Chapter 17 Turn "boring" into profit

Austrian economist Schumpeter said: "Only when an operator engages in innovative activities can he become an excellent entrepreneur." John Hawkins even pointed out in the book "Creative Economy" that the current daily output value of the creative industry in the world is as high as 22 billion US dollars, and is increasing at a rate of about 5%.In London, England, the importance of the creative industry to economic development has surpassed that of the financial industry. On August 11, 2005, Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba.com, announced that Alibaba had acquired all the assets of Yahoo China and received a US$1 billion investment from Yahoo.This is currently the largest merger and acquisition in the history of China's Internet, and Ma Yun's generous investment has shocked the industry.Ma Yun said that so far, there is no successful precedent for the B2B e-commerce model on the Internet, and there is no listed company to do B2B. "Alibaba can achieve today's achievements because when everyone thinks that the B2B model will not succeed, we have Always keep doing it.”

At present, Alibaba's daily profit exceeds 1 million yuan, and it has become the world's largest e-commerce website; in 2005, Alibaba's operating income was 68 million US dollars. Chen Tianqiao, who started his business at the age of 26, chose a new profit model other than online advertising, telecom sharing and other models. He started as an online game agent for Koreans, and quickly transformed successfully, creating an online game empire that has begun to take shape. . Whether it is Alibaba, Shanda, or Focus Media, their profit models are not copied from abroad, and they are full of the creativity of these wealthy upstarts.Some people may ask: Is the industry the entrepreneurial hero, or the creativity of the upstarts created a brand new industry?Then you might as well take a look at Jiang Nanchun's experience, he may be able to bring you perfect answers and thinking tips.

Society is progressing, some people "degenerate" to be extremely boring, some people "evolve" to be extremely smart; some people are bored with nothing to do, while some people use boredom to cash in every possible way. Just as the founders of the "positioning" theory, American marketing gurus Jack Trout and Al Reitz emphasized, to make marketing information dissemination effective, enterprises must change from the original "communicator-oriented" to "audience-oriented". ", that is, from "please pay attention to consumers" to "please pay attention to consumers"!

In today's age, time, attention, and trust have become scarce resources in society. Urban young people are always complaining that they don't have enough time to meet all their needs, and there are too many things to deal with in their disposable time. many.Consumers' lack of time often means lack of attention.In other words, attention is becoming a fortune in the hands of consumers.With the advent of the information age, the expansion of information has made consumers' attention one of the most valuable consumption resources that businesses compete for.Therefore, the rare "boring" time of the day for consumers has naturally become the best marketing communication opportunity for companies to compete for.

On the other hand, according to the research results of AC Nielsen in 2005, the average number of advertisements that a consumer remembers every day is 1.79, while 18.8% of consumers can hardly remember any advertisements, and can remember 1 to 3 advertisements The cumulative number of people who advertise is 46.6%.Consumers are exposed to thousands of pieces of advertising information every day. How can a company's marketing information stand out and become the "one in a thousand"?It is undoubtedly more important than the advertising design itself to choose the media channel that can attract the audience's attention and grasp the best marketing communication opportunity. "Boring space" more reflects the combination of consumers' subconscious desires and advertisements.

Zheng Xianglin, vice president of Zenith Communication Group China, believes that the core competitiveness of new media born in the "waiting economy" lies in how to attract attention through innovative content and how to maintain end customers through continuous service .These new media are hidden in various spaces and objects in the daily environment, which minimizes the conflict with the audience and makes the integration of advertising and entertainment more closely.These new media have found everyone's individual time very well, and through these fragmented time, a good environment that is difficult to obtain by traditional advertising has been obtained.In the future, the integration of various carriers such as outdoor advertising and mobile TV will become inevitable.

It seems that the "boring economy" seems to fully explain the emergence and market foundation of new media such as LCD screens in buildings.Capturing people's brief moments of boredom in various places and preying on their attention has become a huge "gold mine" for those who run the "boring medium". Of course, the media that occupy people's "boring" time, how long their existence will last, still needs to be discussed and studied. After all, as a new thing, it will encounter all kinds of weird questions all the time.But no matter what, things have changed over time, and a group of people represented by Jiang Nanchun have found a new advertising market worth hundreds of millions of dollars in "boring".This is the age of the "boring industry".

Watching TV at home, you face a multiple-choice question - program or commercial?At the elevator entrance of the building, you also face a multiple-choice question - advertising or boring? In fact, in the era of excess media resources, how to grasp "eyeball loyalty" is more challenging than establishing "brand loyalty". The "boring time" without interference, prevention, and competition is the key to "violent marketing" for enterprises. One of the best opportunities. A famous saying that Jiang Nanchun often said is: "Creativity creates business." In fact, he has indeed achieved the ultimate in this concept in business.With a unique vision, he saw this huge "boring" space, where "flowers are blooming" and full of infinite spring.

As early as the campus days, Jiang Nanchun was already an out-and-out advertiser.In his view, the most significant change since the reform and opening up is the emergence of different social and economic classes. This situation has brought about market segmentation, product segmentation, and audience segmentation. Even shampoo can be seen in different classes. exist. Therefore, combining his many years of experience in the advertising industry, Jiang Nanchun quickly designed a business model specializing in the promotion of "boring culture": set up LCD-TV platforms in major office buildings in the city, and sell advertising slots to advertising? ? ?To broadcast, and then integrate, use a national media to provide advertisers with systematic strategic promotion services.The so-called focus in the commercial building LCD-TV network is to cover audiences who are troubled by "boredom" with a monthly income of more than 3,000 yuan who frequently visit these places.

According to Jiang Nanchun's explanation, the daily access to building elevators is basically business managers and white-collar workers. They are high-income people aged 25 to 45 who follow trends and pay attention to quality of life. They are leading buyers and important consumers of many fashion products. Or, and because people are generally "bored" when taking the elevator, the LCD TV in the building is easy to attract attention. Under Focus Company’s criteria for judging new media, Focus has successively developed a golf network, a beauty salon network, an airport bus network, and a store TV network, building a clear pyramid of advertising media that revolves around consumers’ lifestyles. .Among them, the store TV network sets LCD and plasma TVs at the retail terminals of the store, which directly stimulates consumers' desire to buy during the shopping process, and thus has a great influence on consumers' purchase decisions.On the other hand, Jiang Nanchun also believes that if you use TV to display dynamic advertisements, the effect will be much better than static and flat poster advertisements.

Some scholars have put forward the explanation of "boring economy". Busy modern people always spend some time waiting. The waiting time incurred when moving around the building is also incorporated into its exploitable "waiting economy" resource.According to a survey conducted by the new generation market monitoring organization in Beijing and Shanghai in August 2003, people spend 303.28 seconds waiting and taking elevators every day, which is about 5.05 minutes, which is enough to develop a new media industry. So what about the acceptance of this form of media among those who ride the elevator?In Beijing and Shanghai, this kind of LCD TV media installed at the elevator entrance of office buildings has a higher acceptance frequency.According to the survey, 60.7% of the people said that they would watch or often watch (at least once in two elevator rides) LCD TV advertisements installed in office buildings, and 26.1% of them would watch them every time. Many people in the industry also believe that it is very important for Focus Media, which just emerged in 2003, to become "famous overseas" in such a short period of time, because it has successfully found another entry point into the "boring culture" industry. Dr. Qian Xuefeng, chairman of Hanli Capital and a well-known domestic investor, said: "Looking back at Chinese companies such as Sina, NetEase, Sohu, Linktone, and Shanda Network that have landed on NASDAQ, what do they rely on? SMS! Games! And Essentially, these means belong to the 'boring cultural industry group'. From this perspective, Focus Media's promotion is another extension of the 'boring cultural' industry." Qian Xuefeng believes: "Ding Lei's text messages make friends, the main body It solves the "boring culture" tendency of young people aged 20 to 40 on the move; Chen Tianqiao's online games mainly solve the "boring culture" tendency of young people aged 15 to 25 at home or in Internet cafes; and Jiang Nanchun's Focus Media solves the 'boring culture' tendency of middle- and high-income people aged 25 to 45 in specific locations (such as office buildings and entertainment consumption places)." It is precisely because of Jiang Nanchun's foresight to foresee this future that Focus Group has inherited its natural and good talents and has a bright future. When are ads active?When are consumers least psychologically repulsive to media?The answer is: when people are in a more boring time and space than advertisements. Because of "boring", Jiang Nanchun seized a blank market; also because of "boring", Focus successfully conveyed the value of media promotion for mid-to-high-end products. Taking advantage of the "boring" time difference, Focus Network effectively targets business owners, managers and senior white-collar workers, fully covering urban highly educated and high-income groups between the ages of 25 and 50.And these groups are the most active consumer class in society, and they are important consumers of mid-to-high-end fashion commodities. The focus of the focus advertising positioning makes its advertising investment more accurate and avoids wasting on invalid people. The 30-second advertising CPM (cost per thousand) is only 1/10 of that of TV. In addition, the living habits of business people and urban high-income fashion white-collars determine that their contact rate and attention to traditional media are lower than ordinary people, and the commercial building advertising network can effectively cover the above-mentioned target audience.Therefore, the focus's seamless communication method will effectively target audiences that are difficult to reach by traditional media, and the combination with traditional media will maximize possible consumers for the brand. Finally, the effects of focus advertising and traditional media are highly complementary. The three-dimensional combination spreads through different time and space, which strengthens the audience's cognition and memory of the brand, and the CPM of the general audience is less than 1/ of that of TV. 2.The three-dimensional combination and effective supplement make the audience have a deep memory of the product brand of the Focus advertiser, and also make the investment cost of the Focus advertiser lower. The huge cost temptation and effect advantage soon consolidated Focus Media's position in the "boring economy" market, and "boring" made Focus Media obtain more unexpected gains. It is undeniable that no matter how gratifying the growth situation of advertising companies is, relying on creativity to compete has become a more and more frequently used model for companies to compete. "When doing graphic design for a client, we needed an illustrator with a unique style, but after a series of selections, we found that it is not necessary to be in the company to get the best solution, and we can find it through interactive and interconnected outsourcing methods. A more vivid solution.” Senior advertising executive Wu Xiaobo described his creative experience in this way. Compared with the past, the Chinese advertising industry in 2005 seemed to be more restless and excited.Advertising creativity began to win awards in international competitions, and the breakthrough of zero made the advertising industry really excited.Huang Shengmin, dean of the School of Advertising at Communication University of China, attended the "Value and Misunderstandings of Focused TV Media" summit forum in Shanghai, and put forward the view that "the domestic advertising market has appeared an 'inflection point'". I don't know if it indicates the emergence of creative advertising.In any case, Jiang Nanchun is the one who really masters creativity and thinking breakthroughs. Some people say that the success of Jiangnanchun is due to the creation of money, and it is also due to the era of emerging industries.Jiang Nanchun himself has a saying: In the face of creativity, business is unequal.Jiang Nanchun fully stimulates the "wisdom of the game" by participating in the "wisdom game", and survives in China's advertising media market by virtue of creativity. While savoring the excitement brought about by his free thinking, Jiang Nanchun also did not forget to think rationally about the severe situation of advertising profits.In an interview with the media, he talked about his personal views on advertisements. In his thinking, the size of an advertisement is determined by the proportion of the advertisement on the human retina, not by its absolute volume or area.When asked when advertising is most effective, Jiang Nanchun quickly answered the question: "Advertising is effective when you are in a time and space that is more boring than advertising." He further explained that because at this time advertising becomes content.In addition, he added, advertising is most effective when there is no choice, such as when the TV has only one channel and no other choices. Starting from the whim of "turning the advertising posters on the elevator door into TV", by June 2005, Focus Media founded by Jiang Nanchun had covered more than 20,000 people in 41 cities including Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. commercial buildings, covering more than 30 million mid-to-high-end audiences.On the day he landed on NASDAQ, his worth soared to 270 million US dollars.After returning from the IPO, Jiang Nanchun repeatedly repeated the entrepreneurial secrets in his heart under the curious questioning of media reporters: first, imagination creates profit margins; second, before creativity, business is unequal. Opportunities are fleeting. If you don’t grab the time today and work one hour less, you will pay 10 hours to solve this matter in the future.In the process of competition in the entire market, if you stop, you will die. Jiang Nanchun said: "Every day, the voice of 'run fast' keeps coming out of my heart. Run until your competitors disappear, you don't need to look back, you just run forward." Wide sea diving, sky high the birds to fly.Jiang Nanchun's way of making money is to think of what others can't think of, and to do what others can't do.When others focused on the traditional advertising business, he broadened the carrier of advertising and found a new sky - "For example, 72% of the customers in hypermarkets in Chinese cities are the main purchasers of household fast-moving consumer goods on average. These are the characteristics. Now as the degree of product homogeneity increases, consumers’ loyalty to the brand decreases, and more and more advertisers believe that it is better to exert influence on the consumer terminal. Wal-Mart in the United States and TESCO in the United Kingdom All have verified the feasibility of the sales terminal media model." Jiang Nanchun likes to watch Zhang Yimou's films. When Focus Registration was founded, it was being shown in major theaters in China.He was born in a Chinese major, not so much his favorite plot, but his favorite narrative structure, a Borgesian narrative structure he has always admired: when you make regular judgments about the hints and hints in the story, the plot But a big reversal happened.Perhaps due to his early understanding of the way of thinking in Borges' works, Jiang Nanchun's Focus Media is based on reverse multidimensional thinking from form to content. He no longer pays attention to marketing methods and discovering customers to improve Traditional business, and return to human nature and culture itself to study the problem of gradually decreasing advertising efficiency.Jiang Nanchun spent a lot of time thinking about this issue, and finally he defined what he was going to do as a new model of "boring culture" industry that "helps others beat boredom".The answer that satisfies him is due to his cultural non-industrial view of literary research, but his humanistic research-oriented thought, which is the result of an anti-empirical model.This is also the general rule of cultural success of most innovative business models understood by Jiang Nanchun. Today's world is a world of disputes, and the media landscape is changing rapidly. The outside world once believed that the biggest threat to Focus Media was not its life-and-death rival Juzhong Media, but media organizations with state-owned backgrounds such as Oriental Pearl TV.Take Oriental Pearl Tower as an example. According to its public listing information, the company already owned 6,000 digital broadcasting platforms in downtown Shanghai, including city landmarks, ferry terminals, and some third-level hospitals. With the development of commercial banks, it is estimated that the number may reach as many as 7,000. In addition, the Pearl of the Orient also has the part of Jiangnanchun? ? ?It does not have inherent advantages, such as free use of the news and entertainment content provided by Shanghai SVA Media Group, and free use of the wireless real-time digital signal system transmitted by the subsidiary company.In contrast, Focus stays at the technical level of only advertising and hard disk playback that cannot be updated in real time, which seems weak. Tian Tao, vice president of CTR, believes that despite the rapid growth of advertising on new media such as outdoor LCD TVs, this growth is mainly due to "quantity", and this type of advertising still needs to work hard on "quality".Therefore, regarding the "high-end" devices such as "content" and "wireless transmission technology" possessed by these Oriental Pearl, coupled with their so-called "quality" advantages, many people in the advertising industry have analyzed that only the Oriental Pearl can pose a threat to Focus . However, this "quality" is not that "quality". Jiang Nanchun clearly stated to the media that Focus will not follow suit and provide content other than advertisements on its own media, because Focus's business model does not require content.What he and Focus Media should strive to do well and become bigger are just a thorough advertising information platform, and all they need is tens of seconds while people are waiting. "Focus doesn't need content." Jiang Nanchun said: "People waiting in front of the elevator are not interested in what programs are on TV. They just want to pass the tens of seconds of boring time. This is the biggest so-called 'waiting force economy'. Characteristics." In fact, the communication effect of Focus Building TV ads without content is still better than that of traditional TV ads with content.According to CTR’s previous statistical data on TV audience behavior and psychology, people watch TV at home and have a high degree of attention to programs, but because people can choose, the ratings of advertisements are dropping sharply, and only 17.76% of people are interested in advertisements. Good attention: But when the effect of TV ads in buildings compares with the effects of TV ads in buildings, people’s acceptance of TV ads in buildings is higher than that of TV ads: Jiang Nanchun uses his own strategic vision and layout to prove his energy as a new generation of young entrepreneurs.Its self-confidence, courage and high-spirited are difficult to avoid in the comments on pure channel media that abandon content.