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Digital age sparks buzz around e-hongbao
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NOT even an event as steeped in ancient tradition as Spring Festival can withstand the onslaught of the modern digital age. Welcome to the year of the e-sheep.
Internet giants such as Alipay, Tencent and Sina muscled their way into the time-honored custom of hongbao by developing virtual variations.
Hongbao, the red envelope filled with “lucky money” that older family members give youngsters during the holiday, is meant to convey greetings for a prosperous New Year. One thing is certain. Internet companies and advertisers helped their own good fortunes by adapting tradition to the cyber realm.
The industry question now remains: Who will be the bellwether of the new trend in this Year of the Sheep?
“The Chinese New Year gave existing small-sum transactions on WeChat, Alipay and Weibo a makeover,” Shanghai-based social media consultancy CIC said in a recent research note. “All of them successfully exploited the frequent and spontaneous conversations and interactions between users on smartphones.”
Though the holiday is now over, the buzz generated by e-hongbao and other Spring Festival virtual gimmicks lives on.
Alipay, an arm of Alibaba, launched a mini game on its smartphone application that allowed users to try their luck simply by clicking on their phone screens during a 30-second period. Winners were given cash rewards or online shopping coupons.
E-hongbao quickly became the rage among millions of smartphone users.
The winnings were typically small, most of them ranging from 0.58 yuan to less than 10 yuan (US$1.60). At least 156 million yuan worth of virtual red packets were given out in cash and another 430 million in digital coupons.
10 billion yuan
Between January 26 and March 5, up to 10 billion yuan worth of e-hongbao were sent by corporate accounts or individual users through Alipay.
Due to the frenzy of participation across China, Alipay had to post an urgent apology through its official website, advising that heavy traffic might mean delays in processing.
More than half of Alipay users who gave or received e-hongbao were under 25 years of age, with nearly 40 percent under 35.
Alipay said more than 100 million people gave or received the company’s digital red packets between February 18 and February 21. At the peak on the eve of Chinese New Year, 240 million e-hongbao worth 4 billion yuan were sent.
Sina’s Twitter-like microblogging site Weibo began its holiday gimmick by asking netizens to comment on CCTV’s annual Spring Festival Gala show. At the same time, more than 400 million virtual red packets were distributed through dozens of partners — usually verified accounts, famous commentators or official accounts from media outlets — to their Weibo followers.
On the night of the Spring Festival Gala, more than 34.7 million Weibo users participated in the discussion about the TV show.
A Shanghai office worker told Shanghai Daily that the virtual red packets she sent cost between 10 yuan and 20 yuan each.
“But the money doesn’t really matter,” she said.
“What’s important is that it signifies best wishes and good fortune for the New Year.”
Tencent’s popular smartphone chatting application WeChat took a slightly different tack. It offered the chance to win virtual red packets to smartphone users who shook their phones at specified moments during the televised Spring Festival Gala.
“Phone-shaking” is an existing function on WeChat. When the phone quivers, a sensor transmits a signal back to the communications service. Normally, the phone would then play a random song from Tencent’s music service, but the system was modified during the Spring Festival Gala to become a lucky draw format.
WeChat users who opened e-hongbao from brand names automatically became followers of that brand’s official WeChat account.
“For brands like Yanghe Distillery and Haier, which are usually big advertisers on CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala, collaboration with WeChat provided them with new channels to connect with viewers,” said Xiao Mingchao, an independent business commentator.
About 120 million e-hongbao valued at 500 million yuan were given out by 14 advertisers. General Motors brand Chevrolet gave away 3.9 million e-hongbao worth at least 10 million yuan through WeChat.
From February 18 to 23, 3.27 billion virtual red packets were sent or received by WeChat users.
Wang Xia, a resident of Shandong Province in her late 20s, said e-hongbao was a nifty way to send greetings to friends.
“I sent about 300 yuan worth of e-hongbao through WeChat,” Wang said. “It took a lot of time sending and receiving e-hongbao. I probably spent way too much time on my mobile phone as my family was eating our annual holiday dinner.”
Alvin Foo, head of Airwave, the mobile business unit of Omnicom Media Group, said the holiday marketing ploys certainly opened up new vistas for Internet platforms.
“WeChat gained further popularity through its collaboration with CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala,” he said. “It shows how easy it is to provide linkages between TV viewers, newspaper readers or any other media types, and that signifies a huge potential for interactive campaigns in the future.”
It’s fairly safe to say almost every smartphone user now has a WeChat account, and most users are familiar with how to use WeChat for making purchases and payments via their mobiles, he added.
Since the e-hongbao format required users to link their bank cards to their WeChat accounts, the system could be rolled forward to allow them to pay for things like utility bills, phone bills or online shopping purchases linked to WeChat.
That’s a battleground for Internet giants.
Alipay had 79 percent of China’s mobile online payment market at the end of last year, while Tencent’s payment service had less than 8 percent, according to domestic research firm Analysys International. The probability of netizens using both services wasn’t given.
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