If you work in marketing, you've likely felt it: since the start of this year, affected by the trade war and market downturn, the internet advertising market has shown signs of fatigue. (Report source: CTR Media Intelligence) According to CTR's '2019 First Half China Advertising Market Review,' the overall Chinese advertising market declined by 8.8% in the first half of this year, with internet advertising revenue down 4.3%, making internet brands cautious about ad spending. Facing a new advertising winter, where should brand marketing go? Is Traditional Advertising Failing? Unlike traditional brands, internet companies have a unique understanding of brand marketing, which is a broader concept than traditional advertising and closer to the product itself. This stems from the current media environment: as media becomes fragmented, people have more entertainment options, their attention is severely dispersed, and they only care about interesting things and people on their preferred platforms. In other words, traditional advertising is no longer the only way for brands to reach users; marketing is evolving toward 'thousands of faces for thousands of people.' Against the backdrop of economic downturn, every company is cautious about advertising expenditure. For marketing departments, KPI is ROI. The biggest fear is launching an ad that cannot quantify input-output or show ROI conversion. This is not to sell marketing anxiety; we also see that some so-called viral ads fail the KPI test. Remember the viral 'What is Peppa?'—it seemed to win both praise and popularity, but in fact, 'Peppa Pig Celebrates Chinese New Year' suffered a box office flop. From the current industry situation, traditional advertising seems to be failing, which troubles both client-side marketing departments and agency practitioners. What can advertising still bring to brands, and how should advertising be done? Under Marketing Anxiety, How to Break the 'Traditional Advertising' Model While some brands are still immersed in traditional advertising models, other industries are using cleverer ways to advertise. For example, in the comic strip field, accounts like GQ Lab and New World X Research Institute create content by grafting current hot topics and memes with advertiser content, as seen in 'XXXX Illustrated' and 'This Generation of Young People...'. They excel at embedding 'Easter eggs' in comics, not hard-selling directly, surprising people with ads. Another example is the short video field, with IPs like Yitiao and Er Geng. Er Geng shares stories of urban white-collar workers pursuing dreams and staying behind, showing care for their emotional lives, winning with warm advertising language. There's also the Douyin account @Miao Bu Ke Yan, incubated by Maoyan Entertainment's MCN platform, which specializes in high-aesthetic native ads, using origami, painting, and other art forms to vividly showcase product features, combining technical flair and visual appeal. It's clear that whether it's comics or short video emerging ads, they are not as serious or aloof as past ads. Instead, they cater to young people's meme culture, tell stories around emotional pain points, or perform based on curiosity, achieving a subtle, transformative effect. Creators focus on approaching users' preferred scenarios and expression styles, making ads increasingly 'native' to users, blending ad content with user interests for better results. If the above comic and short video IPs use innovative content models to cleverly advertise, turning ads from 'hard' to 'soft,' then there are also marketing IPs that focus more on diversified combined methods. For example, in the e-commerce field, I recently noticed Tmall Global's new marketing IP 'Global Eye-Opening Day.' Its brand marketing approach precisely reflects the client-side brand marketing team's adaptive thinking, which is worth exploring. It's said that Tmall Global's Global Eye-Opening Day was launched by the Tmall Global brand marketing team in July this year, and it's the brand's first monthly marketing IP targeting overseas new products and trend items. Out of curiosity, I reviewed Tmall Global's previous marketing actions for Global Eye-Opening Day and found that whether it was July's 'Import Anti-Embarrassment Artifacts' or August's 'Import Baby-Soothing Artifacts,' both started from pain points, shaped trends through scenarios, and mainly used silly ads and topic marketing. But recently, I found that its September back-to-school campaign changed the traditional approach, shifting to KOL-led performances and a combination of multiple marketing methods. From pain-point topic insight setting to precise audience selection, it moves toward greater consumer participation and higher effectiveness, providing new ideas for internet brand marketing. KOL Empowerment in Brand Marketing: Value Far Beyond an Ad If it were the usual back-to-school marketing, the common approach might be for the official brand to shoot a TVC with a back-to-school atmosphere and embed product information. This is marketing driven by a selling mindset, where the ad reaching consumers marks the end of marketing. But Tmall Global's approach is different: it starts with audience insight, analyzes the target audience's preferred expression styles, and then selects matching communication contexts. It's understood that before the project began, the client-side brand marketing team conducted a survey on college student TAs and found that the younger generation has average interest in traditional ads and prefers KOL expression. This made the team think about how to engage in peer dialogue using the language of post-95s and post-00s, based on their information consumption habits. Based on precise research, Tmall Global launched the third Global Eye-Opening Day activity under the theme '#Suddenly Have Hope for the New Semester.' They mobilized KOLs that young people are interested in—led by Xijing Mudan, with front-desk Liu Yiping, Wuli Xiaotongtong, Miaoge singherC, and other drama queen video bloggers—focusing on topics like college dormitories and parties to showcase campus life. They placed products in campus scenarios to establish direct consumption associations, conveying the core IP mindset of 'Imported Eye-Catching Artifacts, Halo Attached to the New Semester,' embedding imported products. After the blogger videos took the lead, the official account followed up with an edited official version, paired with a lucky-draw interactive topic. They also released blogger-same-style video posters, creating a nine-grid image of campus fun facts under #Suddenly Have Hope for the New Semester#. Through UGC social interaction, they attracted attention to back-to-school topics and successfully harvested more UGC. Here, we see the brand using the mindset of 'advertising is content, content is advertising' in marketing, leveraging KOLs that users follow and communicating in their language to achieve lower audience disruption and deeper user engagement. After the initial topic groundwork, the final stage introduced a planting list to convert consumer mindset into purchases. This marketing IP's approach to engaging the target group no longer sticks to the original single model, but leverages third-party KOL influence, scenically embeds activity information and IP mindset, and then aggregates content through official channels for secondary dissemination. It's evident that this is a more systematic and diversified combined marketing IP behavior, integrating brand, KOL, and user UGC resources to achieve a full-funnel marketing loop, efficiently connecting brands to precise audiences—far beyond what a simple ad can do. Such advertising and marketing approaches benefit both consumers and brands. It also proves that advertisers don't necessarily have to force audiences to accept ad information through hard ads. Instead, they can consider audiences' information acceptance habits and expression styles, enrich ad content and methods, and trigger audience attention. To truly resonate between consumers and brand content, and extend the IP's long-tail effect to achieve brand-effect integration, we see a brand becoming more 'pragmatic.' Is the Hard Ad Model Still Valuable? Of course, by reviewing the above phenomena and cases, we can see that from comics, short videos, to e-commerce IPs, diversified innovation is achieving certain results, but this does not completely negate the value of traditional hard ads. After all, the emergence of one advertising model or new marketing IP form does not mean the disappearance of another old marketing form. To be precise, the value of traditional hard ads still exists. But hard ads are only part of marketing; marketers cannot view traditional TV, internet, and other ads as the sum of all marketing. The most direct role of traditional hard ads is to broadcast widely, quickly build brand or product awareness, awaken user needs, and stimulate consumption. For any new product or IP, when it first launches, it is unfamiliar to consumers. At this time, there is an urgent need to build awareness, and choosing hard ads can inform consumers in the most straightforward way. For example, Luckin Coffee, which has been hotly discussed from last year to this year, owes its rise to a hard-ad spending strategy. In the first three quarters of last year, Luckin's ad spending on elevator TV media accounted for 73% of its total ad spend. Leveraging the advantages of elevator ads—'forced viewing + repeated playback'—Luckin successfully educated the coffee market. Therefore, for clients, even as the marketing environment changes, they should not blindly pursue hard or soft ads, but choose based on their product lifecycle, target audience, media characteristics, and marketing goals, appropriately changing communication methods and strengthening and updating their marketing content. Conclusion In short, for internet brands, they should embrace changes in the marketing environment and operate marketing IPs with a boundaryless mindset. Expand creative ad formats and explore more beyond advertising for marketing. Just like the IPs in comics, short videos, and e-commerce, they bridge the dual needs of brand promotion and audience entertainment, fitting user scenarios and pain points to land creativity. The marketing value here is not just ad creativity and conveying brand values, but also creating ultimate experiences for users. Of course, such marketing ultimately must return to the product to use marketing budgets wisely. So what brands and agencies need to do now is how to make ads more cohesive and communicative, and never let ads lag behind marketing progress. Source: Chief Marketing Officer (ID: cmo1967) Tips will be paid 400-2000 yuan once adopted.