New rules are coming! Store visit videos with links will be considered advertisements. This chaos should stop...

The wind of supervision has blown to the chaotic store exploration content track. According to the recent new regulations, store exploration short videos should be marked with "advertisement" on the content with advertising components. Can the chaos in the store exploration content track be curbed? Let's take a look at this article to explore this wildly growing experience sharing content field. Recommended for friends who are interested in short videos.

Recently, there have been reports that the "Internet Advertising Management Measures" will be implemented on May 1, which mentions that "if goods or services are promoted through knowledge introduction, experience sharing, consumer evaluation, etc., and shopping links and other purchasing methods are attached, the advertiser shall clearly mark 'advertisement'", and the short video content of experts exploring stores that are familiar to the public falls within the scope of this regulation.

This means that in the future, store exploration videos will either no longer be able to be linked or will become advertisements.

In the past two years, as platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou have delved deeper into local life businesses, store exploration content has seen an unprecedented explosion, which has also given rise to a series of chaos that has caused headaches for consumers and businesses.

What impact will the new regulations have on store explorers after they are implemented?

1. Store visits will change from seeding to advertising

“The days of misleading consumers in the name of store visits or reviews are over.”

As the "Internet Advertising Management Measures" are about to be officially implemented on May 1, the Beijing Consumer Association made the above sharp comments on the store visits and evaluation content within the industry.

In accordance with the provisions of Article 9, paragraph 3 of the "Internet Advertising Management Measures" (hereinafter referred to as the "Measures"), short videos of the "expert store visits", "expert recommendations", and "expert experiences" type, as long as they are accompanied by links to jump to purchases, are clearly Internet advertisements, must be marked with the word "advertisement", and must not mislead consumers.

If the above-mentioned regulations are violated and the Internet advertisements are not identifiable, they will be punished in accordance with the third paragraph of Article 59 of the Advertising Law.

This means that starting from May this year, promotional orders from short video influencers such as store exploration and evaluation will either no longer be able to include group purchases or related links and package them as grass-planting content; or they will be marked as advertising content and subject to consumer supervision and legal regulation.

The implementation of the Measures clearly states that relevant content and behavior will be subject to the constraints of laws and regulations. An authoritative media outlet explained: "According to the Advertising Law, the Anti-Unfair Competition Law and other legal provisions, businesses, influencers and Internet platforms that use false propaganda to deceive and mislead consumers must bear corresponding legal responsibilities."

The news quickly attracted the attention and discussion of a group of store explorers.

The most direct thing is that some influencers are worried that traffic will be affected. A food group buying influencer on Douyin said: "The advertisement words are displayed and the traffic is also low. This is just a process. Don't worry."

Some industry insiders also believe that with the arrival of regulation, this marks the end of the bonus period for store exploration content, and that simple and crudely shot store exploration videos will be difficult to monetize in the future.

An interesting phenomenon is that the "Measures" to be implemented are actually aimed at all short video content with promotional behavior. However, the media's interpretation and focus on this "Measures" emphasizes content with a tendency to promote products, such as store visits and reviews. Ultimately, at the consumer level, more attention is paid to store visits.

The reason for this situation is that, on the one hand, there is indeed a lack of supervision on soft-implanted content such as store visits; on the other hand, there has been chaos in the field of store visits in recent years, many consumers have been deceived, and even merchants have suffered grievances.

2. Wild growth under the wind

As early as the era of pictures and texts, there were "store exploration" contents that recommended offline stores and food from the perspective of Amway, or promoted businesses. With the rise of live broadcasts and short videos, "store exploration" content has become more and more popular.

In the early store exploration content, in addition to showing the "exploration" process, finding stores, checking in for delicious food, and sharing experiences, there was also content that combined food broadcasting with store exploration, such as Mizijun and Langweixian.

But at that time, because the link between store exploration content and merchants was relatively long, the main focus was on promoting products.

It was not until the end of 2018 that short video platforms represented by Douyin began to gradually develop teams for local life, and offline businesses began to flock to Douyin and Kuaishou. The connection between the content end and the consumer end was opened, which accelerated the prosperity of the entire store exploration market in a short period of time.

In 2019, Douyin vigorously expanded its merchant resources and launched a series of support policies to increase traffic for store exploration content. At that time, a celebrity with 10,000 followers found that the number of views of his store exploration videos was 2-3 times that of non-store exploration content.

After entering 2020, affected by the offline environment, a large number of businesses also began to turn to online customer acquisition, which quickly gave rise to a wave of store exploration experts and MCNs. At that time, the price of a single promotional video by an expert with about 100,000 fans was 2,000-3,000 yuan, and the merchant also had to pay a portion of Dou+. It was also during this period that many excellent cases emerged in the field of store exploration, and various players quickly poured in.

After the store exploration content is included in short videos, it can not only guide users to consume through location tags, but the platform also launches a series of merchant operation and customer acquisition tools, such as group buying functions and coupons, which provide direct and effective conversion tools for store exploration traffic.

There is a case study: In 2021, a store explorer with only more than 50,000 fans had 4 videos selected in one week.

He ranked among the top 10 in the Douyin group buying sales list in Guangzhou, with more than 2,500 group buying orders and an estimated commission of 20,000 yuan.

It is precisely because of the tilt of platform policies, the influx of merchants and the improvement of commercialization paths that there has been a huge explosion in store exploration content. For example, on Xiaohongshu, the number of notes displayed by searching for the keyword "store exploration" in 2021 soared from 1.09 million in the previous year to 12.61 million, and now has reached 12.83 million.

However, the explosion of store exploration content has given rise to many industry chaos. For example, store exploration experts use traffic to force merchants to exchange free meals, and there are also false propaganda to attract conversions...

Among them, the "Niu Dao Incident" that was discussed most frequently was because Niu Dao, a celebrity with millions of fans who specializes in visiting Beijing cuisine restaurants, went to KFC to review the new product, mixed sauce noodles, but gave it an extremely low rating. He even used the opportunity to promote an Old Beijing mixed sauce that he sold in a video.

But soon after, a user discovered that Niu Dao visited KFC for the second time. When faced with the same mixed sauce noodles, he said in a new video that the price was right, the sauce was separate from the oil, and the noodles were steaming, and he described it as "really like the taste of my mother's home cooking."

This contrast between before and after made netizens quickly say that Niu Dao was "recharged". The so-called "recharge" means that KFC, which was rated as not delicious, paid Niu Dao to re-promote it, which led to the huge contrast between before and after.

The "recharge" phenomenon will not only cause the rapid change of Niu Dao's face, but will also cause many store explorers who claim to be real and objective to over-package businesses. They will even, driven by bulk recharges by merchants, join forces with other experts to promote them as "Internet celebrity stores."

In addition to the recharge phenomenon, the store exploration track has also seen chaos in the form of big stomach kings eating and showing off their wealth. For example, @大logo吃遍北京 (now renamed @大logo吃遍全国) was named by the People's Daily and Xinhua News Agency for being obsessed with traffic.

3. Backed by a trillion-dollar market

Nowadays, the store exploration track continues to be hot. Especially with the continuous increase in the local life track by platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, the entire market scale is still expanding.

According to iResearch Consulting data, the local life service market size will grow from 19.5 trillion yuan in 2020 to 35.3 trillion yuan in 2025, and the online penetration rate will also increase from 24.3% in 2020 to 30.8% in 2025.

According to the "2022 Douyin Life Service Store Exploration Data Report" released by Douyin Life Service and Bytedance City Research Institute, in 2022, merchants and influencers on Douyin created a total of 1.1 billion store exploration videos, which received nearly 100 billion likes. At the same time, Douyin Life Service merchants released 5.07 million influencer-matched business orders through the platform, a year-on-year increase of 623.12%.

Among this growing part of store exploration content, a large portion is homogeneous short videos that directly promote merchants’ discount packages.

The shooting materials of these contents are unified, and the spoken copy is highly similar, such as the bargaining copy of "cut the price a little bit", "cut the price more", the package copy of "your X-piece set is complete", and the homogeneous copy of "consumption cannot be refunded", "such a large table is very cheap", etc., and then the group buying link is attached.

On the other hand, the popularity of the store exploration track has also attracted some content experts to "cross industries". For example, Xinbochang previously counted the phenomenon that Douyin's top car experts shot food and store exploration content for a period of time. (Click to review: After losing a million fans, "Monkey Brother Talks about Cars" stopped talking about cars and turned to food exploration? )

"Just like in recent years, many comedians or other types of experts have gradually transformed into beauty products. These people who have nothing to do with store visits are essentially going for business orders when they do store visits," said the head of an agency.

It is precisely because of the "profit-seeking" influx of these top experts that the store exploration track, which has experienced wild growth, has once again ushered in more uncertainties...

It is understandable that talents pursue commercialization.

However, since store exploration content was originally focused on sharing real experiences and providing references for consumers, when influencers injected exaggerated and over-packaged false elements into store exploration content for commercial purposes, it became advertising. Previously, even if such store exploration content was advertising, it was difficult for consumers to distinguish it because of its grass-planting nature.

Previously, Xiaohongshu was criticized for being flooded with fake content on its platform. It also tried to add an "advertising" logo to the advertiser list so that users can distinguish between real content and advertising promotions.

However, businesses are certainly unwilling to have their content labeled with advertising logos, which runs counter to their original goal of achieving "tap water" through spontaneous sharing by influencers.

This is actually a game between platforms, influencers, and merchants. It can also be seen that the chaos in the store exploration track has existed for a long time, but in fact there has been a lack of relevant supervision.

After the implementation of the new regulations, what kind of impact will it really have on the store exploration track? Can it make the industry more orderly? Everything remains to be seen. But at least, the wind of supervision has come, which can give influencers and institutions a heads-up, and make them give up the idea of ​​traffic supremacy and profit-seeking, and truly return to the original intention of content.

Author: Aligu Editor: Xiaohong

Source: WeChat public account "New Broadcasting Field"