E-commerce platform advertising war: Shake ads provoke Apple to fight back

As the Double Eleven shopping spree came to an end, Apple took a striking move, requiring several leading domestic apps to remove gyroscope permissions, ending the prevalence of shake ads. Let's read this article and see the author's interpretation!

Double Eleven has finally come to an end. When e-commerce giants such as Alibaba, JD.com, and Douyin announced their victory, Apple poured cold water on them.

According to recent media reports, since November, Apple has notified many leading domestic apps and asked them to remove gyroscope permissions.

In other words, Apple has stopped the shake ads.

The basic principle of the so-called shake-and-shake advertising is that when a user sees the corresponding advertising screen, if the phone’s gyroscope senses that the user is shaking the phone, the advertising page will jump.

But the problem is that if the shake ads appear at the opening screen of an APP, and many APPs will automatically vibrate the phone when they are opened, or if the user is in a mobile state or the phone is in motion, the ad system will think that the user has made a shake action and jump to the ad page (to the APP).

As long as the sensitivity of the ad system is set high enough, shaking the ad will almost directly redirect to the relevant page.

Shake ads are a commercial form of advertising created by APP developers. Although the original design intention is good, in practice it has always been a wild and gray operation, usually a violent means of attracting new users by rogue software and rogue mini-programs.

But on this year's Double Eleven, e-commerce giants started this kind of rogue operation.

01

The e-commerce giants launched a massive amount of Double 11 splash screen advertising, and these ads set the gyroscope sensitivity to a very high level. Many netizens reported that even if you don't shake your phone, it is very likely to automatically jump to the corresponding APP, which caused a lot of complaints.

In the past Double Elevens, big companies wanted to teach you how to do arithmetic problems. This year, on Double Eleven, big companies started to teach you how to balance.

Judging from the advertising situation, e-commerce giants obviously put in a huge amount of advertising during the Double Eleven this year. However, the proliferation of shake ads not only directly damages the user experience, but also obviously does not help the advertising effect. In the end, it only brings good-looking ad jump rate and traffic data.

Therefore, the proliferation of shake ads is actually the result of bad money driving out good money.

If we don’t use shake ads, the jump data for the APP team will not be impressive enough, and it will be difficult to convince the platform to continue to deliver ads; for the platform delivery team, there will be no impressive data to report to, and work performance will be difficult to guarantee.

The two parties conspired to launch the shake ads, and in the end, the only ones hurt were consumers and the platform’s own interests.

Similar to shake ads, there are also ads that design fake icons to trick users into clicking on them, which can all be called electronic psoriasis.

So, on the one hand, major e-commerce platforms announced that they would return to a low-price strategy, but on the other hand, they inflated their marketing expenses and extremely disrupted the user experience. This makes it seem that the low prices of this year's Double Eleven are somewhat difficult to convince the public.

Of course, I believe that business leaders such as Liu Qiangdong and Dai Shan would definitely not encourage this, but the pressure of internal KPIs may have forced the advertising and operation team to take risks. But what is regrettable is that the suspension of shake ads actually requires companies like Apple to stop it by removing gyroscope permissions.

But if we think more deeply, there may be corruption in advertising behind the Double Eleven campaigns of major e-commerce companies. I suggest that all major e-commerce platforms can conduct a thorough investigation and perform internal audits. After all, eliminating corrupt officials is also a way to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

02

From the perspective of e-commerce platforms, user experience is not that important. In other words, e-commerce platforms may believe that low prices are the best user experience in the e-commerce consumption process, and in order to achieve low prices, they can sacrifice user convenience and visual beauty.

Therefore, if you look at the APP pages of Taobao, Tmall, JD.com and other major e-commerce platforms, they are all noisy and visually like a noisy market. Compared with foreign platforms such as Amazon, they are much cleaner and fresher.

Of course, we do not think that visual cleanliness and beauty are the most important for consumers. It is very likely that the market-style page design of Taobao and Tmall is the page layout with the highest conversion efficiency.

This is why when Pinduoduo’s “Kan Yi Dao” was popular, although many users felt that the ads were harassing and there were many tricks in the site operation methods such as “Kan Yi Dao” and “Big Wheel”, Pinduoduo still took advantage of the WeChat social communication dividend to achieve rapid growth. When WeChat began to control fission sharing, Pinduoduo had already accumulated original users.

The operation idea of ​​e-commerce platforms is based on traffic conversion as the main logic. To put it bluntly, e-commerce platforms usually do not treat users as people, but as traffic and data, and then achieve conversion through step-by-step behavioral induction.

In this induction process, the evil of human nature is usually exploited.

But for social platforms like WeChat, traffic is generated continuously, so there is no traffic anxiety, no specific conversion targets, and no pressure to "make business easy in the world", so the focus of the product will be placed on the user experience.

So from the perspective of division of roles, traffic consumers such as e-commerce platforms will always disrupt the user experience and obtain additional traffic by "doing evil", but the side effect is that they disrupt the ecological balance and achieve "entropy increase".

Traffic producers such as social platforms and content platforms need to constantly monitor traffic acquisition behaviors and engage in offensive and defensive battles with traffic consumers, thereby managing the ecosystem and achieving "entropy reduction."

03

Alibaba, JD.com and other platforms have all promoted low-price strategies this year, targeting cost-effective consumption. A major characteristic of cost-effective people is that they are willing to sacrifice user experience in exchange for low prices, which is more obvious in the behavior of sinking users.

Therefore, from a pessimistic point of view, even if Apple today prohibits the "Shake" advertisement by restricting the gyroscope's permissions, the promotion of e-commerce platforms will probably no longer be the same as before, promoting consumption upgrades and quality life, but will be more inclined to use simple and crude brainwashing advertising marketing.

We used to joke within our team that the brainwashing ads that Jiang Nanchun used to do in elevators were replicated by Taobao and Tmall in online marketing this year. After experiencing Double Eleven, you will know that if a wealthy and willful e-commerce company wants to do brainwashing ads, no one can stop it.

Although this is just a rough prediction, based on the laws of business history, in the stage of stock competition, unlimited and eye-catching marketing methods will continue to emerge. This year's new energy vehicle market is a good example.

Of course, we hope to have both low prices and elegance, but this is obviously not realistic, so in the future, we may need to continue to endure the advertising violence of e-commerce platforms until the regulatory authorities speak out again to rectify the situation.

Author: Liu Yu, WeChat public account: Spreading Gymnastics