In the past year or two, consumer demand for upgraded quality of life has spawned a batch of DTC brands with 'new consumption' attributes in the food and beverage track. These brands mostly feature social direct selling, private domain operations, and other characteristics in their business logic, and often tend to accumulate brand awareness and initial customer base through bidding advertising.

Although many food and beverage DTC brands have similar positioning and business models, their ability to gain ad volume in bidding often varies greatly. Many brands are also beginning to wonder: Is there a so-called innate bidding weakness? Is it possible to predict one's own volume-gaining ability before bidding?

To this end, Tencent Ads has organically combined practical experience with data capabilities to develop a 'pre-assessment' system for brand bidding advertising capability—the 'Volume Self-Check Station'—and combined it with a systematic volume-gaining methodology to help achieve scientific decision-making and full-process scientific guidance for advertising.

Through the bidding capability assessment of the 'Volume Self-Check Station', it was discovered that the emerging tea brand Cha Xiaokong has excellent volume-gaining potential. Subsequently, with the close coordination of Tencent Ads operations, service providers, and the advertiser, and the timely and reasonable use of volume-gaining tools, the brand achieved rapid volume growth even without high market awareness, with daily spending exceeding 100,000 yuan, leaping from a 'novice' brand to a rising star in ad competition.

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Comprehensive Assessment by 'Volume Self-Check Station'

Discovering Bidding 'Potential Stocks'

Previously, people tended to attribute bidding performance to operational factors. However, Tencent Ads has found in long-term practice that a brand's volume-gaining ability depends not only on operations but also on a combination of internal and external factors. Due to the failure to identify and quantify these factors one by one, brands often misjudge their volume-gaining ability, leading to biased attribution of advertising effects and falling into the dilemma of 'mysterious volume gains'.

To break the 'mystery', it is necessary to scientifically classify and evaluate the various factors affecting a brand's volume-gaining ability, hence the 'Volume Self-Check Station' came into being. As Tencent Ads' first bidding potential assessment system for food and beverage DTC brands, the 'Volume Self-Check Station' covers four major dimensions: external competitiveness, enterprise competitiveness, internal driving force, and volume-gaining competitiveness, with a total of 52 quantitative analysis indicators, helping advertisers comprehensively review the brand status related to bidding advertising.

For brands that intend to engage in bidding but have not yet entered the market, the 'Volume Self-Check Station' allows advertisers to comprehensively predict whether they are suitable for bidding and whether they have the conditions to gain volume, thereby avoiding blind entry and wasted costs. Brands already in the market can conduct a thorough review to provide strategic basis for subsequent optimization.

For a single brand, the comprehensiveness of the 'Volume Self-Check Station' enables the brand and marketing platform to avoid subjective amplification of local unfavorable factors and more comprehensively assess the brand's volume-gaining potential. It is this capability that revealed Cha Xiaokong's 'potential stock' nature in the assessment.

As a new brand born in the second half of last year, Cha Xiaokong has room for improvement in brand awareness and market recognition, still needs to accumulate more first-party data, and its bidding advertising is also in its infancy. However, the 'Volume Self-Check Station' assessment found that Cha Xiaokong's business model and audience scale have great development potential, its advertising goals are reasonable, and it has strong execution capability, with excellent overall potential. Therefore, Cha Xiaokong quickly established an efficient joint operation mechanism with Tencent Ads, embarking on the path to becoming a rising star in ad competition.

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Rigorous and Scientific Operations

Joint Operation + Multiple Tools Promote the Rise of a 'New Star'

Cold-start bidding advertising certainly faces many challenges, but with the scientific potential assessment of the Volume Self-Check Station, combined with the systematic operational path that Tencent Ads has integrated from past practical experience, it can help brands fully utilize the potential of the system and data. In this new product launch of Cha Xiaokong, through the efficient execution of tripartite collaboration among Tencent Ads operations, service providers, and Cha Xiaokong, as well as the effective application of volume-gaining capabilities and tools at key stages, rapid volume growth under cold start was ultimately achieved.

1. Rapid Material Iteration Based on Market Insights

Through insights into Cha Xiaokong's category and audience preferences, Tencent Ads provided recommendations for advertising material iteration in the directions of 'scenario-based', 'grass-planting', and 'video-based'. After the launch, Tencent Ads and the advertiser efficiently promoted this iteration strategy, achieving rapid iteration of ad materials and formats within one month of the campaign. Through scenario-based multi-images and high-quality short videos, the ad's volume-gaining ability was enhanced, increasing daily spending by up to 5 times and making CTR 59% higher than the market average.

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2. Timely Activation of Product Advertising Capability, Matching People and Products to Reach Consumer Minds

In Moments ads, placing product-oriented ads and letting products find 'suitable consumers' is key to winning in bidding. Previously, everyone would use first-party data modeling to achieve more precise targeting. To compensate for its weakness in first-party data, Cha Xiaokong quickly enabled the SDPA product advertising tool while relaxing volume limits. This allowed ads to reach more audiences related to the 'tea' category, achieving more precise people-product matching and solving the problem of finding customers during the cold start period for new brands.

Based on the evaluation dimensions of the 'Volume Self-Check Station', Tencent Ads has also extended a 'Bidding Advertising Product Selection Guide' for the food and beverage industry, targeting the two common marketing demands of new consumer brands—'direct purchase' and 'follower acquisition'—to help brands optimize product selection and ad information, thereby achieving better bidding results.

3. Using 'Wormhole' Capability for Asset Reuse to Improve Volume Performance

In addition, Tencent Ads also enabled the 'Wormhole' product for Cha Xiaokong. By replicating stable and converting high-quality plan models, new ads from the brand can quickly enter the volume-gaining track and obtain a longer ad lifecycle, further improving advertising performance.

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Summary and Insights:

Scientific Methodology Guides Bidding Decisions

Due to the existence of upper limits on traffic resources, whether a brand should engage in bidding advertising and how to do so requires more scientific and rational decision-making guidance. This is also the core motivation for Tencent Ads to launch the 'Volume Self-Check Station' and continuously improve the systematic advertising methodology. It helps brands use quantitative assessment tools more in decision-making rather than relying on subjective judgment.

Under a scientific and comprehensive evaluation system, whether a brand's 'starting point' is high or low, and whether it has obvious advantages or weaknesses, are not final verdicts on its volume-gaining ability. Cha Xiaokong's counterattack from a 'novice' to a rising star in ad competition shows that emerging brands can also use bidding advertising as a greenhouse for brand growth and thrive within it.

Recently, the brand self-check version of the 'Volume Self-Check Station' will be officially launched, allowing advertisers to conduct self-assessment and provide credible basis for subsequent decisions. Tencent Ads also hopes to use this assessment tool to work with advertisers to improve brand bidding advertising capabilities and effectiveness.

Once the tip is adopted, a reward of 400-2000 yuan will be paid.