There is no point in rolling randomly. To find new volume, we must return to the essence.

This article specifically discusses the key changes in Tencent Advertising and the opportunities it will bring. If you are also interested in brand marketing, let’s take a look~

Video accounts are almost the last place where e-commerce has new growth. So how can we find them? Where can we find them?

A few days ago, Daofa attended the "2024 Tencent Advertising Innovation and Sharing Conference", and the venue was crowded. Brands, agents, and pitchers all expect to hear some "tricks" and "shortcuts" at this conference. However, the conference did not give a "quick pass guide", but instead proposed that everyone return to the essence of brand marketing: use good products and good content to find increments. In order to achieve this goal, Tencent Advertising has made significant changes in business logic and operating procedures. In this article, we will talk specifically about what key changes have occurred in Tencent Advertising? What opportunities will these changes bring?

01 Two changes: simplification and certainty

Historically, Tencent Advertising has followed a path of “mergers, mergers, and more mergers”.

Before 2015, almost each product had an advertising team: QQ, Tencent.com, Tencent Video, WeChat… Two rounds of mergers in 2015 and 2018 brought Tencent’s advertising business under the advertising marketing business line AMS under CDG.

However, the system integration after the business merger is actually more difficult: Tencent has long had two advertising platforms, Guangdiantong and WeChat Advertising, and multiple business logics. Therefore, faced with the complex advertising system, many brands are completely confused and can only outsource it to agents. While the agents complain to customers that Tencent Advertising is difficult to place and recruit, they are secretly happy to have the space to earn service fees.

"Exclusive audience package", "try another unrelated optimization goal", "create more advertising plans, pile up materials to win by quantity"... There are many things that can be done, but in fact, the agents themselves don’t know how to determine the ROI: they can only try randomly. In the past, advertising was completely "metaphysics".

The most intuitive feeling I got from this conference was the repeated emphasis on “streamlining” and “certainty”.

Streamlining is reflected in operations and content screening.

In terms of operation, the setting items on the delivery side were reduced from 56 to 33; the delivery level was simply changed from 3 levels to 2 levels.

In terms of content, the number of ads entering the system has been reduced from 7.7 million to 7 million, and the materials put in will be screened and filtered at the front end. This has raised the requirements for the quality of materials, and the previous strategy of piling up materials is no longer effective; on the other hand, because the number of ads is reduced, new ads and good ideas are more likely to come out. At the same time, fewer and more refined materials also reduce the cost of putting in.

Determination is reflected in product links and model matching.

The new optimization goals proposed at this conference are closer to the latest business models and gameplay, such as video account live broadcasts. However, whether these optimization goals can match specific product links and backend models remains to be tested. Only when these can be matched, the optimization goals will be meaningful and provide certainty, rather than an empty shell.

Although these were clearly stated at the meeting, it will still take time to implement them. After all, there are still problems such as sparse model samples, so we can look forward to it.

02 One Core: New Advertising ID

The functional changes in the above delivery end actually show the change in Tencent’s advertising concept - from the past "please try more" to "the platform finds the best for you" .

The core of this transformation is the "new advertising ID." This is the most important information in Tencent Advertising's several conferences this year.

"Advertising ID" is the most basic algorithm logic. Once the advertising ID is changed, it is necessary to sort out and adjust all the chains of the strategy algorithm. The "new advertising ID" proposed at this conference has grouped all advertising IDs with similar cores. As long as the content conveyed by the advertisement is essentially similar, whether it is 1, 100, or tens of thousands of advertisements, the background will identify them as one advertisement.

To achieve this result, the advertising system needs to be able to understand the content of the advertisement and the product. Only by understanding the product can the system make better matches and further improve the advertising conversion rate. The essence behind this is that Tencent Advertising is determined to make the advertising system understand the content of the advertisement, understand the business, understand the product and the transaction.

Back to the specific implementation method, "broadly defined commodities" is the core of this new ID. Although the focus of this meeting was on the capabilities of consumer e-commerce customers, "broadly defined commodities" is not limited to "physical goods sold", but also includes other "transaction scenarios", such as game payment, education course payment, real estate retention, and all other behaviors related to the final transaction.

In fact, Tencent Advertising has mentioned "close to transactions" and "close to products" many times in the past few years, but only today are the conditions for advertising around products becoming mature.

First of all, after the video account transaction ecosystem was established, Tencent truly had its own platform products and transaction data. Previously, the unstructured product data in the landing page and mini-programs was actually difficult to obtain directly, especially real-time data.

Second, the maturity of large model capabilities. In addition to the generation of content such as dialogue and image creation, content recognition is also an important function of large models, such as Meta's "Segment Anything Model". With the support of these new technologies, the products in videos and pictures can be truly understood by the model.

With data and technology foundation, it is possible to achieve product dimension optimization and “people-product matching” in the entire advertising chain. And it is the “new advertising ID” that runs through the product dimension optimization.

Therefore, the previous practice of "pile up a lot of advertising infrastructure" should be more difficult to work, because the platform will "recognize" a certain product/category. But on the contrary, if the placement is based on product logic, combined with new optimization goals and the closed-loop scenario of video accounts bringing goods, there may be better optimization results.

03 Two opportunities: Video accounts and Tencent advertising ideas

In addition to the changes, there are two opportunities worth paying attention to.

The first is video accounts, especially video account stores and video account live broadcasts, which are currently in a period of rapid growth.

According to the financial report, the advertising revenue of video accounts in Q2 2023 exceeded RMB 3 billion, while the advertising loading rate was only 3%; in Q3 2023, "WeChat's pan-internal circulation advertising revenue increased by 30%, and accounted for more than half of WeChat's advertising." In the field of live streaming, according to the data leaked from the "2024 WeChat Open Class", the supply of video accounts in 2023 increased by more than 300% year-on-year, the number of orders increased by more than 244% year-on-year, the order scale increased by more than 244 times, and the GPM (average total order amount per thousand viewers) exceeded RMB 900.

These high growth data show that Video Account is in a period of rapid development. If you join the market at this time, you can get the dividends of the platform development.

What is more important than data is that with the improvement of product infrastructure, the traffic volume of video accounts will be further expanded.

After the links between video accounts and other traffic forms are connected, the links between advertising and transactions will be richer. Video accounts will also be able to attract traffic from other low-priced traffic points of Tencent, thus generating new transaction links, such as the circle of friends starting to support video account stores, video account stores going beyond video account live broadcast rooms, and corporate WeChat adding video accounts. In this case, advertising investment may be a cost-effective discovery point.

Of course, the significance of video accounts is far more than just adding a new traffic entrance. Video accounts are equivalent to completing the last piece of the puzzle from consumers' interest to transactions, truly realizing the full business chain that can be circulated internally on Tencent's traffic. For merchants, whether it is bringing goods or advertising, there is greater room for imagination.

The second opportunity lies in the native application of the Hunyuan model, “Tencent Advertising Ideas”.

The logic behind video accounts selling goods and Douyin e-commerce in the early stages is the same: the largest business increase comes from transaction data: when the platform has commodity transaction data, the effectiveness and certainty of advertising will be significantly improved.

2023 is the first year of the big model. However, before that, Tencent Advertising started to upgrade and iterate its "big advertising model" in 2021, and it has gradually shown its positive impact on advertising revenue. Although the big advertising model (sparse matrix) is different from the large language model LLM (dense matrix), there are a lot of similarities in the underlying data processing and engineering practices.

The accumulation of Tencent Advertising during the period of developing the advertising big model also laid the foundation for the "Tencent Hunyuan Big Model". This is why the main teams of advertising and the "Hunyuan Big Model" are both led by Jiang Jie, Vice President of Tencent.

Now, with the trend of investing in the "Hunyuan Big Model" regardless of cost, the engineering and data capabilities of Tencent TEG will definitely be significantly improved. The closest training ground to "Hunyuan" is Tencent Advertising. "Tencent Advertising Ingenious Ideas" is a native application built on "Hunyuan". Making good use of Tencent Advertising Ingenious Ideas may bring some unexpected benefits.

In addition to "passing the review in seconds", the biggest advantage of native advertising materials is that CTR and CVR can be written into the optimization goals of the generated materials. In other words, the materials generated by Tencent Advertising Miaosi have both content aesthetic logic and business conversion logic. These are incomparable to third-party materials such as Midjourney and StableDiffusion. At present, Tencent Advertising Miaosi is only for drawing and micro-motion videos, but seeing the evolution of Hunyuan's capabilities, it will not be too late to generate short videos.

If the "metaphysical era" is about how to bargain with platforms, then at this stage, it is more important to make friends with platforms and create win-win situations by using good content and good products.

Author: Dao Fa Xing Yan; WeChat public account: Dao Fa Research Institute