The marketing value of KOCs is no longer high.

I recall that back in 2019, Li Meng from Westwin once put forward a viewpoint that "It will be internet influencers that wipe out advertising agencies in the future". 

When this statement was made, it immediately sparked widespread criticism and denunciation across the entire advertising industry. Of course, since Westwin itself is an influencer marketing company, it is understandable that Li Meng made such a bold remark to endorse his own company back then. 

In 2021, Westwin was officially listed on the A-share market. To a certain extent, the company's successful listing has confirmed that Li Meng's judgment back then was generally correct. If we look at the current situation of established advertising agencies such as Ogilvy, it is obvious that the advertising industry has been hit quite hard. 

But perhaps Li Meng's judgment back then was only half right, because no one expected that AI would emerge out of nowhere. If we say that internet influencers will eliminate advertising agencies in the future, it seems that now, AI will probably be the one that eliminates internet influencers in the future. 

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Back in the early days of influencer marketing, everyone was willing to invest in KOLs, because early KOLs did enjoy traffic dividends, and the KOL market had insufficient pricing information, leaving a large amount of room for brand arbitrage. Therefore, brands that dared to be the first to try could often reap the early dividends. 

In fact, many declining brands were revived by placing advertisements on top-tier KOLs like Li Jiaqi and Viya. Looking back now, the quotation from Li Jiaqi and Viya at that time was not expensive at all. 

This is like Xiaokang Automobile running into Huawei, which was transformed into Seres and even squeezed into the first tier of the automobile industry. 

Later, as the value of KOLs was recognized by the market, and major platforms spared no effort to create benchmark cases, the pricing of KOLs became more mature. As a result, KOL placements are basically a case of spending money just to get some publicity. Although they can drive sales, they cannot sustain profitability, so they are already very similar to brand promotion activities. 

Later, the marketing industry created a concept called KOC marketing. In fact, the concept of KOC marketing was probably first proposed in the industry by the author during a communication with a senior colleague at his previous company. 

KOCs became popular for one reason that the threshold for placing KOC content was very low. Back then, a large number of new consumer brands emerged, and not all brands could afford top-tier KOLs like Li Jiaqi and Viya, so KOCs were exactly the solution for these small and medium-sized brands. 

Another reason is that the pricing of KOCs was not fully transparent. For a content creator with thousands to tens of thousands of followers, there was huge flexibility in deciding how much to pay for cooperation. Incomplete pricing means there is an opportunity to cash in on traffic dividends. 

Of course, another factor is the rise of Xiaohongshu. The entire ecosystem of Xiaohongshu is dominated by KOCs, without too many top KOLs. Xiaohongshu focuses on product seeding marketing, which is closely related to product sales, making it a very suitable core platform for KOC marketing. 

All in all, the concept of KOC was made popular by us, and later became a standard part of the marketing methodologies of all major platforms. 

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But in the AI era, we believe that the marketing value of KOCs is actually no longer high. I believe brands that have done related placements in recent years should have similar feelings. 

This is mainly due to changes in the content ecosystem. 

The emergence of AI essentially greatly lowers the threshold for content creation, which has severely impacted the KOC ecosystem. In other words, AI accounts are actually competing with KOCs for traffic. 

We are not saying that a large number of accounts are automatically operated by AI, but that a large amount of KOC content is improved in efficiency through AI, which increases the overall content supply and diverts the tail traffic, thus directly lowering the ROI of KOC placements. 

You can find that many people who teach others how to operate Xiaohongshu and do social media marketing are actually teaching people how to use AI to replicate popular posts. That is to say, with the support of AI, content competition has become much more intense. 

According to our recent tests, AI-generated content does not even require manual fine-tuning, and its reading experience is no different from that of manually created content. 

As we mentioned before, the future of content marketing will by no means be an era of "small but refined" content. The old approach of spending millions on a large piece of content to push it hard will no longer work. Instead, brands need to win by volume, by producing a huge amount of diverse content to ensure the overall exposure. 

In this case, KOC placements are completely meaningless. On the one hand, the cost of communication and cooperation with KOCs will seriously reduce marketing efficiency. If you want to improve efficiency, you have to outsource the work, which will bring a lot of content risks and even lead to public relations crises. 

On the other hand, no matter how many KOC placements a brand does, it cannot support the volume of basic exposure. Think about it: even for the most unknown KOC, you have to pay at least 200 RMB as a red envelope for cooperation, while generating a piece of content with similar data using AI may cost less than 10 RMB. 

Therefore, if brands have extra money to spend on KOC placements, they might as well save it to build an AI content system, which can be called the "content asset" that brands can precipitate and retain in the long run. 

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This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Communication Gymnastics" (ID: chuanboticao), written by Zhou Zaian, and published with authorization from 36Kr.