Since its introduction, smart TVs have responded to the needs of users in the context of consumer upgrading, with market share climbing all the way up. According to data from China Ecolab, the market share of smart TVs has been increasing year on year since 2014, and has already passed the 90% mark this year, becoming the standard for household users. With the popularity of smart TVs, the OTT market has also reached the eve of an explosion, with this $100 billion market set to explode in the next 1-3 years.
In the OTT sector, although LeRon is a brand that was only established, it inherited the glory of the previous LeTV Super TV at its birth, and the advantages accumulated by LeTV Super TV became the brand accumulation of LeRon. Although in the past period of time, due to some uncontrollable factors, the brand of LeTV system suffered from sudden ups and downs, which made the market once not optimistic about LeTV Big Screen. However, with a series of resources sorting and integration, especially the injection of new blood after the entry of the Sunac Group, new ideas have been opened up for the next development of the LeTV series.
The newly established "LeRong" brand has made an effort in backward operation, breaking the closed ecological system of LeTV in the past, but with an open and integrated mindset, creating a smart home ecosystem with better resources and access to multiple scenes of users' lives. As the OTT market continues to develop, Le Rong, having weathered the storm, will draw strength from its accumulation and lead the OTT big screen marketing.
Connecting to smart home life scenes
Long before the market understood what OTT was, Le Rong was the first to introduce the concept of smart TV and led the OTT market with its first-mover advantage, creating many brand assets that are hard to be surpassed: the first Internet TV brand, the cultivation of the first batch of Internet TV users, 12 million households and 40 million users, and an artisanal spirit. All these assets were inherited without reservation at the beginning of Lerong's establishment and incorporated into the DNA of the Lerong brand, allowing the brand to be ahead of many brands at its birth.
In fact, judging from the market reaction, Le Rong is carrying a burden, and many people believe that the release of the brand "Le Rong" is an attempt to "de-Leshi-ize" the company under the shadow of the former LeTV unlisted system's credibility. Liu Shuqing, CEO of Lerong Group, also admitted that Leshi had gone through a dark moment. But on the other hand, even in the most difficult year, there are still a lot of partners going forward with LeTV, which is enough to prove that LeTV's strategic direction of "big screen + content" is right.
Putting aside the credit impact brought by LeTV's unlisted system, the assets left by LeTV to LeRong are still sufficient for it to occupy a favourable position in the OTT market by integrating resources. Especially when the market share of smart TVs became saturated and OTT competition shifted from front-end entrance capture to backward operation capability, Le Rong was also given a chance to regain the lead.
After the brand launch of LeRong in July 2018, Liu Shuqing, when answering the question of "What is the core capability of LeRong", mentioned that the scene is a very important resource for LeRong. Integrating online and offline resources and connecting users to intelligent life scenes is one of the driving points of LeRong after its establishment.
Based on this goal, LeTV has opened up its hardware, software and system to cover the whole chain of users' family life and penetrate deeply into the family life scene, forming a closed loop of smart home ecology.
At the marketing presentation of LeRong on December 5, Zhang Lei, Vice President of Brand Marketing Centre and Commercial Products of LeRong Group, introduced the efforts made by LeRong in opening up the smart home life scenario: the new EUI8.0 operating system to be released by LeTV will be simplified, and the light weight launcher brings a 25% increase in fluency. On one hand, it allows users to perform more complex operations while maintaining a smooth experience, and on the other hand it ensures a smoother experience and space for advertisers' ads.
Most importantly, LeTV Super TV redefines the concept of smart home. In traditional smart home, commands are uploaded to the cloud through an app and then returned from the cloud to the local area, while Le Rong's smart home uses a Home AI System to achieve "one cloud to control multiple products, one screen to control multiple ends", which has the advantage of security and stability. When the network is disconnected or the signal is weak, you can still control your home devices through the local control centre.
Among them, LeRong has opened up all the service protocols in the cloud across categories and brands, completing the underlying services. Users can choose different brands of home devices according to their own preferences, and can also realise "one screen to control multiple devices".
With the release of the operating system, users with a Super TV will have an intelligent home control system and a complete solution to control their home's door locks, curtains, lights, etc. through the Super TV screen. For advertisers, this means that they can extend to users' life scenarios through the LeTV Super TV screen and do in-depth communication and interaction with them. At present, LeTV TV has connected more than a hundred categories and a thousand brands, which means that through a super screen almost covers the whole scene of users' offline life, forming a smart home ecological closed loop.
In addition to the hardware and operating system level, the next step is the content level. LeTV TV is linked to Tencent, Mango, Huadu TV, CIBN and Super TV content, so that quality content can be fully aggregated on LeRong Super TV to better serve users and meet their diversified needs for content. After linking the five major content platforms, the content of LeRon Super TV has skyrocketed to three times its original size, which a person can't finish watching for 27 years continuously. The rich, high-quality content resources serve users well while also providing more opportunities for brands to reach and influence them.
In the past, in the LeTV ecology, from hardware, software, system and then content, it was all owned by LeTV, which is a closed ecosystem. The riskiness of this model lies in the inability to leverage the quality resources, talents and products in different industries to form a mutually empowering and dynamic circle of positive operation. Now Le Rong has also seen the drawbacks of the past LeTV model, and has taken an open mind to absorb quality resources from outside to form an ecology that can truly generate chemical reactions.
From flow thinking to family relationship thinking
Traditional marketing is based on flow thinking, but when the market penetration of smart TV tends to saturate, it will enter the stock market, the core of the stock market, is the operation of the stock of users.
Users will show some new characteristics in the smart home environment. Huizhao, Vice President of Operations of Le Rong Group, shared a set of user data: Le Rong's core users cover the more economically developed regions of northern, eastern and southern China, of which about 76.99% have opened the children's channel and 80% have used voice search, of which 40% are men and 50% are mostly women.
Based on this insight, Le Rong has shifted from the flow thinking in the past to family relationship thinking, and based on this, it has formed three modes, namely, "Enjoy Yourself, Parent-Child and Respect Elders", to reach different families through different contents.
For example, when a user enters the "YUEYI" mode, they will see some of the top movies, TV series, variety shows and animation content. The YueHui section is divided into several sections: VOD, rotation, 4K, app shop and shopping, of which VOD is a vertical channel with super high user stickiness and direct access to rotation on boot, which is the first traffic entrance to the super large screen; 4K pore-level definition to create the ultimate viewing experience; app shop to manage, distribute and co-op push quality apps; and video-based shopping to break the traditional graphic shopping and improve consumers' decision-making power.
The content of YUEYI model also covers current young people's favorite movies, hit dramas and classic movies, covering 60% of the entire theatrical movies, including 83% of movies with box office over 100 million, achieving full coverage for movies with top 20 box office; coverage of hit dramas and variety shows reached 70% in 2018, with S-grade and A-grade dramas accounting for 50% of the total; classic movies have 30,000+ movies and 350000+ dramas.
Parenting is the key segment for LeTV in 2019, with content in three main categories: firstly, entertainment content such as animation; secondly, Fun Education, which cultivates good study habits in children, as well as nature, art, thinking and science; and thirdly, fragmented parenting content for parents to watch, in order to enhance the quality of parent-child interaction, while expanding the circle of parent-child consumption.
Based on the insight of the elderly, we also provide content for the elderly in four dimensions: drama, health, hobbies and social life, for example, in the drama section, the content is mainly anti-war films, drama films and countryside films; health includes Tai Chi, yoga, health care and wellness; hobbies also focus on the most popular among the elderly The hobbies also include the most common social activities for the elderly, such as square dancing, fishing, chess and cards and dating. The social networking activities include square dancing, fishing, chess and cards, and dating. The design is also flat to make the content more accessible to the elderly.
Behind this family relationship minute operation mindset is the support of the Stargazer system. The Stargazing System is LeTV's AI intelligent algorithm platform, which reads and calculates data from the backend and sets rules for activation. It defines users from nine dimensions and more than 2,000 tags, and departs when they reach certain rules to precisely segment users in front of the TV, thus enabling content to be delivered accurately.
With the help of the Stargazing system, Super TV has an in-depth understanding of a household and can help advertisers understand the specific preferences of their users and then target them when delivering.
OTT empowers advertisers
Having done the groundwork and met the diverse needs of users for content, LeTV Super TV can bring a lot of imagination to advertisers within a complete OTT closed loop.
This OTT closed loop reaches into multiple scenes of users' lives and can provide strong coverage of users through on/off advertising and living room magazines, as well as high exposure and interactive advertising display through global pop-ups, skin changing, desktop Crazy, brand desktop and brand zone advertising resources; at the same time, the content provided around the family relationship model can give rise to more commercial cooperation possibilities.
Take a children's brand as an example, its core communication audience has two main dimensions: children as product experiencers and parents as product purchase decision makers. So how does the brand communicate and interact with these two groups to influence and convert them?
The LeTV Super TV Kids Desktop covers more than 4 million children's households, and 84% of the clicks on children's content on the Super TV side come through the Kids Desktop, so the solution developed by LeTV Super TV is to provide children with encyclopedic knowledge content on the Kids Desktop and interact with them through some knowledge-based mini-games.
In this process, the branded elements also naturally engage and interact with children, and it works better because it is very relevant to the needs of the users.
For example, every night, the brand pushes the weather forecast to the users and includes some practical tips according to the weather conditions, such as "In a hazy day, the nose is the first line of defence to prevent the haze from invading the body, remember to clean the baby's nasal cavity to prevent illness", etc. This kind of warm-hearted communication makes the brand three-dimensional and warm. This warm-hearted communication made the brand three-dimensional and warm, enhancing parents' goodwill towards the brand.
LeTV Super TV OTT big screen marketing not only provides brands with full-chain placement coverage and penetrates deeply into users' life scenarios, but also its latest industry's first buy-while-you-watch big screen one-click purchase advertising product launched together with Nielsen, which can be said to have solved the problem of the last link in the user's purchase journey, when brand advertising finds the right person in the right scene, so that he can directly operate the remote control in his hands to three steps to complete the purchase, thus shortening the distance between advertising and conversion.
For advertisers, effectiveness is key when it comes to big screen advertising. LeTV Super TV is the first smart TV vendor to dock its SDK with a third party. Through cooperation with third-party partners including Nielsen, LeTV Super TV realises the full amount of SDK monitoring, the basic monitoring data is open and transparent, providing reliable and quantifiable guarantee for backward operation, and also restoring the value of OTT marketing.
The strong correlation between categories, geography, family structure and content has gradually emerged through continuous testing of many categories and different content adaptations, especially the strong influence of interactive advertising on large family screens in mother and child, household, automotive, financial products and other family decision-making products, with the highest reach interaction conversion rate reaching 6.9%.
In the next 2-3 years, as the value of OTT marketing explodes, LeTV Super TV will be the first to unleash its accumulated energy with its first-mover advantage, open-mindedness and integration of resources to lead the $100 billion OTT market.