess. On the one hand, the ratings of various daytime programs were very low, and it was impossible to find advertisers.

On the other hand, advertising resources in some high-rating time periods are in short supply, and backdoor practices such as "passing notes" and "making phone calls" are common, and there are even people reselling advertising resources. This has also led to a strange phenomenon in CCTV: the higher the ratings, the lower the cost per thousand people for advertising.

The result is that China's largest TV station has less than 10 billion in advertising revenue a year.

The one who changed all this was Tan Xisong.

After joining CCTV, she made many innovations that seemed unimaginable to her predecessors.

In 1998, Li Yong, who was still working as an independent director and editor in the External Affairs Department of CCTV, was amazed after watching the variety show "GO BINGO" produced by the old European entertainment company ECM. He felt that China should introduce similar programs.

He first proposed the idea to the external leaders, but was rejected. Then he went to the Arts Center, but was rejected again. Unwilling to give up, he sent the sample to CCTV2. After watching the sample, Tan Xisong decided that this program had great commercial potential. She called Li Yong directly and said something that Li Yong would never forget: "I want this project!"

So, with the support of Tan Xisong, a program with a strong commercial flavor was born. It is called "Lucky 52".

Another innovation of Tan Xisong is that she created a new advertising model for local government publicity work, which is the various "Beautiful xx" and "Hospitable xx" city promotional videos that we often saw on CCTV4 when we were young.

Her most important innovation is that she brought a completely new way of attracting investment to CCTV: bidding.

On November 18, 1994, Tan Xisong held an investment promotion conference in the cafeteria of CCTV Color TV Center.

In order to attract investment this time, she personally went out to visit heroes from all over the country and spread the invitation to bid.

Because the target of investment is CCTV's most core advertising resources, including the time periods before and after the "News Broadcast", the advertising time periods before the "Weather Forecast" and "Focus Interview", etc.

The date of the investment promotion conference is also set very carefully, November 18, which sounds like "yao yao yao fa" (need to ask for success).

The reason for choosing bidding is that, on the one hand, it is more open and can solve the problem of backdoor transactions in a way that does not offend anyone, and more importantly, it is a competition between companies.

In that era when a unified domestic market had not yet been established and the industrial structures of different provinces and regions were similar, and the focus was on "big and complete" or "small and complete", there were countless small and medium-sized enterprises that completed primitive accumulation in the regional market and became wealth winners locally.

The inertia of success makes these companies want to go further and become national champions.

CCTV prime-time advertising is their stepping stone to compete for the world. In order to compete for this stepping stone, there must be countless entrepreneurs willing to spend a fortune on the title of bid winner.

The subsequent development was indeed as Tan Xisong expected. The bidding amount for CCTV's prime time soared from 560 million in 1994 to a peak of 15.88 billion in 2012.

From Kongfu Banquet to Qinchi, from Harbin Pharmaceutical Factory No. 6 to Qumei, for a long time, CCTV's prime-time advertising has had this kind of power to turn stone into gold, bringing countless unknown companies willing to go all in to the center of China's business community.

Back to the first CCTV bidding, before the meeting, people generally thought that the competition for the highest bid would be between the two companies with the highest advertising exposure at the time - Shandong Kongfujiajiu and Guangdong Sun God. However, when the bid was announced, the highest bidder was not any of them, but a small brand from Yutai County, Shandong: Kongfuyanjiu.

In order to win the bid for CCTV, it spent 30.79 million yuan, which was almost one-third of the company's annual profit and tax. In return, it not only got the slogan "Drink Confucius Banquet Wine, Write Articles for the World" to be broadcast before and after the "News Broadcast", but also the sponsorship rights for the 1995 CCTV Spring Festival Gala.

The 1995 Spring Festival Gala now seems like a battle between gods.

In terms of song programs alone, there are Na Ying's "Flowers in the Mist", Andy Lau's "Forget Love Water", Yang Yuying's "Tell You Gently", Meng Tingwei's "There is a Cloud Made of Rain in the Wind". In terms of language programs, apart from Zhao Benshan, Fan Wei and Gao Xiumin's "Uncle Niu's Promotion", and Guo Donglin's "If You Have Something to Say, Please Talk", I personally think the best one is "Packaged Like This" performed by Zhao Lirong and Gong Hanlin.

This skit is like a fable, vividly showing how modern media distorts reality and subverts tradition. What the old lady played by Zhao Lirong does, to some extent, represents the commodity economy era, where ordinary people with common sense are confused by the media's whims and corporate marketing offensives, and eventually deconstruct them.

In fact, Zhao Lirong's subsequent works also had more or less similar themes.

But the irony is that the Spring Festival Gala, and even CCTV itself at that time, are the epitome of modern media. Everything performed in the skits, outside the stage, follows the rules of commercial society and operates in an orderly manner.

Thanks to the sponsorship of CCTV, Kongfuyanjiu's annual profit and tax in 1995 was 380 million yuan, almost 4 times the previous year. Its sales revenue was nearly 1 billion yuan. You know, even Moutai's revenue exceeded 1 billion yuan only after 2000.

For the next four consecutive years, the naming rights of the Spring Festival Gala were divided up by liquor companies, and the sponsorship rights for the midnight time signal were also won by liquor companies for three consecutive years.

Behind this is the fact that from the 1980s to the 1990s, the state relaxed its control over the liquor industry and grain prices, and distilleries of all sizes in various places launched a crazy expansion of production capacity. Small local liquor companies like Kongfuyanjiu and Qinchi had the opportunity to take advantage of CCTV and soar overnight. Although the liquor industry has changed its flag in the past nearly 30 years, CCTV has always been the most important marketing position for liquor brands. From Tuopai to Wuliangye, from Guojiao to Yanghe, the advertising fee of CCTV is increasing day by day for every glass of liquor drunk by Chinese consumers.

In addition to liquor companies, pharmaceutical companies and health care product companies were once the most important sponsors of the Spring Festival Gala.

In 1997, Harbin Pharmaceutical Factory, a long-established state-owned enterprise in Northeast China, spent tens of millions of yuan on CCTV to make "blue bottle calcium, delicious calcium" popular across the country, and the already declining Harbin Pharmaceutical Group was revived.

In 2000, Harbin Pharmaceutical Group went a step further and spent 1.2 billion to sponsor the Spring Festival Gala, and even put "Gai Zhonggai" on the countdown dial of the Spring Festival Gala, leading an "era of pharmaceutical marketing."

If you remember, at that time on CCTV, Northeastern pharmaceutical companies represented by Xiuzhen, Harbin Pharmaceutical, and Kuihua were frequent guests in the advertising time. Whether it was the Children's Lung Heat Cough and Asthma Oral Liquid, Liver Protection Tablets, Rheumatism Pain Relief Patch or Calcium and Zinc Supplement Oral Liquid, they launched many advertisements that we are familiar with.

In 2001, the title sponsor of the Spring Festival Gala was changed to Qumei, a weight loss drug brand under Taiji Group.

The advertisement of "Beautiful life starts from Qumei" must have echoed in many people's childhood.

But neither Qumei nor Harbin Pharmaceutical is the biggest winner of the Spring Festival Gala marketing. After all, even in 2024, "I won't accept any gifts this year, I will only accept Melatonin" is still a classic advertisement known to everyone. Although it has never been the title sponsor of the Spring Festival Gala, Shi Yuzhu cleverly combined the rigid demand for gifts during the New Year holidays with health products, which can be regarded as a classic case in the history of advertising.

China's health care product industry started in the 1980s, exploded in the 1990s, and in the 2000s, with the help of CCTV and the Spring Festival Gala, health care products conquered the mass media front and finally reached its peak. For more than a decade, health care products were one of the biggest sponsors of China's television industry until the heavy hammer of the Advertising Law came down.

But no matter what, CCTV and the Spring Festival Gala have become the iron throne in China's business world.

It symbolizes the direction of the times, attracts the attention of hundreds of millions of people, and sends countless trendsetters to the top.

Precisely because it is so important and symbolic, after a brief period of competition among many players in the second half of the 1990s, CCTV's winning bid and the Spring Festival Gala title sponsorship quickly became the stage for giants, and it was no longer a place for grassroots heroes like Qin Chi, Kong Fu Yan, and Taiji Group who were willing to go all in with a small investment.

2003 was a relatively mediocre Spring Festival Gala.

"Heart Disease" contributed by Zhao Benshan, Gao Xiumin and Fan Wei is a good sketch in itself, but it is still slightly weaker than the previous T0-level "Selling Crutch" and "Selling Car".

Although Guo Donglin's skit "I Swap Roles with My Dad" contributed a famous line: "The last one, isn't he usually the second to last in exams?", its level of classicism can only be described as mediocre in the history of the Spring Festival Gala.

What is more memorable is that year, Zhao Zhongxiang appeared on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala for the last time. At this time, 20 years had passed since he announced the opening of the gala before the first Spring Festival Gala.

Many people may not remember that there was a crosstalk called "Talking about Advertisements" in the Spring Festival Gala that was less than 5 minutes long. It was very unpopular, but also very interesting. It mocked the ubiquitous insertion of advertisements in TV programs.

What’s even more ironic is that while people are complaining on stage, outside the stage, Spring Festival Gala advertisements have stepped into a new era.

This year, Midea Electric Appliances replaced Harbin Pharmaceutical Group and became the first sponsor of the Spring Festival Gala's midnight time announcement. This sponsorship lasted for 16 consecutive years (except for 2012 when there was no midnight time announcement advertisement).

Midea has been the champion for 16 consecutive years. Its confidence comes from the fact that China joined the WTO in 2001, and the manufacturing industry has found new momentum, among which the home appliance industry is naturally a key area.

More importantly, with the commercial housing system being rolled out across the country since 1998, real estate has become the pillar of China's economy for more than 20 years. As an extension of real estate, home appliances are naturally the industry that has benefited greatly from the times. Every penny that Midea spends on CCTV will be converted into ten or a hundred times the company's revenue.

In 2003, the first year of sponsoring the Spring Festival Gala, Midea's annual operating income was only 20 billion yuan, but by 2010 it had exceeded 100 billion yuan, a five-fold increase. By 2019, the countdown to midnight of Midea's last sponsorship of the Spring Festival Gala, the company's revenue that year was close to 300 billion yuan, making it the undisputed king of Chinese home appliances.

The growth rate of CCTV’s advertising expenses is even faster than Midea’s revenue growth.

Public reports show that the price of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala midnight countdown advertising was only 6.8 million yuan in 2005. By 2010, it had increased to 57.2 million yuan, more than eight times.

You know, the countdown ad is only 10 seconds long. 10 seconds costs more than half a billion yuan. If you calculate the unit price, Midea's purchase of the Spring Festival Gala ad is three times more expensive than Temu's purchase of the Super Bowl ad in the past two years.

It can be said that since Midea entered the market, the CCTV Spring Festival Gala has entered an era where giants compete in their ability to make money, and this gala has become a money-making machine running at full capacity.

After entering the 21st century, in addition to title sponsorship and zero-hour countdown ads, CCTV has created a complete set of mature monetization models for the Spring Festival Gala. There are many different types of paid items.

First, there are the in-film ads. From 19:55 to 20:00 before the show starts, this is the "golden five minutes" that brands cannot miss on New Year's Eve. As the show approaches, hundreds of millions of viewers across the country will tune in to CCTV-1 at this time.

By showing up at this time, advertisers can get exposure in the hundreds of millions. The closer to the opening, the more expensive the price. In recent years, the price generally starts at eight figures.

Then there is the oral congratulatory message, which is an advertising form that has only appeared since 2004. Only companies that have paid money have the opportunity to shout to the national audience, "xx brand wishes the people of the country a happy new year."

In addition, after the party, there was a long list of thank-you units in the subtitles, which were all invisible advertising spaces that were only available to advertisers whose advertising amounts exceeded a certain amount.

Even close-up shots of the audience have corresponding prices. In a book titled "Inside Information of the 21st Spring Festival Gala", it is mentioned that the on-site cameramen have a notebook in their hands, which records which round table guest should be given a close-up shot when performing which program, and only the CEOs of companies that sponsor the Spring Festival Gala for more than 10 million yuan are qualified to sit in this position. Mengniu's Niu Gensheng, Huiyuan's Zhu Xinli, Baidu's Li Yanhong, these sponsors have all left big close-ups in the Spring Festival Gala.

Next is the "My Favorite Spring Festival Gala Program Selection" program, which is broadcast on the 15th day of the first lunar month. Although it is not broadcast during the Spring Festival Gala period, as a dessert packaged in the Spring Festival Gala advertising package, it is also very suitable for some sponsors who are relatively less financially or have not grabbed the prime advertising spots.

In November 1997, Yili returned empty-handed at the CCTV bidding conference. After all, Yili at that time was not the ruler of China's dairy industry and one of the two giants of the grassland. Facing Qinchi's 320 million yuan bid, it really couldn't keep up.

But at that time, Yili hired an outside brain, the famous brand strategy expert Li Guangdou. Under Li Guangdou's advice, Yili chose to bypass the main battlefield of the Spring Festival Gala and found the value depression of CCTV advertising, that is, "My Favorite Spring Festival Gala Program Selection", and obtained the exclusive naming rights.

On the fifteenth day of the first lunar month of the following year, Yili's slogan "The sky is vast, the wilderness is boundless, the wind blows the grass low and you can see cattle and sheep; the grassland, the milk is fragrant, and Yili milk powder is famous" appeared in front of the national audience. In conjunction with the CCTV advertisement, Yili carried out a concentrated marketing promotion across the country. As a result, after 1998, people all over the country knew about Yili milk powder.

Of course, these obvious advertisements and congratulatory messages do not actually have much to do with the party itself.

The most profitable, but also the most criticized by the audience, is product placement.

In the 2000 Spring Festival Gala, A-Mei sang a song called "Give Me a Feeling", aka the Coca-Cola advertising song.

In the 2001 Spring Festival Gala, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung sang "In the Mood for Love", also known as the Sun Tien Wine advertising song.

As for Feng Gong's crosstalk "Pushing the Limit", he directly recited the slogan of Gai Zhong Gai, "No more waist soreness, no more back pain", in the program, with full effect.

Since then, product placement has become more and more prevalent in the Spring Festival Gala. Every time the camera scans the audience, sponsorship of Mengniu Milk or Heineken Beer may appear. The number of parties involved in product placement in the show has also increased year by year, reaching its peak in 2010.

This year's Spring Festival Gala set a new record in revenue with nearly 650 million yuan in advertising fees. Among them, the brutal product placement held up the banner.

When Liu Qian performed magic, Huiyuan juice frequently appeared on camera. During the four and a half hours of the Spring Festival Gala, Huiyuan appeared on camera for 7 minutes, longer than Dong Qing. For this exposure, Huiyuan set a record for the highest price of product placement in the Spring Festival Gala at 60 million.

In addition, in Zhao Benshan's skit "Donation", four major advertisers took turns to appear. For nearly half of the skit, the brightly lit big characters "Guojiao" were placed on Zhao Benshan's desk, blinding the eyes of the national audience. The placement fee for this skit alone reached 12 million yuan.

According to media statistics, a total of six programs accepted product placements from 11 advertisers this year.

As a result, the 2010 Spring Festival Gala became the most criticized by the public since the 1985 Spring Festival Gala incident.

Although the quality of the show was quite good, the audience couldn't stand it because the fans were too nagging.

Under the criticism of the public, the CCTV Spring Festival Gala production team had no choice but to announce that after 2011, there would be "zero placement" in the Spring Festival Gala. In 2012, CCTV even launched the slogan of "zero advertising". All advertisements were only broadcast before and after the Spring Festival Gala. Once the gala started, there would be no advertisements. Midea sponsored the countdown to zero for 16 consecutive times, and the only interruption was this year.

According to media statistics, from 2011 to 2013, CCTV lost 1.75 billion yuan in revenue in order to maintain its promise of a "pure Spring Festival Gala."

CCTV's proactive reduction in advertising, despite various objective and subjective factors, seems to be inevitable from the perspective of the development of media history.

As local provincial satellite TV stations are launched one after another, CCTV is no longer the only TV giant that can cover the whole country. Since 2005, Hunan Satellite TV has achieved a breakthrough by relying on variety shows and Korean Wave, and Zhejiang Satellite TV, Jiangsu Satellite TV, Anhui Satellite TV, and Dragon TV have successively risen. Local satellite TV has gradually formed a force that can compete with CCTV.

When the audience's aesthetic tastes begin to diversify and their choices are no longer limited, their requirements for the Spring Festival Gala will naturally increase, and their tolerance for advertisements will naturally decrease.

From this perspective, the failure of CCTV Spring Festival Gala in 2010 was not surprising.

Moreover, as the 21st century enters its second decade, television media is also reaching its final peak, and the power of the media is about to be handed over to new players of the next generation.

In 2014, as the Spring Festival was approaching, Zhang Zhidong, then CTO of Tencent, proposed whether it was possible to develop an electronic red envelope function on WeChat.

The Guangdong region has always had the custom of giving out red envelopes during the Spring Festival. As a Shenzhen company founded by a Chaoshan boss, Tencent has naturally inherited this culture. Every Spring Festival, employees who want red envelopes at the door of Ma Huateng's office can line up outside the company gate.

At the beginning, Zhang Zhidong just hoped that this function could help Ma Huateng, who had been troubled by a stubborn lumbar disease, to reduce some physical exertion. Unexpectedly, the WeChat team made some magical changes to the simple electronic red envelopes, adding group red envelopes and random red envelopes. Soon, this function, which had not yet been officially launched, became popular within Tencent.

At 4 p.m. on January 28, 2014, two days before the first day of the Lunar New Year, the new feature WeChat Red Packet, which the WeChat team called a "easy-to-use work", was officially launched.

No one expected that a huge change that would change China's Internet, social, financial and retail industries would happen in just two days. On New Year's Eve, 4.82 million people used WeChat red envelopes. The peak of traffic occurred around midnight on New Year's Eve, with 25,000 red envelopes being opened every minute.

According to later statistics, from New Year's Eve to the eighth day of the first lunar month, more than 8 million people across the country received 40 million red envelopes.

Because both sending red envelopes and withdrawing cash require binding a bank account, this means that WeChat Pay, which was just launched not long ago, has allowed 8 million people to bind their bank cards at the lowest cost.

This red envelope campaign combines the Chinese festival culture, the traffic potential of the Spring Festival, the social fission ability of WeChat, and the gamification design (grabbing red envelopes and trying your luck), which can be called a perfect storm.

By the way, this storm also destroyed the Spring Festival holidays of countless Alibaba executives.

During that Spring Festival, Alipay executives boarded the nearest flights overnight and rushed back to Hangzhou from all over the world. Wu Yongming, who was then Jack Ma’s special assistant, even chartered a plane from Hawaii to fly back because he couldn’t buy a plane ticket.

Later, Jack Ma posted a message on social media, calling WeChat red envelopes the "Pearl Harbor attack." After the 2014 Spring Festival, mobile payment officially entered the era of Alipay and WeChat Pay competing against each other, and the main battlefield of this protracted battle was undoubtedly the Spring Festival Gala.

On CCTV's side, Ha Wen, who will be directing the Spring Festival Gala for the third time in 2015, decided to add something different to the Gala.

This female director is famous for her radical reforms and innovations.

In the 2012 Spring Festival Gala, she pushed all advertisements out of the show, not just product placements, but all advertisements. It was also the year she stopped the boring song medleys, causing many singers with connections to lose the chance to appear on the Spring Festival Gala. Even Yang Weiguang, the former director of CCTV, could not do this, but Ha Wen did it.

But her reforms have been met with mixed reviews from the very beginning.

In order to achieve the goal of "teaching away all barriers to hosting the Spring Festival Gala", she recruited a large number of grassroots actors and newcomers to participate in the Spring Festival Gala in 2012, bringing the proportion of newcomers to nearly 50%. In addition, in order to adhere to her principle of "first, it must be meaningful, and second, it must be interesting", she killed a large number of language programs.

The final result is that the Spring Festival Gala has indeed been transformed and updated, but it is not certain whether it is better looking, funnier, or more popular with the masses.

In short, Ha Wen has always been a radical reformer for the Spring Festival Gala.

In 2015, after two consecutive "Pure Spring Festival Galas", Ha Wen decided to introduce a new way of playing for the commercialization of the Spring Festival Gala, namely new media interaction.

In the early days, the interaction between the Spring Festival Gala and the audience mainly relied on hotlines. During the first Spring Festival Gala, Li Guyi was requested to sing ten songs by the public over the phone, which almost turned the Spring Festival Gala into a personal concert. This was once regarded as a good story.

Later, after mobile phones and the Internet became popular, text messaging and Weibo interactions were also included in the Spring Festival Gala.

With the advent of the mobile Internet era, Ha Wen believes that the Spring Festival Gala must make achievements on the mobile side.

In 2015, three Internet companies bid for the interactive partner of the Spring Festival Gala. In the end, WeChat won the cooperation with the "shake + red envelope" solution and a high sponsorship fee of 53 million yuan.

However, for WeChat, winning the cooperation is only the first step.

One of the most realistic questions is, where does the money come from to give out red envelopes to one billion viewers during the Spring Festival Gala?

It is true that Tencent is wealthy, but WeChat is, after all, just one of Tencent's many business units. Ma Huateng can give Zhang Xiaolong tens of millions to invest in Spring Festival Gala advertising, but it is impossible for him to give out hundreds of millions more to provide benefits to audiences across the country, right?

We can only seek external help.

Fortunately, Tencent is an Internet company, and their logic has never been simply to exchange advertising fees for user volume, but rather "Tencent sets the stage and partners perform."

WeChat has come up with a new idea: “Named Red Packets”.

WeChat provides the entrance to the Spring Festival Gala red envelopes, and the cooperating companies pay the sponsorship fees, which will be distributed to users in the form of cash red envelopes, and what they gain is the opportunity for brand exposure.

As the Spring Festival approaches, WeChat's marketing team launched an attack in all directions and finally successfully brought back 500 million yuan in sponsorship fees. These sponsorship fees will be used as WeChat's ammunition reserve and will be poured out during the 2015 Spring Festival Gala.

The 2015 Spring Festival Gala arrived as scheduled. This year, the gala programs were lackluster, but for the audience, the viewing atmosphere was probably the most exciting in the past 10 years.

During the four-hour live broadcast, WeChat sent out 1 billion red packets, with the peak interaction reaching 810 million times per minute. The evening show increased the number of WeChat payment users from less than 10 million to 200 to 300 million in one go.

What’s even more frightening is that Tencent itself didn’t spend a penny on the 500 million red envelopes, but in return it gained 200 million personal bank card bindings. WeChat completed Alipay’s 8-year performance in 2 days.

For Jack Ma and Alipay, if the plot of 2014 was the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, then the plot of the 2015 Spring Festival Gala has already advanced to "Showa American Story".

Seeing its competitors closing in, Alipay had no choice but to respond. In the 2016 Spring Festival Gala, it spent 260 million yuan to snatch the sponsorship rights for the Spring Festival Gala red envelopes from WeChat. This price was five times the sponsorship fee of WeChat the previous year. In addition, Alipay sent out 800 million red envelopes that night, and Alipay spent more than 1 billion yuan on Spring Festival red envelopes that year.

With the help of collecting five blessings, password red envelopes, "咻一咻" and other gameplay methods, the total number of Alipay participants in the 2016 Spring Festival Gala reached 324.5 billion times, 30 times that of the previous year.

In the next two years, Alipay continued its efforts and spent 1 billion and 600 million yuan in red envelopes during the Spring Festival Gala respectively to compete with WeChat.

Alipay’s efforts during the Spring Festival Gala have indeed led to a continuous increase in its penetration rate, but its strategic goal of suppressing WeChat has not been achieved.

After its surprise attack on the Spring Festival Gala, WeChat withdrew from the market and shifted its focus to offline payments. With the help of two major battles in taxi-hailing and O2O, it became a national payment tool. Alipay was powerless to stop it.

In December 2016, Ma Huateng announced that WeChat Pay's offline market share had surpassed Alipay. Since then, WeChat Pay and Alipay have established a pattern of dividing the world, and neither can go further. However, the mobile payment infrastructure established by them has become the foundation for the development of China's new economy and new finance in the years that followed.

The story returns to the Spring Festival Gala. As the main battlefield of this round of payment war, the commercial potential of the Spring Festival Gala has been discovered again.

For traditional consumer brands, the Spring Festival Gala is just a media channel for exposure, but after the WeChat red envelopes, many Internet companies have discovered that the Spring Festival Gala is actually a combination of traffic, scenes and social chains. Once the value of this combination explodes, the commercial value generated is huge.

Moreover, only Internet companies can utilize such commercial value.

In the past ten years of the Spring Festival Gala, Internet companies have replaced consumer brands and become the most important advertisers of the Spring Festival Gala. From food delivery platforms to e-commerce platforms, from online education and training to short videos, every trend in the Internet industry has left its mark in the Spring Festival Gala advertisements.

From Kuaishou, Douyin, JD.com, Xiaohongshu, to this year's Alibaba, each year's partners have put their most important marketing resources of the year on the Spring Festival Gala.

Although the ratings of the Spring Festival Gala have been declining since 2019, it still has irreplaceable commercial value.

Watching the Spring Festival Gala remains the greatest common denominator among Chinese people on New Year's Eve.

In the past 42 years, no other program has attracted more Chinese people's attention than the Spring Festival Gala.

No content product is more of a public topic than the Spring Festival Gala.

There is no other period of time with a stronger emotional intensity than from 8:00 to 12:00 on New Year's Eve.

In this fragmented Internet age with so many different people, when it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to build consensus with others and the world, the Spring Festival Gala, as the nucleus of Chinese culture, customs and emotions, becomes even more precious.

When we talk about the Spring Festival Gala, we will miss the golden age of the Spring Festival Gala in the 1990s and 2000s, and we will miss the names such as Chen Peisi, Zhao Benshan, Zhao Lirong, and Zhao Zhongxiang and their programs.

When we talk about the Spring Festival Gala, we will think of every night when we sat in front of the TV with our family, eating peanuts and oranges and counting down.

When we talk about the Spring Festival Gala, we will say in unison that "the Spring Festival Gala in recent years is really boring". Before the Spring Festival Gala, we will set up WeChat groups to "complain about the Spring Festival Gala" and share every joke about the Spring Festival Gala.

This is why, when we say that the Spring Festival Gala is "getting worse and worse", we still don't want it to be discontinued. Because in this era of scarce consensus, there is at least one thing that we all care about and can agree on.