---
title: "Can a 100 Million Budget Build a Brand?"
description: "Almost all practitioners and experts teach how to achieve big results with small investments and create low-cost hits, but they don't tell you that low-cost hits are mostly luck. In the marketing industry, few study how to spend big money or manage large-scale campaigns with budgets over 100 million. I firmly believe in the power of money; if you want to quickly assess professional competence, look at how much marketing budget they've personally spent and how."
author: "杨不坏"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2019-05-15"
language: "en"
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---

# Can a 100 Million Budget Build a Brand?

> Almost all practitioners and experts teach how to achieve big results with small investments and create low-cost hits, but they don't tell you that low-cost hits are mostly luck. In the marketing industry, few study how to spend big money or manage large-scale campaigns with budgets over 100 million. I firmly believe in the power of money; if you want to quickly assess professional competence, look at how much marketing budget they've personally spent and how.

Zero cost, small budget, replicable, gaining 100k followers, viral hits...
Almost all practitioners, including all the masters, are researching and teaching how to achieve high output with small input, how to create low-cost viral hits, but no one tells you that low-cost viral hits are mostly a matter of luck.
In public discussions within the marketing industry, almost no one studies how to spend big money, how to manage large-scale campaigns, the kind with project budgets over 100 million. It seems everyone thinks spending money is easy.
In the marketing industry, which borders on metaphysics, I firmly believe in the power of money. If you want a quick and simple way to judge professional competence, look at how much marketing budget they've personally spent and how they spent it. Just as the most effective way to measure a person's intelligence is to look at their profitability in the open market.
**Many practitioners think, 'Give me 100 million, and I'll immediately make the brand awesome—just flood with ads.' Keyboard warriors full of blind courage are everywhere.**
I haven't made big money, but in my career I've spent big money. Being able to spend big money is truly a high-level skill. For example, I once had a media budget of 500-600 million, but for various reasons it was spent very scattered and unsuccessfully. Four or five years ago, before KOLs became so expensive, I had 5 million for new media communication and bought out the KOLs on Weibo and WeChat within 3 days—not by individual, but by Excel sheets; I bought resources from many Excel sheets. These are all failure cases.
**When you hold a huge budget, it's really hard to spend it, and even harder to spend it correctly.**
Nowadays, how to spend big money well is an urgent issue because there's no correct path anymore. In the past, buying CCTV was enough; you couldn't go wrong. But now there are too many choices. China's media market consumes several billion a day, right? So if you hold a 100 million budget, it's just a drop in the ocean. How do you spend it?
For example, new car launches, flagship phone launches, major brand upgrades, mega brand events, and new internet trend campaigns—these categories of brand budgets are mostly above the 100 million level.
So today, let's talk about how to spend big money and how to finely manage large traffic. Enjoy:
**First, when you face a large-scale campaign and need group army operations, all precision, tiered targeting, segmentation, and mid-to-small KOLs become ineffective. You need massive exposure to huge traffic.**
Currently, many brands are still doing 'spread the net' exposure, buying a bit here and there, feeling like they're seen everywhere. Undoubtedly, this is wrong and a huge waste. I previously mentioned the concept of 'cognitive dome,' but that concept suits tiered communication, not mass communication.
**Sustainable exposure within a fixed traffic pool, operating deep traffic.**
This is a conclusion from my recent thinking: choose a suitable mass platform as the main battlefield, complete most of the communication path on this platform, spend over 80% of the budget, and deeply bind and integrate with the platform, its KOLs, and its users.
There aren't many such mass platforms—for example, Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, Taobao, and even CCTV is an option. The principle is to bind to a fixed traffic pool and conduct deep cooperation.
Next, let's use a case. Recently, I chatted with friends at vivo. For their two new products, iQOO and X27, they tried a new communication strategy. Next, combining vivo's case, let's discuss thoughts on large-scale communication campaigns.
At the mass exposure level, vivo chose deep binding cooperation with Douyin. Douyin is already a mass platform for young people, not divided by tier or region. Treating Douyin as the CCTV for young people should be fine.
vivo's audience overlaps highly with Douyin's users, so choosing Douyin is a relatively correct choice. I remember Redmi also did deep binding cooperation with Qzone back then; that was also good.
I won't elaborate on what point resources or content frequency they bought at the exposure level. Generally, in such deep binding cooperation, the platform can usually do some customized development based on client needs.
Content output is the appearance, the information release—like what product, shocking release, what's coming, what's on the market, etc. Simple and direct announcement. **The effect to achieve is that daily active users on the entire platform see it at least twice.**
There's not much to say here; it's just a forced appearance. Remember to make it cool and slightly exceed user expectations.
This step is very important, very important, very important. It's a step often overlooked in many brand campaigns.
Usually, people either cooperate with the official platform for hard ads or with KOLs for content, rarely doing both on a large scale simultaneously. If you only cooperate with the official platform for splash screens, information feeds, or even customized formats, to consumers it's still just an ad, no different from the first 1000 ads they've seen today, and can be ignored directly. If you buy many platform KOLs, it lacks momentum and is too scattered—not a group army strategy.
So, while doing big exposure, you should also produce in-depth content with the platform's top KOLs and launch it together. When cooperating with platform KOLs, it's best to have the platform participate as well; they know better which KOLs have higher value, what content suits them, and various creative forms and how to recommend them.
Besides KOLs, ordinary users' word-of-mouth is also important, or rather, KOLs are meant to guide more ordinary users to participate. Hard ads and PGC drive UGC, creating topics within the platform.
In vivo's cooperation with Douyin, their own spokesperson content appeared in hard ads and information feeds, plus native content recommendations from platform KOLs, ultimately creating in-platform topics. For example, X27 presented the topic #一升就变美# (One Lift and You Become Beautiful) on Douyin. The official created shooting templates, and ordinary users applied and imitated them. **Forming a content matrix of celebrity hard ads—KOL content—native UGC.**
Imagine: you open Douyin and see a celebrity hard ad. Here, there's very little conversion because this position often has ads and isn't special. Enter Douyin and see the celebrity's information feed ad—OK, that's just a hard ad too.
Then you scroll to native content created by KOLs; here, conversion increases somewhat. Then you find ordinary users also using templates to play with the topic. By now, you probably can't ignore this ad, right? In short, **the goal is to make the brand integrate into the platform's public opinion, not just buy ads.**
For example, for the splash screen, vivo used celebrity endorsement content, roughly meaning 'I'm here,' used as a loudspeaker: a new product is released and it's impressive. Then there's PGC from platform KOLs. This type of content is mostly scenario-based displays: the product's appearance, functions, features, usage scenarios, etc., shown in various ways. For instance, the most distinctive feature of the vivo X27 should be the pop-up camera, so they used the topic #一升就变美# for ordinary users.
To summarize, the above two steps are conducted in the platform's public traffic, mainly for display and exposure. The core purpose is to show the product's features and selling points more comprehensively and three-dimensionally without annoying users. This also creates a cognitive dome for users within the platform. **Within the same traffic pool, repeatedly reach users through multiple touchpoints, multiple forms, and diversified content.**
**Step three: Users enter the brand's private traffic pool.** No matter which platform you deeply cultivate, you must open the conversion path and make it very easy for users to enter the brand's private traffic pool.
This private traffic pool can take many forms, depending on the platform. It might be an official Weibo, a landing page, a public account, or a Taobao store. In short, users should be settled into a channel where the brand can sustainably communicate.
**This step's core is retaining users.** When everyone comes from public pages to the brand page, it's the last step before conversion, so it's especially important. Any slight disturbance might scare away potential users because they're not familiar with you yet, even though they see some people talking about you outside.
If they come in and find the page experience poor, can't find what they want, they leave; if they come in and find the product introduction unclear, inconsistent with what's discussed outside, they leave; or if they come in and find the outside is bustling but inside nothing is said, they leave.
It's actually about managing user expectations. When they come to the brand's private page, you should further enhance their expectations and strengthen their purchase decision. For example, with vivo: the hard ads look cool—that's expected. KOLs are all praising; they probably paid for it, but it really looks good and useful, and the photos are beautiful. Then they see ordinary users discussing the topic; indeed, it's not bad.
Next is the jump. Whether from hard ads, KOL content, or ordinary user topics, users can directly jump to vivo's official Weibo or vivo's Douyin flash store, where they can pre-order or buy directly. There's no need to jump to other e-commerce sites; they can complete the purchase within Douyin.
For vivo, they pre-prepared content on the official Weibo and optimized user experience in the flash store, just waiting for users to come in. So, shouldn't the official Weibo pin several related posts and put the topic and flash store jump in prominent positions? That is, don't make people search, and definitely don't make them think to search.
**To summarize, vivo's deep cooperation with Douyin built a brand path with three traffic modules: commercial traffic, public traffic, and private traffic.**
**Commercial traffic** is the platform's paid media, such as splash screens and information feeds. This part serves the role of informing and exposure. It needs concentrated and saturated placement to let as many people as possible know a new product is coming.
**Public traffic** is the KOL traffic within the platform. The important value of this module is native content, helping the brand integrate into platform public opinion. At the same time, KOLs carry brand reputation and scenario-based product displays, allowing audiences to understand product features more intuitively and three-dimensionally.
**Private traffic** is the brand's own traffic pool for sustainable communication with users. External traffic should eventually be guided into private traffic. When entering private traffic, users have already developed strong interest in the product and want to learn more, then decide whether to convert. So, in private traffic, you must manage user expectations and establish the simplest and most direct conversion path.
Three steps, each important. If you don't do the above three steps well, conversion results are out of the question.
**At this point, a path is about to reach its destination.** Why say 'arrive' instead of 'sell'? Not everything ultimately sells for money, or rather, it may not sell at this step. What this step does is sign a contract with the user. After signing, it might be the end, or there might be more roads ahead.
The key at this step is to predict the user's tolerance threshold—the maximum cost they can bear.
At this point, can users accept leaving personal information, pre-ordering, paying a 99 yuan deposit, or directly buying a 3000 yuan phone, or even a car? This is the moment of game between brand and user. If the user's threshold is paying a 99 yuan deposit, then a 0 yuan pre-order would be a loss, and full payment would be an even bigger loss.
Finding the upper limit users can accept is the core of the conversion moment. For example, vivo used a Douyin flash store for free reservations, ultimately reaching a total reservation volume of one million units. To be clear, a phone with over a million reservations is a very, very large number, and it was only on Douyin, a single platform, and only from one communication campaign. Besides online flash store conversion, they also directed traffic to offline stores, since some people still want to hold it in their hands to be assured.
Another important point is that the entire campaign needs very good rhythm control. The timing and content of each segment must be coordinated, and the entire process should be completed in a relatively short time to achieve conversion.
People always lose passion in hesitation. The whole process is about guiding public sentiment to a certain high point and then converting immediately. This is a group army systematic large-scale campaign, testing the project manager's perception of changes in public sentiment.
**Core question:**
The vast majority of marketing practitioners in China lack the ability to fight big battles, spend big money, and operate large traffic, especially in the current internet communication environment. Maybe some have spent large budgets, but was the spending successful and effective?
So the question is: how to finely manage large-scale brand campaigns in the internet communication environment? Today, I've considered one direction.
**Action guide:**
1. **Choose the right platform for concentrated placement.** Regular readers know I previously mentioned 'cognitive dome,' advising scattered placement. Now I'm advising concentrated placement. Is that a slap in the face? No.
Channels are scattered, but users are concentrated. When you target an audience of millions, find the places these users frequently touch and cover multiple touchpoints. But when you target an audience of over 100 million, you can't scatter because when you find that buying 100 million in one channel, even up to 1 billion, you still don't feel it's everywhere.
So concentrate on one mass platform. The dual-micro and one-dou (Weibo, WeChat, Douyin) are currently suitable online platforms. Concentrating on one platform and penetrating it thoroughly is the most effective placement strategy.
2. **Integrate, integrate, integrate.** When a brand focuses all its energy on a single platform, it must not just buy ads. Instead, during this period, integrate the brand into the platform's public opinion environment, becoming topic content within the platform. Integrating the brand into the platform is very important.
Hard ad exposure, KOLs providing PGC scenario displays and guidance, mobilizing UGC to generate content, importing from public traffic to private traffic, and timely and effective conversion. It should be done in one go, without gaps, without rushing, everything just right—this is difficult.
3. **What about multi-platform coordination?** Finally, let's step outside the above logic and framework. For example, variety show sponsorships can only provide exposure, Xiaohongshu focuses on word-of-mouth, Taobao focuses on selling... Can these platforms be combined into a path? Everyone can think about it.
In the future, marketing industry money will likely increase. Spending 10,000 to achieve the effect of 100,000 is not a skill; that's just guerrilla warfare. Those who can spend 100 million and achieve the effect of 100 million, who can manage large-scale brand campaigns, are scarce talents.
Source: 杨不坏 (yangbuhuai01)
Tips will be paid 400-2000 yuan once adopted.
**China FMCG + Internet Professional New Media**
**Dedicated to FMCG manufacturers' transformation, upgrading, and channel digital solutions**


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