Farewell to Innocence: Behind-the-Scenes Stories of Xiaohongshu's Spring Festival Gala | DeepKr Lite
Text | Zhong Yixuan
Editor | Qiao Qian Yang Xuan
In the 2024 Spring Festival Gala, Jiang Shimeng, who played the role of a mother in the sketch "Can It Be the Same?", said an advertising slogan, "Why read books? " "Xiaohongshu, Your Life Guide!"
This line quickly became a trending topic. Along with the line, the bright red Xiaohongshu throw pillow on the sofa also became popular.
Few people know that this throw pillow is not an "official" Spring Festival Gala item but just a last-minute substitute.
One background is that during the more than one month of running-in for the Spring Festival Gala before, many of Xiaohongshu's "fantasies" have gradually been shattered. A Xiaohongshu employee told 36Kr that the core positioning of the 2024 Spring Festival Gala project is an effect advertisement to serve the growth of DAU (Daily Active Users), but as the implanted rights and interests are constantly being restricted, Xiaohongshu adjusted its expectations and began to include brand exposure in the Spring Festival Gala plan. "By the final moment, everyone already knew clearly what to do." A former Xiaohongshu employee said.
The plan of the throw pillow emerged in this way. Two or three days before the Spring Festival Gala, someone suggested simply putting a throw pillow on it like in past events. But the problem is that the factory was about to have a holiday at that time, and it was almost impossible to customize a throw pillow in such a short time.
A joking scene occurred - almost all Xiaohongshu employees received such a collection message, "Who has a red throw pillow at hand/home?"
After dozens of hours, a unique throw pillow was cleaned and quickly sent to the Spring Festival Gala stage.
It is difficult to find a more grand festival celebration than the Spring Festival Gala. As a top domestic cultural IP, the Spring Festival Gala still maintains an ultra-high viewership rate of nearly 80%. It is also like an intersection point. For more than forty years, traditional consumer companies and new Internet upstarts have come and gone here.
It is also difficult to find a more unique community than Xiaohongshu. It provides another framework outside the extreme algorithm world. Nowadays, when it comes to Xiaohongshu, the tone and experience are still the company's biggest labels.
2024 is the first cooperation between Xiaohongshu and the Spring Festival Gala. Instead of giving out red envelopes to attract new users as other Internet companies usually do, Xiaohongshu tried to find new ways to play while retaining some of its own temperament. However, for a community that does not overly interfere with UGC (User Generated Content), it is more difficult than the parties imagined to be embedded in a communication ceremony that emphasizes seriousness, collectiveness, and high homogeneity.
This year is the second year of Xiaohongshu's cooperation with the Spring Festival Gala, and "a sense of normalcy" has replaced many wild ideas. The story of Xiaohongshu's Spring Festival Gala is the story of a young Internet company colliding with the rules of the traditional world.
Expectation
At the end of 2023, after officially confirming the landing of Xiaohongshu's first Spring Festival Gala cooperation project, there were less than two months until the 2024 Spring Festival Gala.
Despite the short time, the internal expectations for the Spring Festival Gala were very high. First, the growth myth of the Spring Festival Gala for Internet companies has been verified earlier. For Xiaohongshu, its three major tasks at that time were the growth of DAU, the coverage of the lower-tier market, and live-streaming e-commerce, which were basically in line with the scenes of the Spring Festival Gala. Second, the founder Mao Wenchao was very interested in the Spring Festival Gala project, and this top-down emphasis quickly spread throughout the company. There is nothing wrong with the expectations themselves. Xiaohongshu spent a sky-high price for a less than six-hour gala, and it needs to see a quantifiable return.
In the words of former Xiaohongshu employee Chen Ping, at first, everyone envisioned the Spring Festival Gala as a huge effect advertisement.
According to the logic of effect advertisements, he remembers that in Xiaohongshu's earliest internal deductions, two key result indicators, the community DAU (Daily Active Users) and e-commerce GMV (In the first year, Xiaohongshu launched the purchase of the same style as the stars in "Everyone's Spring Festival Gala" to stimulate the transaction of live-streaming e-commerce), were once estimated to be overly optimistic values.
One background is that the Spring Festival Gala itself has the highest investment threshold. If an Internet product wants to cooperate with the Spring Festival Gala, its daily active users must exceed 100 million. Otherwise, if the traffic surges too much after the broadcast, it is easy to cause the server to crash.
"Our daily active users are 100 million. Referring to the peak values of other companies in the past, what if 300 million people come in?" A middle-level Xiaohongshu employee recalled. For this reason, Xiaohongshu decided to upgrade the server.
With the experience of other companies in the past and the overly high expectations, an astronomical cost was deduced internally. Chen Ping said that when the first version of the Spring Festival Gala budget plan was submitted, everyone was shocked, "Because the technical expenses including bandwidth alone exceeded the sponsorship fee of the Spring Festival Gala."
According to 36Kr, in 2024, the rights and interests that Xiaohongshu obtained by sponsoring the Spring Festival Gala included a behind-the-scenes live broadcast called "Everyone's Spring Festival Gala", two oral broadcasts during the gala, and the exposure of the same style of goods as the Spring Festival Gala, with a total price of more than 100 million. Although it cannot be compared with the first-level sponsors such as JD.com and Wuliangye, whose sponsorship fees are about 400 million, Xiaohongshu is generally ranked "between the second and third levels" among the sponsors.
Some Xiaohongshu employees said that within nearly two months, the company was shrouded in an atmosphere of optimism and high pressure from top to bottom. "All work must give way to the CNY (Spring Festival) project, including any product iterations and upgrades." An algorithm employee said that he was informed two weeks in advance that no changes were allowed, "for fear of affecting CNY".
The founder Mao Wenchao also personally supervised the Spring Festival Gala project, and his traces can be seen in the CNY community theme and the design of the Spring Festival Gala exposure. "These pressures came down layer by layer, and the final message was that if the goals were not met, the performance of all employees would be 3.25 (the lowest level)." Former Xiaohongshu employee Zhang Wei told 36Kr.
In Zhang Wei's impression, at that time, at least 2,000 Xiaohongshu employees signed the Spring Festival Gala confidentiality agreement. On the day of the Spring Festival Gala, in addition to the staff stationed at the main station, a large number of Xiaohongshu employees in Beijing and Shanghai were working overtime in the conference rooms - these conference rooms had been sealed with stickers several days ago and could only be used on the day of the Spring Festival Gala. As for every employee entering and leaving the office that day, stickers were required to be pasted on the phone cameras to prevent data leakage.
Even the partners of payment channels such as WeChat and Alipay were required to keep people on duty for overtime, "in case of the need for live-streaming e-commerce transactions from time to time".
Until the 2024 Spring Festival Gala, Xiaohongshu sent a team of hundreds of people to the main station before and after - this has also become the largest number of cooperative partners stationed at the CCTV main station in history.
Collision
The simplest way to calculate the return of the Spring Festival Gala is whether Xiaohongshu can strive for as much exposure as possible for itself. On that night, any oral broadcast or exposure about Xiaohongshu on the Spring Festival Gala screen is an important moment for the fluctuation of Xiaohongshu's DAU.
But soon, Xiaohongshu found that it would be facing a completely unfamiliar set of rules.
A Xiaohongshu employee told 36Kr that in the early stage of the cooperation, Mao Wenchao once tried to implant Xiaohongshu's community image into the Spring Festival Gala through "aesthetic transformation", "He believes that the Spring Festival Gala has a northern aesthetic, and the cooperation with Xiaohongshu may bring something new."
"The sofa of the Spring Festival Gala has been used for more than ten years. Can we put Xiaohongshu's original furniture on it to make it more beautiful? If the clothes worn by the actors are styled with the brands of Xiaohongshu's curators, would it be better?" In the memory of the above-mentioned employee, Mao Wenchao once expressed similar demands.
But these seemingly "naive" questions were directly blocked by the process before even reaching the level of cooperative rights and interests - in most cases, the Spring Festival Gala director team will not interfere with the makeup and styling of the artists, and the artist teams also hope to regard the makeup and styling as a resource exchange for their own partners, rather than the irrelevant Xiaohongshu.
The outside world once used the word "designer" to evaluate Xiaohongshu founder Mao Wenchao. This sense of design can be seen everywhere in today's Xiaohongshu APP - the double-column graphics are not completely aligned but are staggered. This is a deliberate ingenuity. The reason is that "Xiaohongshu once compared the community to a city, and the main roads of the city need to be staggered and have a sense of breathing", a Xiaohongshu employee said.
In the Spring Festival Gala project, Xiaohongshu also had many inspirations in design details. Zhang Wei said that Mao Wenchao hoped that every user watching "Everyone's Spring Festival Gala" could find that their likes would become bunches of fireworks at 0:00, so as to have a stronger sense of belonging to the Spring Festival on Xiaohongshu.
Just like this founder attaches importance to feeling, experience, and tone, this temperament is continuously maximally extended in the product of Xiaohongshu itself. But this is naturally like a parallel line to the seriousness, restraint, and precision that the huge communication ceremony represented by the Spring Festival Gala possesses.
The strong side shown by the CCTV director team once made Xiaohongshu feel a contrast. The reason is that although the cooperative department that Xiaohongshu's Spring Festival Gala sponsorship is in contact with is friendly, the former and the Spring Festival Gala director team are completely two systems.
For example, in the past Spring Festival Galas, it is not uncommon for programs to be suddenly cancelled just before going on stage. In this context, many things are not decided by Xiaohongshu, even down to the power to control a volume level.
On New Year's Eve, the Xiaohongshu live broadcast program "Everyone's Spring Festival Gala", which is defined as the sharing of behind-the-scenes stories of the Spring Festival Gala, needs to start the live broadcast simultaneously with the Spring Festival Gala in the CCTV studio, but the Xiaohongshu technical team soon found a problem. All the on-site microphones need to be first collected in the CCTV mixer before they can be output as a mobile signal.
"The TV and mobile phone output signals are different. At that time, our live broadcast sound was relatively small. We just needed to push the volume knob up a little bit, and the problem would be solved, but this demand just could not be met." A former Xiaohongshu employee who experienced the scene told 36Kr. The technical students present that night were very helpless.
The volume problem was just the beginning. After the broadcast started, some employees soon found that the rhythm was more uncontrollable than imagined. One background is that when "Everyone's Spring Festival Gala" was designed, the reference object was "Kangxi Lai Le", but the cooperation degree of the guests was not as simple as "just chatting, gossiping, and playing games" as planned - as one of the sponsorship rights and interests, CCTV can at most invite the actors to the backstage live broadcast room, but cannot and will not decide what the other party should say and do. That night, the movement and expression of the guests almost deviated from the script, "and the originally designed jokes and games were difficult to achieve".
Since Tencent started in 2014, after successive Internet companies took over from traditional consumer brands, they have given a relatively stable answer to the Spring Festival Gala marketing - the Spring Festival Gala is a scene to give out red envelopes to attract new users. In this sense, Xiaohongshu is the first company to actively design the program agenda, which makes the difficulty and effort of the Spring Festival Gala project far more than just a sponsorship exposure, but more like the logic of a TV program production. But this is obviously beyond Xiaohongshu's imagination and preparation.
All these collisions also created a rather dramatic detail - during the rehearsal of the Spring Festival Gala, Mao Wenchao took a car to the CCTV building. Because he did not report in advance, he was blocked downstairs in the cold wind and could not enter for a long time.
"In the end, it was the Xiaohongshu staff in the building who made various coordinations by phone so that he could go upstairs." A former Xiaohongshu employee who experienced the scene said.
Reality
After the 2024 New Year's Eve, Xiaohongshu quickly conducted a small-scale review internally.
A Xiaohongshu employee said that everyone's mood was rather depressed, "Many colleagues sat in their chairs in a daze", and the traffic did not come in a rush. The Aliyun computer room that was previously reserved was also quickly cancelled, "The numbers obtained were quite different from what was expected."
There are many details worth reviewing. Some employees believe that the oral broadcast in the Spring Festival Gala was too "Xiaohongshu-style". During the advertising time, the audience's attention is consumed in seconds, but Xiaohongshu still retained words with a higher comprehension threshold such as "The Life Guide of 300 Million People" in the oral broadcast.
Another reflection is that the design of the oral broadcast that night was not focused enough. "The stories before and behind the scenes" were too literary and implicit in such a high-paced gala. "Especially when the oral broadcast was placed behind another company, whose strategy was to give out red envelopes, the audience was easily distracted by the red envelope hook in front", Chen Ping said.
Zhang Wei believes that the lack of experience in implementing super-large projects, the overly tight preparation time, and the unfamiliarity with the style of work of the units within the system are all problems exposed this time. "At one point, it was the middle-level who jumped from other Internet companies and had similar implementation experience who pointed out this problem on the table, and then everyone reacted."
But in the official review after the festival, "in line with expectations and gaining valuable experience" has become the final conclusion of Xiaohongshu's sponsorship of the 2024 Spring Festival Gala. This conclusion is not a reversal. Chen Ping told 36Kr that this is not an excuse. "The internal evaluation is indeed like this. For Xiaohongshu, such a collision may be inevitable. Our biggest gain is to gain valuable experience, which must be something that Xiaohongshu can only get through personal experience."
Due to "at least a two-year contract was signed at that time", the cooperation between Xiaohongshu and the Spring Festival Gala in 2025 continues. But compared with the past, returning to reality is the portrayal of the 2025 Spring Festival Gala cooperation. Many Xiaohongshu employees told 36Kr that before this year's Spring Festival, the internal expectations for the effect of the Spring Festival Gala have been lowered, "more rational and with a sense of normalcy".
In the 2025 Spring Festival Gala, "Everyone's Spring Festival Gala" is still being held, but there are no more sales of the same style as the stars. Compared with the chaotic milk tea delivery activity for verification last year, the community CNY theme has become a more concentrated temple fair gameplay, and the main line is much clearer. The most important thing is that the tone of Xiaohongshu's Spring Festival Gala marketing has returned to the "community" itself - Xiaohongshu is the exclusive note-sharing platform for the Spring Festival Gala, where you can discuss everything about the Spring Festival Gala.
And just before the Spring Festival, a massive migration of TikTok overseas users to Xiaohongshu contributed to a real traffic peak for Xiaohongshu for a period of time by accident. An important reason why users on the other side of the ocean voluntarily broke the division and separation of the real world is that Xiaohongshu is already one of the most peaceful, accepting, and inclusive communities in the Chinese Internet world.
In the internal sharing session of Xiaohongshu's tenth anniversary, Mao Wenchao set the tone for the Xiaohongshu community with the words "broad" and "warm".
Facing the Spring Festival Gala, Xiaohongshu was once naive. But just as many people have commented, some things that have hindered Xiaohongshu's rapid growth have also made it what it is.
(At the request of the interviewees, Chen Ping and Zhang Wei in the text are pseudonyms.)