Advertisement in Spring Festival Gala: The moment converging tremendous communication energy

Huang Heshui, Director of the School of Journalism and Communication, Xiamen University

As an important event of marketing communication, the Spring Festival Gala really deserves exploration, study and effective usage. The Spring Festival Gala rivets the vision of all the people in China on the same TV screen, which creates the moment converging tremendous communication energy.

In this way we can further imagine that, if an enterprises’ brand communication is transformed into one of the contents for communication in the Spring Festival Gala, what changes the enterprise brand will undergo.

Firstly, the Spring Festival Gala, an event attracting the attention of millions of people, will also bring the enterprise brand in front of a huge audience. In my view, in China, even if a brand advertisement is inserted into the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games, it may not necessarily produce such effects. From the perspective of communication strategy, for the same purpose of improving popularity, launching advertisement in the Spring Festival Gala is so simple, one only needs to calculate the amount of money being spent, whereas in order to achieve the same effects, adopting other media strategy will be far more complicated, you never know how many media combinations are needed for achieving the same result.

Secondly, a brand able to show up on a stage attracting the attention of millions of people will be no longer a common brand. Brands capable of being displayed on the Spring Festival Gala are often brands with substantial financial strength. Facts have proved that, an enterprise putting up advertisement on the Spring Festival Gala will win the trust of the market, the relation and operation with its upstream and downstream parties of this enterprise will also become smoother. Ascending onto the stage of the Spring Festival Gala is like sending such a signal to the market: This enterprise and brand will experience great transformation this year!

There is vast space of growth for China’s domestic brand, but in the aspect of winning over consumer’s trust, there is still a long way to go. During the process of enterprise growth, it requires the accumulation of many great events in order to establish a towering corporate image in the mind of the public. Launching advertisement in the Spring Festival Gala for once will indeed show off the economic strength of the enterprise, but it is the economic strength for the moment, not permanent strength in the days to come. Even for Coca Cola, the brand with the highest value in the world, dare not easily give up its sponsorship for the Olympic Games. Other world famous brands, such as Adidas, Nike etc, are also like this, they always consistently link themselves up with important events. Therefore, when putting in advertisement in the Spring Festival Gala and some other important communication events, the advertiser must pay attention to continuity.