This year, the short drama market is growing faster than expected. In China's mainland, 《完蛋！我被美女包围了(Love Is All Around)》 became a dark horse in the form of "short dramas + game". In global market, with the emergence of several popular short dramas, the topic of "short drama marketing" has been on the rise, which is reminiscent of the "global Internet literature marketing" in 2021.
As a professional global mobile marketing strategy platform, AppGrowing has witnessed the wave of global internet literature marketing. Recently, we have observed the strong trend of a group of short drama apps. AppGrowing data shows that ReelShort of Crazy Maple Studio, which is is a participant of COL Group, recently topped the USA iOS Entertainment Free Chart, and its downloads once surpassed those of TikTok.
Source: AppGrowing
ReelShort launched globally back in August 2022, but it didn't start a massive ad campaign until July this year. At the same time, the App entered the USA iOS Top Grossing #100 and continued to rise in the ranking. After a few months of marketing, ReelShort has become the top product in the global short drama market. The reaction of the capital market confirms it: since November, the share price of COL Group has continued to rise and even doubled.
AppGrowing observes that short drama apps still use digital ads as the main marketing method at present. With the increasing entrants, the media buying competition in the field is rapidly intensifying. Today, we take ReelShort, which has successfully led the way, to take a look at the advertising strategies of such apps.
01 Advertising strategy of ReelShort
According to AppGrowing, ReelShort began mass advertising in July. It saw more than 400 ads per day in the App Store and Google Play. It went even higher since October, with single-day figures exceeding 1,000 for a time.
Source: AppGrowing
Currently, ReelShort's main target markets are Europe and North America, which is reflected in the ad market distribution. TOP5 are the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and New Zealand, with the USA accounting for the largest share. Media are dominated by Meta Media, with Facebook, Meta Audience Network and Instagram all accounting for over 20%.
Source: AppGrowing
For short drama apps, their own content is a natural pool of ad creatives, so videos are the mainstream. According to AppGrowing, ReelShort's creatives are mainly in the form of videos, of which the proportion of vertical videos is more than 80%. In addition, utilizing the ad audience analysis feature, we see that the target of creatives is mainly women aged 25-44.
On the creative side, ReelShort mainly uses clips from popular short dramas. AppGrowing shows that among the nearly 180 days of ReelShort's creatives, the No.1 impressed is a clip from the first episode of The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband, with a duration of more than 4 minutes.
Specifically, the video begins with a clip of "arguing with a sale and making her kneel down to put on shoes" to quickly create a feeling of excitement and retain users.
Source: AppGrowing
Following the plot of "selling the token of love", it shows the conflict between the hero and the heroine. Finally, the dialog between the two leads to "Contract Marriage", which leaves the viewer in suspense and stimulates the viewer to download the App to watch the full drama.
Source: AppGrowing
The second most viewed creative is a clip of exciting footage from another popular short drama Fated to My Forbidden Alpha. The short 30-second video, with popular BGM showing werewolf transformations, hero saving beauty, love at first sight and other plots, quickly captured the audience of the subject.
Source: AppGrowing
In general, the creative content of short drama apps is highly dependent on its platform. High-density dramatic plots quickly grab attention and highlight the relevant elements of the topic according to the preferences of target users. ReelShort mainly focuses on the European and American markets, so the ad creatives concentrate on presenting settings such as werewolf, vampire, ABO, and mansion grudges in pursuit of visual impact.
In terms of creation, ReelShort (on behalf of current leading short drama apps) has created some formulas: "Conflict + Reversal = Enjoyment". In the first 3 seconds of videos, conflict storylines are utilized to grab attention, such as revenge, heroes rescuing beauties, etc. In addition, suspense is set up at the end of videos to introduce the download button, stimulating users to watch all the episodes in App.
Source: AppGrowing
It's worth noting that due to the increasingly fierce global competition in short dramas, leading apps such as ReelShort use watermarks and icons fixed in the screen to deepen users' impression of the brand and to protect original rights and interests.
02 It Could be the Perfect Moment for " Short Drama Marketing"
According to AppGrowing, since H2 2023, the ad volume of Short Drama Entertainment Apps has grown significantly, and besides ReelShort, Short Drama Apps such as CHANGDU's MoboReels, NEW READING's GoodShort, ANYUE's FlexTV, and JIUZHOU's 99TV are also expanding their advertising scale. In addition, TikTok, Kwai and other shorts media are also accelerating the incubation of similar content. "Short drama" has undoubtedly become a hit field of global apps in 2023.
At the present stage, there is a high degree of overlap between the audience of short dramas and that of Internet literature, and many popular short dramas are based on Internet literature. Therefore, Internet literature publishers enjoy a content advantage in short dramas. Behind the head products of short dramas now, most of them are familiar Internet literature publishers, such as COL Group and CHANGDU.
As far as the development of the short drama market is concerned, now may be the best time for "short drama marketing". Since 2020, China's mainland short drama market has entered a reshuffling stage. Coupled with policy issues, it is very difficult for new entrants to get a piece of the pie.
In contrast, in the global market, the previous " Internet literature marketing" has built up the user base, and the global users are familiar with the content of China's Internet literature. So the acceptance threshold of short dramas based on such a foundation is not as high as imagined. Instead, for publishers who are already familiar with the reading preferences of global users, it is not difficult to accurately locate user needs and create localized short dramas.
In addition, compared with China's mainland, global short drama content selection space is larger. In terms of themes, European and American users like werewolves, vampires, ABO, etc. Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Macao & Taiwan users have similar preferences as China's mainland: sweet love and romantic genres are popular. Japanese users enjoy revenge and so on. Whether it's mining a single market or making "all-you-can-eat" content, it could support global publishers to make a big impact. At the same time, global media are more flexible in terms of content, and there is also room for LGBT content.
Of course, short drama marketing is also facing some problems. In addition to actors, filming, etc., publishers need to pay attention to copyright issues (e.g., background music), and advertising strategy requirements are different from those in China's mainland.
In any case, "Short Drama" has clearly become the mobile marketing trend of this year, and AppGrowing will continue to keep an eye on it and output news and ad insights. AppGrowing has especially introduced a new app tag [Short Drama] to help marketers accurately filter the data of such products and analyze the ads.
