To a certain extent, short video marketing is the epitome of the current surge in digital marketing.
Editor’s note: This article from the public micro-channel number ” Advertising PDA “(ID: guanggaoshouzhang) , author: WalterK.
One-time job change, triple salary increase
“Too fierce.”
When asked to what extent short video marketing is now developing, Yao Jie blurted out these three words.
Yao Jie is a senior executive of Today Internet Information Technology Co., Ltd. Even if the company is located in a second-tier city like Hefei, he still experienced the shock of short video marketing since last year. Today Internet is a regional advertising service provider focusing on serving the local market of Anhui, established in March 2016.
The company’s founder Chen Hao originally worked in the advertising department of a local newspaper group. Under the impact of the new media, the traditional media advertising business inevitably began to shrink, which gave him the idea of starting a business.
On an occasional occasion, he learned about the mode of information distribution through intelligent recommendation and was confident about the future of this mode. Returning from Beijing to Anhui, Chen Hao established Today Internet, and started to be the regional advertising agency for today’s headlines in Anhui.
“The pace is still slow and should be more aggressive.” Looking back at the company’s layout rhythm in short video marketing, Yao Jie’s tone still revealed some annoyance. In fact, his actions are not too slow-he started to establish a short video team two years ago, and quickly promoted the team’s major transformation last year. The focus of the transformation is to bet on short video marketing.
The determination to transform stems from the turbulence that is evident at the market level. Yao Jie’s “too fierce” is reflected in at least two levels: not only are users increasingly interested in short videos, but also advertisers are short-sightedFrequent enthusiasm.
From the perspective of company management, the fierceness of the industry is directly reflected in the fierce competition for talent. Suddenly expanding market demand is forcing companies to quickly expand their teams, which has led to instances of mutual digging at high salaries. Taking Internet Today as an example, the initial size of the short video marketing team was less than 10 people. In less than two years, it has now quadrupled to 45 people.
“Employees who work for a year or two can jump a job and their salary can increase by 30%, or even double,” Yao Jie said.
At the moment, he found that most of the employees in the company’s short video team are fresh faces, which means that the turnover rate is between 50% and 60%.
30% salary increase in a job change, which is still a relatively conservative level in the industry. If we move our sights from second-tier cities like Hefei to the north, north, east, and south, as these regions gather more short video marketing service providers, the competition for talent is even more intense.
Zhang Bing, the founder of Colorful Interactive, led the team to enter the field of short video marketing in November 2018. As this market becomes more and more prosperous, the staff of the video production department also expands synchronously-only 50 people in early 2019 By the end of the year, it will reach 100 people; the current team size has reached 150 people. According to his plan, the company’s internal personnel engaged in short video production will be expanded to 200 people by the end of the year.
Case of short video marketing displayed on the colorful interactive official website
Faced with the overall pressure of the advertising market, Zhang Bing’s confidence in the short video has not been compromised.
But the nearly uncontrollable competition for talent also made Zhang Bing feel a little angry. He used “chaos” to describe the fierce competition for talent. “The market is crazy,” he said. “In extreme cases, it is not a problem to triple the salary after being cornered. Some companies even promise to give more than hundreds of thousands or even millions of annual salary to the employees who have switched jobs.”
When Zhang Bing expanded his team, he received a lot of resumes that surprised him. For example, a job applicant jumped three times within a year, and without a job interview, he entered the job directly, and his salary was adjusted every time. 30% to 40%.
I don’t agree with the madness of the industry, but must also adapt to the environment. The short video marketing bonus is clearly visibleUnder the condition of the state, the pace of recruitment cannot be stopped. Zhang Bing admitted that 20% of the company’s talents now come from competing companies, and all he can do is give a relatively reasonable salary.
2. ” Was it poached? It’s a pity”
“Nobody”, Yu Xianghua, CEO of Juxing Media, encountered similar confusion when expanding its short video marketing business.
Juxing is a company founded in 2011. Since the background of the team is all from the traditional radio and television system, “big video” has become the main direction of Juxing.
At the earliest, Juxing’s main business is integrated marketing with online video advertising as its core. Entering the field of short video marketing began in the second half of 2017, and the current short video team has reached a scale of 200 to 300 people. Yu Xianghua admits that the fierce competition for talents has become a common problem in the industry, and there are often cases in which the monthly salary directly changes from 8,000 yuan to 16,000 yuan after he changes jobs.
Although affected by the external environment, the expansion of the company’s short video team will slow down this year, but it will also maintain a steady pace of entering seven or eight people every month. Even so, hiring the right employees has become a big problem.
“Professional, reliable and able to work under pressure, the entire industry is lacking,” Yu Xianghua said.
As the general manager of the effect channel business department of the massive engine, Jiang Liang has a more intuitive understanding of the phenomenon of short video marketing talents. The most extreme case he has learned is that the salary of a short video marketer jumped from 8,000 yuan to 45,000 yuan directly after switching jobs, which means that the salary has nearly doubled.
The reason for this increase is the “explosion” just made. When chatting with the former owner of this employee, the other party stated bluntly that “it’s not a shame to be poached, because I know it’s worth the price.”
Similar examples have been staged repeatedly in the industry since 2018. However, after many young practitioners were poached by high salaries, their career development path has not been smooth.
It is often the case that after working for a few months in the next company, the ability cannot support the high salary, and the result is either a salary reduction or a departure. But “it is easy to go from frugal to extravagant, but hard to go from extravagant to frugal.” After enjoying high salaries, people are already reluctant to lower their salaries. In the end, they can only choose to start their own businesses or be forced to leave the short video marketing track.
According to the calculation of Yu Jienan, the head of a large number of universities, the short-term video marketing talent gap in China is conservatively estimated at hundreds of thousands, and may even reach the order of one million. And this huge talent gap is superimposedThe rapid growth of the market has triggered an industry average liquidity rate of 40% to 50%.
However, the abnormally high turnover rate is the biggest enemy of the company’s stable operation.
Right now, many service providers must invest a lot of energy and cost to cultivate optimized talents internally. For example, about 30% of the colorful interactive short video marketing team are fresh graduates.
After cultivating for a period of time within the company, employees’ business capabilities have gradually matured. At this time, if employees take over the olive branch thrown by other companies through high salaries, it means that the investment previously invested by the company to train employees has become a “sinking cost” that can not produce any benefits. This is obviously unbearable for short video marketing companies. The weight.
Yao Jie, who is connected today, shares this. Although the company’s business scope is limited to Anhui, the employees who have worked for one or two years are placed in the local talent market, and they can immediately become competitors. Sweet and sour.”
Training of talents must be done, and it is possible to make wedding dresses for others, which has become an unavoidable problem for service providers.
3.Talent “Stall”
Stall is a proper term for the aviation industry-when the aircraft climbs too fast, it will make the lift less than gravity, and eventually cause a rapid fall. This phenomenon, known as stalling, is the main cause of many aviation accidents in history. At present, the general shortage of talent in the short video marketing industry implies a similar risk.
So, can the current talent supply keep up with the explosion of short video marketing?
In fact, the multiplied market is attractive enough for all individuals in it. For short video marketing, the time point for the market to appear attractive is in 2019.
“Starting in the second half of 2017, trying in 2018, and breaking out in 2019,” Yu Xianghua of Juxing Media described the development trajectory of the short video business. Similar to him, the colorful interactive Zhang Bing and today’s connected Yao Jie also mentioned that the industry has ushered in an explosive growth period in 2019.
The revenue of Juxing Media’s short video business module reached 270 million in 2017 and increased to 470 million in 2018, but by 2019, this value was quickly refreshed to 2.9 billion.
On the colorful interactive ledger, the contribution of short videos to the company can even be refined to update in quarters-only a few million in the fourth quarter of 2018, and the four quarters in 2019 are 60 million, 230 million, 460 million and 900 million;When the time entered 2020, Q1’s single-quarter revenue has increased to 1.1 billion.
According to Zhang Bing’s estimation of the company’s business, Colorful Interactive’s revenue will reach 8 billion this year, and the contribution of short video will exceed 50%.
As a regional service provider, short video is becoming more and more powerful in today’s Internet revenue landscape. When we first entered the short video marketing market, this business accounted for only 20% of the company’s revenue; from 2018 to 2019, the short video revenue of Internet Today has doubled, and the current share of the overall revenue has reached Fifty percent.
“In the future, the income structure should be adjusted to the original proportion, that is, the short video business will account for 80% or 90%,” Yao Jie said. The income structure will be subverted in two to three years.
An ever-changing law is that changes in the advertising market always follow the flow of user attention resources. In other words, where the user’s attention flows, the advertiser’s advertising costs tend to be inclined.
According to a report released by Internet data research organization QuestMobile: in September 2019, the monthly per capita user usage of short videos was 269.5 minutes, a year-on-year increase of 22.1%, among all sub-sectors with more than 50 million monthly active users Ranked first; and in terms of total usage time increment, the advantage of short video is more significant, with 64.1% accounting for much higher than the second-ranked integrated e-commerce (7.8%).
This trend has also continued in the next six months. According to the statistical results in March 2020, the total usage time of short video users reached 13.137 billion hours, again ranking first in all industries. At the same time, the year-on-year growth rate remained steady at 80%.
The size and duration of short video users have increased significantly during the Spring Festival this year (source: QuestMobile)
The concentration of attention to the short video track, for the platform side, means a sharp expansion of advertising inventory, which in the eyes of advertisers has become The opportunity to grab traffic dividends has contributed to the explosion of short video marketing in 2019. But the dark side of the hot image is the lack of talent supply, and this contrast has also led to frequent chaos in talent competition.
“On the one hand, the development is too fast, so there is a shortage of talents; on the other hand, the lagging education leads to the scarcity of professional talents.”The cause of the fault.
The same is true. In addition to the occasional short video-related courses offered by some vocational colleges, the potential of colleges and universities in the supply of short video talents has not yet been fully tapped. And feedback on business operations, service providers have been coping with such severe challenges throughout.
Yu Xianghua clearly remembered that he had recruited many optimizers when he first entered the short video field, but he was disappointed that many optimizers lacked the most basic professional and systematic knowledge of advertising marketing and market communication. The company must reorganize the training itself and improve the quality of its employees.
The expansion of the talent supply is far behind the market’s dramatic pace of development, which has choked the throat of further development of short video marketing.
4.Entering the square does not mean that it can be heard< /h2>
Behind the scarcity of short video marketing talents, there is an obvious paradox: the scale of creators active on major short video platforms is actually not small, then why there are as many as one hundred in the feedback of short video marketing Ten thousand talent gap?
“There are too many people in the square and it is very lively. Why? Because there is no door, it is easy to enter,” said Dong Dongqiang, the head of the huge engine marketing creative center. “But entering the square does not mean you will be heard.
Dongdong Gun is a senior advertiser who joined Ogilvy & Mather as a copywriter in 2006; in 2018, Dongdong Gun moved to an Internet advertising platform. Due to the combined experience of traditional advertising companies and technology companies, he has his own views on the situation of advertisers in different environments.
In his view, under the organizational structure of the traditional advertising communications group, the two departments of media and creativity have been independent of each other in the past 20 years, which has caused many creative people to look like “drivers who only drive and do not look at the road.” .
Perhaps in the past, relying solely on personal experience was enough to wander through advertising rivers and lakes; but in the face of the increasingly complex advertising ecology, individual experience sometimes appears weak. After entering the Internet technology company, it opened up a whole new field and complemented the knowledge map. This is a big gain after Dongdong Gun believes that it crosses the border.
According to Zhang Bing, the founder of Colorful Interactive, the sudden rise of short videos is an “unmanned zone” for all practitioners. There is no existing experience for reference, so that when looking for talents, companies simply regard whether they have produced explosive funds as the only measure.
But the problem is that the explosion is the result of a combination of uncertainties. The obsession with explosive models has caused a disruption of market standards, which in turn has promoted the vicious competition of high-paying digging walls and other intensified competition. Ultimately, it is the sustainable and healthy development of the entire ecology.
How to complement your careerThe ability of the person is also the direction of Yu Jienan, the head of a large number of universities, trying to solve the shortcomings of short video marketing talents.
In the huge amount of engines, the earliest certification system is related to information flow advertising, and now Yu Jienan is leading a team to promote the creative marketing certification service system. This new certification system anchors short video marketing. After visiting dozens of service providers in first- and second-tier cities, the team built a creative marketing talent capability model centered on short video in February this year.
This model is divided into two stages of junior and senior advertising creative artists, covering multiple links from demand insight, creative planning, creative conception, video shooting, post-editing, and human performance management.
Sophisticated competencies required for short video marketing talents (Source: Huge amount of universities)
In the long run, this model is not only a clue for practitioners to improve their comprehensive capabilities, but it will also become the industry standard for companies to select short video talents. The establishment of the standard is expected to make the competition of talents that tend to be disordered orderly, and allow the short video marketing ecology to develop towards a benign development.
Before the certification system was officially launched, Yu Jienan selected some cooperative service providers for preliminary verification. Many service providers have found that this system can solve many of their problems in talent training, because it really boosts the overall strength of short video marketers.
From the establishment of the project at the end of 2019 to the launch of the curriculum and certification system in May this year, even though the huge number of engines have accelerated the pace of research and development, and delivered a complete solution to the industry within half a year. But for Yao Jie, who is in Hefei, the certification system is still “too slow.”
“It should be done in 2019”, Yao Jie said.
This also shows that the agency companies have an urgent expectation to establish industry standards in the competition of talent competition. For third-party service providers, the courses and certification system created by the platform saves the cost of independently training talents within the company in a higher quality way. They look forward to the gradual alleviation of the lack of talent supply under this certification system.
5. Creative mutation
However, creativeCan the ability be trained?
The philosopher David Hume once said: “The pursuit of true beauty, or true flaws, is like determining true sweetness or true suffering. It is a fruitless investigation.”
Specifically, in the long development process of advertising, the debate about whether advertising is science or art runs through. The subtext hidden behind this debate is actually whether high-quality creativity comes from standardized and refined research or the artist’s brilliance.
However, the meaning of “creative” has undergone a sudden change between two distinct modes of operation, traditional advertising and digital advertising. Taking colorful interaction as an example, the short video marketing team of 150 people needs to produce more than 100 high-quality materials every day; the output efficiency of Juxing Media is similar, and the team of two or three hundred people can produce as many videos as possible each day. 300 to 400.
This is very different from the previous advertising and marketing industry.
Hot spot migration is becoming more frequent, and information competition is becoming more fierce. The rapid changes in the external environment are forcing the production cycle of advertising ideas to be shortened significantly. According to a survey data released in February this year: Two years ago, the running cycle of an excellent idea could reach 30 days, and later it quickly reduced to 15 and 7 days.
Right now, a single high-quality idea is not able to bring in new traffic after only 3 days, which means companies need to put in new ideas. Obviously, such output efficiency cannot be imagined in the era of traditional media.
The output cycle of advertising creatives in the new media environment is greatly compressed
According to Yu Xianghua’s previous work experience in TV stations, a video often takes two months from preparation to finalization, with the high work intensity of the short video marketing team right now It can be called “two worlds”. The mass production of materials is more driven by the needs of advertisers-“some advertisers require at least three versions of material a day,” Yu Xianghua said.
For advertisers, the high consumption of short video content by users makes a TVC routine that no longer works. To continue to attract consumers, you need to provide new content experiences faster, and as a result, the rate of creative output begins to become faster and faster.
The high-output efficiency-oriented nature is naturally a different understanding of “creative”-for example, “golden 5 seconds” has become the basic theory of short video marketing, which refers to the need for advertising to form a suction within 5 seconds.Gravity, otherwise there is a risk of being swiped off the screen by the user.
Yao Jie’s team has many employees who have switched jobs from TV stations. Just “Golden 5 seconds” requires them to adapt hard. “They used to pay attention to the transition when they made the video, but how can they be laid out in the short video scene? It takes a lot of effort to get them used to seeing the truth,” he said.
Similarly, the video is short, and the long video is already “interlaced like mountains”.
There are routines for short video marketing creativity. In addition to the “golden 5 seconds” at the beginning and conversion guidance information at the end, it also includes the need to clearly show in the middle of the short video which pain points the product can meet consumers. In addition, quoting some popular BGM or Duanzi of Douyin is also a trick to increase advertising consumption and conversion rate.
Since it’s a routine, there are rules behind it, which is something almost everyone agrees on. From Dongdong Gun, Yu Xianghua to Zhang Bing, they all believe that 70% to 80% of creative ability can be tempered through standardized training, and the remaining 20% to 30% is related to the talent and understanding of the creative person.
“Both Picasso and ordinary painters have the ability to paint, and whether they can be tested by Picasso is their personal ability,” Dongdong Gun said metaphorically.
But the competition around short video marketing is far from the stage of fighting for talent. If you can mobilize the ability that 70% to 80% can standardize training, it can already greatly improve the current short video marketing effect.
In the past year, Dongdong Gun sees from the platform performance data that after the creative team intervenes, the creative level of information flow advertising is significantly improved, which is enough to confirm that the basic creative ability can be systematically and modularly. Be cultivated.
In any case, short video marketing at the crossroads is currently in a complex situation, and it needs to face both opportunities and challenges.
On the one hand, short videos have a strong ability to aggregate consumer attention resources, and this ability has attracted a large number of advertisers in a short time and expanded a huge blue ocean; but at the same time, Insufficient talent supply makes the competition among service providers tend to be disordered and crazy. In the long run, this will not only bring considerable operational pressure to service providers, but also have a potential negative impact on the sustainable development of the entire ecosystem.
At present, the increasingly fierce conflict between the short video boom and the shortage of talent is in fact the epitome of the rapid development of the entire digital marketing industry that is constantly testing back and forth between dividends and risks.
“Like many people now know that live broadcasting is a trend, but they also understand that entering too early may be a dead end,” Yao Jie said.