618: Short dramas promoting products, a new battlefield between Alibaba and Pinduoduo

This article mainly discusses the phenomenon of e-commerce platforms Alibaba and Pinduoduo using short dramas to promote products during the 618 Shopping Festival in 2024 and the reasons behind it.

A domineering president falls in love with me, travels back to ancient times to become the mistress of the harem... these addictive short dramas continue to heat up this year and have become the "electronic pickles" of many people.

During this year’s 618, short dramas have once again become the hottest topic and a new battlefield for major platforms and brands.

Taobao has already added a section called "Theater" to the secondary page of the "Browse" section, which contains a large number of short dramas. Similarly, Pinduoduo has also added a "Short Drama" section to "Duoduo Video", alongside "Live Broadcast", "Follow" and "Recommendation".

During the 618 shopping event, many brands inserted short dramas into Taobao and Pinduoduo in an attempt to tap into a wave of growth. In addition to Taobao and Pinduoduo, JD.com, Douyin, and Kuaishou are also increasing their investment in "short dramas that promote sales."

A battle without visible smoke is taking place in the new battlefield of short dramas.

Why do e-commerce platforms choose to flock to short dramas? Currently, Pinduoduo's market value still exceeds that of Alibaba, and the market is full of expectations, doubts and onlookers. In the new battlefield of short dramas, who will win, Alibaba or Pinduoduo?

1. Two ways to promote short dramas

This year, on June 18, e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, Pinduoduo, and JD.com cancelled the pre-sale mechanism that had lasted for 11 years. For users, there are fewer "routines". However, for brands and anchors, the operation difficulty and performance pressure are greater.

Without the pre-sale and deposit procedures of previous years, consumers have become more rational and cautious. It is undoubtedly more difficult for businesses to create an atmosphere of impulse consumption to encourage consumers to place orders. As early as before the start of 618 this year, Li Jiaqi publicly stated: "Is this year's 618 promotion difficult? I think it is difficult."

It can be seen that many merchants did not preheat the 618 event two months in advance this year, and also gave up large-scale advertising. Without overwhelming publicity, this year's 618 event seemed a bit deserted. But this does not mean that merchants will not do marketing. They are enthusiastically investing in a "new type of advertising" on e-commerce platforms:

Brand customized skit.

This year, Taobao and Pinduoduo have put a lot of effort into short dramas, and many businesses have also inserted brand advertisements in them to improve sales. For example, the top position on Taobao's theater page was the short drama "Work! BOSS" sponsored by PROYA, which tells the story of a worker swapping bodies with his boss. The video also has links to PROYA related products, and users can add them to the shopping cart with one click.

In Pinduoduo's short drama column, female-oriented content accounts for a higher proportion, such as "The Lady Wants to Escape from Marriage in Troubled Times", "Mr. Mu's Expensive Ex-wife", "This Daughter is a Bit Wild", etc. In addition, the products implanted in Pinduoduo's short dramas are relatively cheaper, such as toilet paper, toothbrushes, etc.

When it comes to the logic of creating "short dramas promoting goods", Taobao and Pinduoduo clearly have different ideas.

When I opened the theater section of Taobao, I thought I had entered a long video app like iQiyi or Youku. It is divided into subcategories such as new film recommendations, Taobao exclusive short dramas, in-depth commentary, and selected recommendations. Users can choose the category they want to watch.

It can be seen that Taobao short dramas are more refined and rich in pictures and content. It attempts to attract and retain audiences with higher-quality short drama content, and then guide them to pay attention to and purchase related products.

Unlike Taobao, Pinduoduo's short drama column is more like a simplified version of the short video APP, using a vertical screen information flow mode, without many content categories and a relatively simple format.

When it comes to the most critical link - selling goods, the logic of Taobao and Pinduoduo is even more different.

Taobao’s product promotion skits will directly add links to related products in the video content, and users can add products to the shopping cart with one click. This can be understood as inserting skits into advertisements, making them more commercial. This strategy can make video content more closely linked to e-commerce transactions, helping to increase transaction conversion rates.

Compared with Taobao short dramas, Pinduoduo short dramas have weaker commercial attributes - they do not add product links or implant products in the video content, but mix the short dramas with products into the short drama information flow and recommend them to interested users through big data.

For example, when users are watching a short drama on Pinduoduo, they will generally scroll through 5 to 8 episodes to see a short video with a product link. Clicking on the link will take them to the product details page. This strategy can meet users' personalized needs and improve product exposure efficiency through the algorithm recommendation model.

The stronger commercial atmosphere of Taobao short dramas shows that it is more aggressive in its layout of short dramas than Pinduoduo. This is because Taobao has clearly regarded the creation of short dramas as a strategy. In March this year, Taobao announced that it would invest tens of millions of funds and over 1 billion traffic in brand-customized dramas in 2024, and join hands with upstream and downstream industries to enter the short drama track.

These big moves actually reflect Taobao's aggressiveness and anxiety.

2. The deep competition behind the short drama

As Pinduoduo's market value once again surpassed Alibaba, market doubts also surged.

Facing doubts about growth, Taobao's solution is to "put users first" and strengthen the growth engine by serving users well. To achieve "putting users first", Taobao must first attract more users, especially as the number of Pinduoduo users is still growing, Taobao needs to increase its efforts in increasing traffic.

With its rapidly growing traffic, short dramas have painted an imaginative blueprint for Taobao.

From last year to now, the explosive short dramas have generated huge traffic. According to the "China Online Audiovisual Development Research Report (2024)", the scale of online audiovisual users in my country has reached 1.074 billion, and the proportion of users who frequently watch short dramas has reached 39.9%, second only to TV series/online dramas and movies/online movies. Short dramas have become the traffic code for various platforms.

In this hot market, Taobao's strongest competitor is still Pinduoduo. Because the users in the sinking market that Pinduoduo focuses on have a high degree of overlap with the audience of short dramas, and the user activity is higher. This has been verified on other platforms that also focus on the sinking market. For example, in the first quarter of this year, the number of active marketing customers of Kuaishou short dramas increased by nearly 90% year-on-year.

In addition, there are a large number of price-sensitive users on Pinduoduo, and the overlap with short drama users is also very high - according to Meiland data, 70% of online short drama users are from the middle and low-income groups. Therefore, many people are very optimistic about the combination of Pinduoduo and short dramas, believing that it will create a new high ground for traffic.

When Pinduoduo was given expectations for short dramas, for Taobao, the layout of short dramas was both a passive response and an active attack.

The addition of the short drama column on Taobao is equivalent to adding a new traffic window, which has also been verified by some short dramas. On Taobao, the playback volume of the high-quality short dramas created by L'Oreal on Double 11 last year exceeded 100 million, and the proportion of new customers for Samsung's Spring Festival short dramas exceeded 90%.

In the Internet world, seemingly free things have already been secretly marked with a price. As long as the platform can attract users to watch free short dramas, it will always find a way to tap into the incremental growth.

In essence, a short drama with goods is a kind of advanced advertisement with multiple gameplays. It has multiple commercial gameplays such as implanting product information and promoting brand image, which can provide impetus for the final transaction. In the first quarter of this year, the average daily paid consumption of Kuaishou short dramas increased by more than 4 times year-on-year. During Tmall 11 in 2023, the commercial conversion rate of 12 customized brand dramas after watching can reach up to 30%.

For Taobao and Pinduoduo, short dramas are a rapidly growing gold mine with great commercial value. According to iMedia Research, the market size of short dramas in China will reach 37.39 billion yuan in 2023, up 267.65% year-on-year, and is expected to exceed 100 billion yuan in 2027. Compared with the film market, the total box office of Chinese films in 2023 was 54.915 billion yuan, and the market size of short dramas is close to 70% of the film market.

Going further, Taobao's in-depth layout of short dramas is closely related to its strategy of deepening its content e-commerce, which is also an important weapon for Taobao to compete with Pinduoduo.

In recent years, Pinduoduo has continuously attracted a large number of users through its low-price advantage, and has also launched a fierce offensive against Taobao's position. In response, Taobao has taken out the killer weapon of "content", trying to form a new driving force for development through content transformation.

The effect is still very obvious: in 2023, the scale of Taobao content consumption users increased by 44% year-on-year, and the number of live broadcast rooms with monthly transactions exceeding one million reached 12,000. Taobao has even set a new goal: GMV will increase by 80% year-on-year in the new fiscal year. Today, short dramas have become an important carrier to achieve this goal.

While Taobao is implementing its content strategy, Pinduoduo has also begun to focus on content construction, with its content-based positions mainly including Duoduo Video and Duoduo Live. However, at present, Pinduoduo's content-based model is mainly based on recommendations and single product hits, rather than high-quality content-based seeding, so users' perception of Pinduoduo's content is relatively weak.

In terms of the speed and quality of content creation, Taobao is currently ahead of Pinduoduo. However, the competition situation is still unclear.

3. The hidden concerns and ambitions of short dramas in driving sales

Although Taobao and Pinduoduo are actively developing short drama programs, it is not easy to generate incremental growth as expected.

First, users will actively choose Douyin and Kuaishou to watch short dramas, because the two are typical content platforms, so the scale of short drama users of Kuaishou and Douyin is large and the growth rate is fast. Data shows that in 2023, the daily active users of Kuaishou short dramas will reach 270 million, and the daily active users of Douyin short dramas will reach 120 million, a year-on-year increase of more than 1126%.

However, Taobao and Pinduoduo are still mainly e-commerce and do not have strong content attributes. Users may happen to see the short drama while browsing Taobao or Pinduoduo, and increase their stay time after becoming interested, but it is extremely unlikely that they will open Taobao or Pinduoduo just to watch the short drama.

This essential difference in underlying logic will make Taobao and Pinduoduo slower in creating short dramas than Douyin and Kuaishou, and the probability of producing a hit will be smaller. Facts have proved that the short dramas of Taobao and Pinduoduo are indeed not popular enough to go beyond the circle, and are not as topical as Douyin and Kuaishou.

If the short drama lacks hits and topicality, it will affect the merchant's advertising effect and sales conversion, which are the two most important goals for merchants. If Taobao and Pinduoduo cannot attract more merchants to cooperate, the short dramas promoting goods will undoubtedly become "tasteless to eat, but a pity to throw away".

Of course, there is no need for Taobao and Pinduoduo to compete with Douyin and Kuaishou in terms of content popularity. After all, they are not pure content platforms, but they must pass the user experience test.

Taobao has recently been emphasizing "users first", and the focus of this strategy should be user experience. However, too much brand exposure and product placement in Taobao short dramas often form a strong commercial flavor that affects the user's content experience, thereby interfering with and discouraging some users.

Although the commercial flavor of Pinduoduo's short dramas is weaker, the content itself is not as high-quality as Taobao's short dramas. Some short dramas that pursue short, flat, and hot topics often have problems such as shoddy production and distorted values, which not only affect user experience but also create higher regulatory risks.

The State Administration of Radio and Television has issued a notice that starting from June 1, 2024, short short dramas will be divided into three categories: "key, ordinary, and other", and will be managed in a classified and layered review manner. All short short dramas that have not been reviewed and filed will be prohibited from being broadcast on online platforms. Under more standardized supervision, the short drama industry will usher in a period of integration, and low-quality content will continue to be eliminated.

In fact, how to maintain a balance between content experience and brand marketing has always been a difficult problem.

Among e-commerce platforms, JD.com has done a more balanced job in creating short dramas. Accounts and content related to short dramas also appear in the "Recommendations" tab information flow on the "Browse" page on its homepage, which is quite similar to Pinduoduo.

However, there is no obvious brand placement or product link in the content of these skits. Users can actively search for the same product in the picture, and the searched page contains information such as the product and single product link. It is equivalent to combining the advantages of Taobao and Pinduoduo: it does not disturb the user's content experience, but also maintains brand exposure.

Looking ahead, the war between e-commerce platforms is continuing to spread and escalate, and each field may become a new battlefield for platforms such as Alibaba, JD.com, and Pinduoduo.

At present, short dramas have become a hotbed of competition among e-commerce platforms, which is essentially a stage in the process of e-commerce platforms becoming content-oriented. Short dramas that promote sales can undoubtedly bring incremental growth, but how much effect they can produce remains to be seen, which depends on how the platform improves the experience of short drama users.

Let the bullets fly for a while.

Author: Lin Wen Editor: Mu Bai This article is written by the author of Operation School [Yi Dian Finance Editorial Department], WeChat public account: [Yi Dian Finance], original/authorized to be published in Operation School, and any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.