Dominates the prime location card slot in the bidding time
Online education advertising wars "virtuous fire"
After the capital surge, chaos appeared, how to find the original intention of education after the "burning money" war
Yangcheng Evening News reporter Shen Zhao
When the programs of the Spring Festival Gala are constantly flooded with advertising slogans such as "learning to think, learning languages", "famous teachers in the front line, and great tricks to solve problems", are you still used to it in front of the TV?
TV festivals target king time dominance, bus stations, subway stations, building elevators and other prime locations have to be locked...In the past 2020, online education companies have become the most important advertising and marketing platforms by virtue of large-scale advertising. Big gold master".
Data provided by a number of digital marketing companies and advertising monitoring agencies show that online education companies’ advertising on various platforms has increased significantly in 2020. Especially in the summer of 2020, the total advertising costs of top K12 online education companies have soared to 60 100 million yuan.
The industry predicts that under the fierce market competition, the “money burning war” in the field of online education will continue in 2021, but behind the bombing of advertisements, issues such as the chaos that online education breeds and how to supervise have also attracted attention.
Ubiquitous marketing Spring Festival stalls bus station building advertisements must be grabbed
"A bus stop has four advertising spaces, three of which are for online education. From time to time, there are buses with online education advertisements passing by." At the end of the year, online education platforms once again set off an advertising war, WeChat Moments, Douyin , TV commercials, subway stations, bus stations, building elevators...In every advertising space in your life, the various advertisements on the online education platform all remind parents of school-age children: "It's time to let your children take lessons online."
Nowadays, almost all popular variety shows, dramas, and movies cannot escape the presence of online education advertisements: the sixth season of "Chinese Poetry Conference" is launched, with an exclusive collaboration with Ape Guidance; "Happy Trio" can see Zebra AI lessons Advertising; "Longing for Life" can see the title of the homework help; "Extreme Challenge" will jump out of the "Famous Teacher Online" in the high-distance classroom; "Classic Yong Chuan" can see Xueersi Online School.
The Spring Festival Gala schedule has also become a marketing arena for online education platforms.
During the Spring Festival Gala this year, the host of CCTV repeatedly verbally broadcasted the advertisements of the Zebra AI class under Yuandao Guidance; Hunan Satellite TV played the advertising songs of the homework help; Tipai became the sole sponsor of the education industry for the B station party.
Not only that, various organizations are competing for users and traffic in the new year through various marketing methods such as knowledge blessing bags, free lessons, and hot searches on Weibo.
Become the third largest advertiser after e-commerce and online game education platforms
In fact, in the past two years, online education companies have always been big advertisers.
According to data from Ping An Securities, in the summer of 2019, the total investment cost of the top K12 online education company was as high as 4 billion yuan, which was quite amazing at the time.
In the summer of 2020, this number soared to 6 billion yuan.
The head platform is even more amazing in terms of advertising.
According to statistics, in the first nine months of 2020, the total investment in advertising and sales of the three ape tutoring, homework help, and Xueersi online school reached about 5.5 billion yuan, more than twice the amount in the same period in 2019.
A person concerned said, “In order to grab traffic and rapidly expand the scale of users, online education has launched a large number of low-cost courses and has become the third largest advertiser on mainstream platforms after e-commerce and games.”
The market scale continues to grow, the industry has raised more than 50 billion in one year
The Yangcheng Evening News reporter noted that 2020 is a year of online education triumph.
The "2020 China K12 Online Education Industry Report" released by iiMedia Consulting last year showed that the online education market will reach 485.8 billion yuan in 2020, and the K12 online education penetration rate will rise to 23.2% in 2020.
IiMedia Consulting analysts believe that the expansion of the online education market is closely related to the expansion of online education users. It is the continuous expansion of online education users and the development of the sinking market that make the online education market continue to grow.
According to the "Statistical Report on China's Internet Development Status" released by the China Internet Network Information Center, as of March 2020, the number of online education users in my country has reached 423 million, accounting for 46.8% of the national Internet users, an increase of 222 million from the end of 2018.
As of June, under the background that offline classes have been resumed, the number of domestic online education users is 381 million, accounting for 40.5% of the total netizens.
According to the data from Tianyan Check, as of October 2020, there are 82,000 new online education companies, which account for 17.3% of the entire education industry.
In 2020, the sudden expansion of the user market and the rapidly cultivated consumption habits have made capital also take a fancy to the development potential of the online education market, and they have lavished money on it.
According to the statistics of the “Dianshubao” of the Net Economics, there were a total of 148 financing incidents for online education in China in 2019, with a total financing amount of 11.56 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 38.3%; in 2020, a total of 111 financing incidents for online education in my country , The total amount exceeds 53.93 billion yuan.
The financing of the top brands is even more one after another: public information shows that Yuandaodao alone has received three rounds of financing in 2020, with a cumulative amount of 3.5 billion US dollars; Job Gang also received a total of 2.35 billion in June and December 2020 USD financing.
Fierce competition has spawned a radical advertising strategy or will continue
Some analysts believe that as the cake of online education is getting bigger and bigger, competition is gradually intensifying. In order to better "enclose the horse and enclosing the land", online education companies intensively put advertisements and become the new "grants" of the advertising industry.
In fact, the high investment of online education companies did not start in 2020, but there is no doubt that under the catalysis of the epidemic, online education in 2020 ushered in the industry-wide investment peak.
In the current fiercely competitive industry environment, online education companies are still in the stage of expanding their income. The industry generally believes that online education companies’ aggressive launch strategies will continue this year.
Judging from the data in the third quarter of 2020 (the third quarter coincides with the summer vacation, K12 online education is the most intense competition for students), in June alone, the online advertising fees of Yuanjiao and Xueersi Online School reached 475 million yuan and 4.18 respectively. 100 million yuan; GSX’s marketing expenses hit a new single-quarter high, reaching 2.056 billion yuan, accounting for more than 100% of total revenue.
Netizens said: With such a deformed proportion, one can't help but question whether the company still has enough budget to invest in the main business of teaching.
Giants lose money, "run away" and continue online education cannot be separated from the essence of education
A reporter from the Yangcheng Evening News noted that in 2020, there will be more new online education companies and more bankruptcies.
The "Statistical Report on China's Internet Development Status" released by the China Internet Network Information Center shows that starting from February 2020, the number of online education companies' cancellations has risen sharply. IT Brothers, Mingxi Chinese, Yousheng Education, Squirrel AI, Xueba Jun and others have successively exposed problems such as difficulty in fund turnover. By June 2020, the highest number of online education companies will be cancelled by 2,116, and news of bankruptcy and runaways is endless.
According to data from the NetEconomics Agency "Dianshubao", there will be 25 online education platforms "death" in 2020.
In fact, in the first year of 2021, the online education industry has been on the hot search for two things: On the one hand, the founder of Xuebajun Zhang Kailei personally issued an article saying that "the Xuebajun who has been running for 8 years has fallen"; on the other hand It is the course announcements and advertisements of 4 companies such as Yuanjiao, Homework Assistant, Gaotu Class and Qingbei Online School. The 4 course recommenders are all advertising actors who claim to be senior teachers.
This "female teacher" described herself as "a math teacher in primary school for a lifetime" in the promotional video of Yuandao Guidance; in the promotional video of Gaotu Classroom, she advertised that she "taught English for more than 30 years"; in the promotional video of Homework Help Li is a live lecturer who is wary of others "the parents themselves may destroy the children"; and in the advertising video of Qingbei Online School, she turned into a senior expert in the industry.
This ad collision incident just exposed the chaos of current online education and the lack of supervision, and the weird advertisement is just a microcosm of the chaos.
Among the top ten consumer rights protection public opinion hotspots released by the China Consumers Association not long ago, online education institutions are on the list.
Industry insiders believe that behind the chaos of online education institutions is the rapid advancement of capital, so that education is getting weaker and capital is getting stronger.
At present, the online education industry giants have suffered huge losses. GSX loses 900 million yuan in a single quarter. For the future, the net loss in fiscal year 2020 is 110 million US dollars, and New Oriental Online has a loss of 758 million yuan in fiscal year 2020.
At present, the industry is still in the money-burning marketing stage, and financing competitions are also underway. It is hoped that the huge financing will not only burn the brand size and popularity, but also the rapid iterative upgrade of product services.
Chen Liteng, an online education analyst at the E-commerce Research Center of the Net Economics, said that online education cannot be separated from the essence of education. The decision-making cycle, use cycle and return cycle of education products are long. Only by creating high-quality teaching content and a complete education system can you The last laugh in the long-distance education race.