A few days ago, Xiaohongshu and JD.com officially announced their cooperation with the 2024 Spring Festival Gala. JD.com will become the exclusive interactive cooperation platform for the Spring Festival Gala, while Xiaohongshu will become a note and live broadcast sharing platform. Looking back at the sponsors of the Spring Festival Gala over the years, from watch brands in the 1980s, to wine and pharmaceutical companies in the 1990s, to major Internet companies after 2015. The Spring Festival Gala is not only a party that is remembered by the whole people, but also a benchmark for Chinese brands and the best footnote of China's business changes.

While we are still looking for the flavor of the New Year in our memories, the Spring Festival Gala has already become a super IP and has become the marketing battlefield with the largest traffic every year.


Aiming to sink the market

In 2024, the sponsor of the Spring Festival Gala will change back to an Internet company.

This year, JD.com became the interactive platform for the 2024 CCTV Spring Festival Gala. According to official information, JD.com will link all its businesses to launch a lottery.

Viewers need to download the APP in advance to participate in the lottery, and win prizes totaling 100 million yuan in the form of "one penny", including 100 Lantu cars and a 10 million Yangzhou mansion.


This is not the first time JD.com has sponsored the Spring Festival Gala. In 2022, JD.com served as the exclusive interactive partner of the Spring Festival Gala and distributed 1.5 billion yuan in red envelopes and merchandise. Different from 2022, this year Jingxi APP, which focuses on the sinking market, has also participated.

In 2023, JD.com faces a user growth bottleneck and urgently needs to tap more sinking traffic.. Based on the sponsorship fees in previous years, JD.com’s sponsorship fees this year will need to be at least hundreds of millions of yuan. With such a high investment, JD.com’s determination to reach the sinking market is evident.

Another Internet company that has pinned its hopes on the Spring Festival Gala is Xiaohongshu. According to the current public information, Xiaohongshu will create a live broadcast of "Everyone's Spring Festival Gala" next door to the Spring Festival Gala studio. From a behind-the-scenes perspective, Spring Festival Gala actors are invited to the live broadcast room to chat about the Spring Festival Gala, and behind-the-scenes footage is played.

Searching for Spring Festival Gala keywords, you can see that Xiaohongshu has opened reservations for "Everyone's Spring Festival Gala". Data shows that 1.23 million people have made reservations for the live broadcast.


In 2023, Xiaohongshu will vigorously promote its shopping e-commerce business, and this direction is also reflected in "Everyone's Spring Festival Gala". Specifically, Xiaohongshu already has a shopping link under "What other goodies do the program crew have for themselves?"


In addition, it is worth noting that the same costumes and props of the Spring Festival Gala can be purchased in the Xiaohongshu live broadcast room.According to the hot spots of the Spring Festival Gala over the years, the same style of celebrities has always been popular, from the same lipstick color to the same style of coat, often occupying the popular list on Weibo. This year’s Xiaohongshu can talk about the Spring Festival Gala and buy the same style, which has become a highlight.

Whether it is JD.com or Xiaohongshu, betting on the Spring Festival Gala is closely related to its own growth bottlenecks. In 2023, the rise of Pinduoduo has made everyone see the huge space for the sinking market. More and more major Internet companies want to seize the sinking market and convert traffic into retained users.


Expensive Spring Festival Gala

Luo Zhenyu said in his New Year's Eve speech in 2019 that he went to CCTV's advertising department with a good idea and a lot of money and wanted to place an advertisement on the Spring Festival Gala, but he was turned away.

The reason for rejection was: "Internet companies want to advertise in the Spring Festival Gala. There is a small threshold. Only those with daily active life of more than 100 million can consider it. Otherwise, the server will crash the moment the advertisement comes out."

In the end, Luo Zhenyu summed up the value of the Spring Festival Gala in one sentence, which later became widely circulated -We know nothing about the power of the Spring Festival Gala.

Indeed, no gala in China has such a high number of views and topics as the Spring Festival Gala. The Spring Festival Gala can not only make countless celebrities popular, but also make countless brands and companies popular.

On the Spring Festival Gala in 2015, WeChat spent 500 million yuan in red envelopes in exchange for 200 million personal bank cards bound to WeChat in 2 days, completing Alipay's 8-year performance.Everything happened too fast. After this battle, WeChat’s status as a national APP was established.


For Internet companies at that time, the CCTV Spring Festival Gala meant hundreds of millions of traffic, which was exactly what Internet companies needed to expand their territories. As long as people still have the habit of "watching the Spring Festival Gala", it means that the value of reaching more user groups and expanding brand reputation will still exist.

Since then, major Internet companies have begun to compete for sponsorship of the Spring Festival Gala. In 2016, Alipay spent 269 million yuan to sponsor the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, which was five times the price of the previous year.

At the same time, Alipay also launched the "Collect Five Blessings" activity. On New Year's Eve this year, hundreds of millions of people "collected five blessings" on their mobile phones.

After the Spring Festival Gala, Alipay gained 1.1 billion pairs of friends. The "Collecting Five Blessings" activity has become a fixed activity of Alipay every year and continues to move towards in-depth commercialization.

However, not every sponsor that cooperates with the Spring Festival Gala can obtain a "retention".After 2016, Baidu, Douyin, and Kuaishou successively appeared on the Spring Festival Gala. Although the traffic increased rapidly, the retention rate was far lower than before.

Among them, Baidu disclosed that due to the high investment cost of the Spring Festival Gala, its performance in the 2019 quarter was affected. Similarly, Kuaishou, Douyin, and JD.com also faced the problem of declining retention rates in the Spring Festival Gala.

Data shows that from 2015 to 2019, the average ratings of CCTV Spring Festival Gala were about 30%, which is at least 700 million viewers; but since 2020, this number has fallen below 24%, and is still declining.

As Spring Festival Gala sponsorship fees rise and young people's interest in the Spring Festival Gala decreases, more and more major companies are beginning to think about the return on investment in the Spring Festival Gala. Therefore, in the context of Internet companies’ efforts to reduce costs and increase efficiency in 2023, major Internet companies have declined to sponsor the Spring Festival Gala.


It’s not that I look down on the Spring Festival Gala, homemade Spring Festival Gala is more cost-effective

While major companies are targeting the Spring Festival Gala, there is a wave of "topic-based" and "self-made" Spring Festival Gala on social media.

It has been observed that a large number of content such as predictions of the Spring Festival Gala and adaptations of traditional Spring Festival Gala appeared on short videos, making netizens fall into carnival: "Very good, save it for the Spring Festival Gala" and "You figured out the Spring Festival Gala skits."

In the comments, netizens continued to speculate on hot topics for this year’s Spring Festival Gala: “Arrange to skip subject three”, “Arrange old artists to teach ‘Zun Du Fake Du’”, “Okay, let’s all make dumplings together”...

On station B, the work "I won't watch the Spring Festival Gala without this program" released by @利gliabuliang became popular. Male and female dancers in cotton-padded jackets cosplayed the classic characters of the Spring Festival Gala "White Cloud" and "Black Earth", and performed creative dances to the BGM of "Reform Spring Breeze Blowing the Ground", which attracted millions of likes.


Coincidentally, in "Binary Sketch", which has been viewed nearly 10 million times on station B, the protagonists wearing military coats and sanitation worker uniforms chanted "dumplings, dumplings, dumplings, dumplings" throughout the whole process, completing a classic "Spring Festival Gala cross talk", which also made many netizens laugh: "Okay, okay, at least this is funny" and "Spring Festival Gala director: sweating all over my family."


In addition, young people also edited "homemade Spring Festival Gala" to express their expectations for the Spring Festival Gala in their own way. There is not only an archeology of past classic Spring Festival Galas, but also the singing and dancing magic that was once widely praised, such as Jay Chou, Andy Lau, Zhou Shen and other singers, and a series of classic sketches by Zhao Benshan.


On the one hand, self-made Spring Festival Gala and “topic-based” Spring Festival Gala are manifestations of the maturity of user-created content, but on the other hand, this also reflectsPeople have no choice but to express their frustration with the content of the Spring Festival Gala through self-creation.

It is true that changes in the content of the Spring Festival Gala are affected by the diversified development of cultural consumption. The Spring Festival Gala is no longer a rare cultural event every year, and it is difficult to meet the cultural needs of more than one billion people through a party. The emergence of local TV stations and online Spring Festival Gala has undoubtedly further weakened the authority of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala.

Nowadays, even though the audience will still sit around the TV and watch the Spring Festival Gala on New Year's Eve, they can no longer put down their mobile phones. On their mobile phones, there are richer cultural products. The audience knows this, and so do the major Internet companies.