During the Chinese New Year, a friend told me he sold 20 million yuan through livestreaming, but after calculating, he lost 2 million. He asked me for a solution. I said his product was essentially a white-label product with no brand awareness and no pricing power. Expecting to turn things around through livestreaming is like trying to build a second floor before the first floor is even completed. From selling products to selling brands, from selling functional use to selling brand premium, there is never a shortcut like the Great Leap Forward. Because while the internet accelerates the speed of information dissemination, the process of human cognition has not evolved. It still requires going from awareness to familiarity to affection, and in between lies a key element: time. And it's a constant cycle. The essence of boosting sales is to continuously increase exposure within a fixed period, constantly let consumers come into contact with your product, and continuously enhance familiarity. Later, I met several brand clients who were gradually growing. They didn't immediately ask me to connect them with livestream resources. When asked about their brand marketing path, they summarized it in seven characters: "双微一抖一分众" (Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, and Focus Media). This is understandable: four channels for brand exposure, and with exposure comes premium; otherwise, no matter how much you sell, you'll still lose money. 双微 (Two Micro): Weibo and WeChat. WeChat nurtures fans, Weibo attracts fans. 一抖 (One Douyin): Douyin, where data explodes. 双微一抖 is often the basic skill for a company growing from small to medium. So how do you play "一分众" (One Focus Media)? What position does it hold in brand communication? What role does it play? How do you invest? How do you calculate ROI? These are questions many small and medium brands still haven't figured out. Today, I'll break down my experience with "一分众" and hope everyone can double their results in brand communication. First, Focus Media can be said to be a treasure media for precision advertising!

  1. Focus Media's environment is a pure information channel. In the closed scenario of the elevator in the building you pass every day, there is almost no other information interference, making it easy for people to be attracted to ads. If there's a girl next to you, you can't stare at her, so you have to look at the ad to avoid awkwardness. I think the elevator might be one of the few scenarios where people actively look at ads, so this channel of Focus Media's elevator media seems simple but is actually very powerful. Unlike feed ads, where the quality of content you scroll up and down directly affects the effectiveness of the ad placement. For example, I just scrolled to a funny joke, and then an ad pops up saying "What to do if your child doesn't eat?" and my good mood is instantly ruined.
  2. Based on housing prices, surrounding industries, resident demographics, and purchasing needs, building ads are very precise. For example, school district housing, old residential areas, industrial clusters, etc. This is even more accurate than internet big data. When I lived in a new residential area, the ads I saw every day were either for whole-house customization or furniture and showerheads, because the whole building was under renovation. The precision is unmatched. After Alibaba invested in Focus Media, through big data, the categories most purchased in each residential or office building are known, and the consumption demand tags of the building's occupants are connected. Moreover, after investing in Focus Media, the people in those buildings who saw the ads will be precisely retargeted to your Tmall Data Bank, and you can retarget them on Taobao!
  3. Since Focus Media's building ads are a fixed, high-frequency medium, people see them every morning and evening when they go out and come back, so repeated exposure is effective. When a brand repeatedly reaches consumers, it can establish more connections and have more opportunities. Moreover, the information can be larger; many brand stories or product selling points can be explained more clearly and in detail, and ad content can have a sense of series. I once saw a brand's full product line rotate exposure in an elevator, like watching a TV series.
  4. As China's largest brand media, Focus Media almost reaches every household. Users have seen it for years; during work hours in office buildings, it shows energizing and motivating ads, and when they come home in the elevator, they see relaxing and warm content, subtly understanding the brand and being planted with the product. It can be said that Focus Media influences the lifestyle and consumption habits of nearly 300 to 400 million urban people in China. To summarize: Focus Media's characteristics are stable performance, strong certainty, and precise targeting. But it also tests brands a lot. This channel is not a stimulant, nor a hot girl, but it is the wife of brand success. To master the power of Focus Media, you need to incorporate it into brand building and invest continuously to enjoy the compound interest of time. In this process, brands need to do several linkages: 1. Positioning Linkage: Positioning must be clear. For example, BOSS Zhipin: the slogan "Talk directly to the boss" speaks the minds of many job seekers who feel their talents are buried by HR. It immediately stood out from many similar recruitment websites. Another example is Guazi Used Cars: "No middleman to take a cut, buyers spend less, sellers earn more," which hits the heart directly. Such clear and intuitive positioning, placed at the entrance of office building elevators, repeated for two weeks, and everyone remembers it. Those who see it will tell those who need it, and word-of-mouth is achieved. Positioning creativity is an old topic, but few do it well. Most brands still can't summarize their advantages in one sentence, or they think they've made it clear, but consumers are left with question marks. I'll write a separate article on how to do positioning creativity well. 2. Time Linkage: It's not that there's no retribution; the time hasn't come. Products that are produced today and sell out tomorrow only existed in the last century. Even Tesla, a groundbreaking product, had to be nurtured for several years before becoming a hit. What you often see is hindsight. You see others become Tmall's annual bestseller or earn over 1 billion a year, but how long they've been dormant and how many exposure lessons they've done are easily overlooked because it's not exciting. To focus on a brand's success, you need to look at what homework it did during its growth period. Feihe had such good brand awareness, but it invested in Focus Media for 8 months, covering hundreds of thousands of office buildings and residential areas across the country, before a turning point appeared and a big explosion came. After achieving some success in internet seeding, Yuanqi Forest (Genki Forest) continued to advertise offline through Focus Media for five consecutive months, firmly occupying more consumer minds and becoming the category leader in sugar-free sparkling water. This may be the hardest part for all brands: money is spent day by day, like simmering beef brisket over low heat, but behind it, familiarity, trust, and favorability are accumulating day by day, yet sales don't seem to change much. It's like making friends; true feelings come from daily accumulation, and only then do long-term business opportunities arise. 3. Firepower Linkage: Strike when the time is right From the previous winter and summer promotions and mid-year promotions to the current 38, 618, and Double 11, every major time node must concentrate firepower. Sprinkling pepper often gets you nothing. In March, spring clothing changes; in May, 517 ("I want to eat"); in September, education brands should bombard; at the end of the year, a grand gift box for returning home in glory should be matched. At these times, Focus Media placements should not be for brand ads but for new product launches or promotions, with ad copy full of driving language: "Come buy, go order, download now, what are you waiting for?" Use passionate phrases together! 4. Identity Linkage: Continuously Break Circles In advertising theory, there's something called "similarity bias," similar to old newspaper ads that said "The 1 millionth car owner is born" or "The trust of 100,000 mothers." That is, when you're walking sideways in the e-commerce circle, don't forget to tell more people outside the circle. Xiaoxian Dun's Focus Media ad said "Leading sales for four consecutive years." For those who have bought, it confirms their choice was right; for those who don't know, it makes them think, "Wow, there's such a brand? Endorsed by Zhang Ziyi, and it's been the sales champion for four years? I'll try it too." Yuanqi Forest not only talks about zero sugar, zero fat, and zero calories but also being the Tmall beverage sales champion. The reason is the same: with billions in online sales as a foundation, it's attacking traditional channels worth tens of billions, so it needs to expose itself in the real world beyond the phone first to build social consensus. So recently, you'll see many internet-famous products particularly keen on investing in Focus Media. The logic is to break circles and seek incremental growth. When the ROI of internet advertising reaches its peak, there are still four-fifths of consumers spending offline. The breakthrough for this part starts with Focus Media ads, transforming from internet-famous brands to public brands. 5. Distribution and Ground Promotion Linkage: Don't let people see it but not be able to buy it If you invest well in Focus Media ads but people can't find it when they search on their phones, that won't work. If the distribution in the surrounding areas isn't in place, that won't work either. If the supporting services can't keep up, that's even worse. Feihe has a consumer education team of over 3,000 people and about 90,000 promoters. Huaxizi has Li Jiaqi's livestream to harvest and create more experiences. Perfect Diary has Douyin plus private domain traffic. These are all combination punches. After brand ads are launched, consumers will search online, so social seeding must be coordinated, and then traffic conversion must be done to quickly turn brand power into purchasing power. Summary: There's so much to write about "一分众" because when you know who's in the building and you can accompany them every day without anyone grabbing the microphone, you really want to make the most of it. In an era of noisy and involutionary internet advertising, Focus Media's media environment brings certainty to ad communication. If you just want to sell goods and are immersed in the quick conversion of livestreaming, that's a one-off deal with no loyalty, no repurchase, only low prices to attract customers, and then you pack up and leave. If you want to build a brand, don't come with the attitude of grabbing money from others' pockets. Consumers aren't stupid; they can see through it. Understand them, solve their problems, provide better choices, and let them gain practical value and psychological comfort. Without brand seeding and content planting, it's unrealistic to expect direct sales. Always remember the definition of a brand: a set of unique benefits, services, and reasons that a seller provides to buyers over the long term. If your tip is adopted, you'll be paid 400-2000 yuan.