Final evening, the buying app Temu, which isn’t fairly a 12 months and a half outdated, ran its second Tremendous Bowl advert in as a few years. It was arduous to overlook, as a result of the identical advert appeared a number of instances, together with following the game-winning landing. By most estimates, the thrice the advert was featured in the course of gameplay would have price an eye-watering $21 million alone.
Alongside advertisements during which Beyoncé introduced a brand new album and Sir Patrick Stewart proposed skinning Peppa Pig to make a soccer, the content material of Temu’s advert was comparatively unremarkable. It had no A-list celebrities or beloved cultural touchstones; not a single heartstring was tugged. As an alternative, a solid of silent, off-brand Pixar characters noticed their needs for 99-cent toupees and $6.99 denims granted by an orange-gowned sorceress, who had herself been granted these powers by ordering the magical gown she was carrying from Temu for $9.99. All of this performed out below a jingle that inspired viewers to store like a billionaire—which is to say to buy always, for enjoyable and leisure, with no second of regard for worth tags. The advert had the milquetoast gleam attribute of media generated by AI, although past aesthetics there’s no indication that that’s the case.
Most corporations that spend massive bucks on Tremendous Bowl advert time go to nice lengths and nice expense to make commercials which are plausibly well worth the priciest actual property in American advertising and marketing—the form of factor that individuals may really like, or no less than talk about, as a substitute of merely tolerate. Temu, which was launched by an organization in China however caters to a largely American shopper base, took the alternative method: an advert that wouldn’t have appeared misplaced throughout a block of Legislation & Order reruns or a house-flipping actuality present on HGTV however that performed over and over to the largest viewers cash should purchase. By its third look, one of many company at my Tremendous Bowl celebration was singing a portion of the jingle—ooh ooh, Temu—to himself, and the remainder of us had realized that we’d been announcing the app’s title incorrectly all alongside. (It’s TEH-moo, apparently, versus TEE-moo.)
Temu, when you’re among the many uninitiated whom the advert was meant to succeed in, is considered one of a wave of fast-growing retailers with ties to China, together with Shein and TikTok Store, which have emerged lately. These retailers supply an enormous collection of dirt-cheap shopper items, they usually’re competing in opposition to each other in a bid finally to problem Amazon’s dominance as the first middleman between Chinese language producers and the People who purchase their merchandise. The corporate’s advert, which is only one half of a bigger marketing campaign throughout media {that a} latest J.P. Morgan report estimated would price the retailer $3 billion this 12 months, had carried out exactly as meant, no less than judging by my celebration company. Temu is spending a literal fortune in an try and speedrun familiarity amongst American customers.
From the start, Temu has appeared to grasp that one of many largest obstacles it faces on its obvious quest to rise to the highest of American buying is just getting its title on the market. America is a mature shopper market—Amazon dominates on-line retail, and Walmart and Goal, lengthy a few Amazon’s chief digital rivals, even have a chokehold on on a regular basis in-person searching for a lot of the nation. On the lowest finish of the market, Greenback Tree and Greenback Common function tens of 1000’s of shops in North America, largely focusing on clients in poorer or extra rural areas. People will not be precisely at a loss for locations to purchase bizarre junk, and it wasn’t clear that they actually wanted or needed one other one when Temu launched in September 2022. When the corporate ran its first Tremendous Bowl advert a couple of months later, not that many individuals within the U.S. had heard of Temu or its father or mother firm, PDD Holdings, which till not too long ago was headquartered in Shanghai and likewise operates the Chinese language retail big Pinduoduo.
Over the previous few a long time, Tremendous Bowl advertisements—traditionally the province of highly effective shopper manufacturers resembling Coca-Cola, Budweiser, and Ford—have change into a manner for brand new corporations which are flush with investor money to sign their desired entrance into mainstream shopper consciousness. On the daybreak of the millennium, dot-com start-ups resembling E-trade and Pets.com purchased up all of the Tremendous Bowl advert stock they might get. Extra not too long ago, advertisements for cryptocurrency exchanges enlisted stars together with Matt Damon and Larry David to introduce the idea to the not-so-terminally on-line. When most People don’t have any clue who you might be, what you promote, or why they need to purchase it, a slick advert in a notoriously costly second not solely spreads the phrase about your organization to an unlimited viewers; it additionally means that your organization belongs alongside these which were round so lengthy, they’ve change into a part of the surroundings of American life.
Temu’s ties to China make these associations much more priceless to its future. A majority of People have lengthy stated they like to purchase domestically manufactured items, and a major variety of shoppers report being against Chinese language-made merchandise particularly. However these preferences begin to bend when foreign-made merchandise are cheaper. In observe, nearly all People now routinely buy shopper items made elsewhere. Amazon has contributed mightily to this actuality: Slowly however certainly, the retailer’s broad providing of merchandise from third-party worldwide sellers, its chaotic consumer interface, and its enormous variety of listings created by non-native English audio system appear to be acclimating hundreds of thousands of individuals to the sorts of transactions that will have appeared intolerably dangerous a decade in the past. Shopping for straight from a international retailer is a step that Temu clearly is betting many of those identical customers can now be persuaded to take, if the circumstances are proper. One of many first hurdles is ensuring everybody is aware of your title.
Historical past tells us that we must be skeptical of companies attempting to make use of costly advert campaigns to purchase their manner into these associations. The dot-com increase busted spectacularly, and the crypto market plummeted with revelations of scams not lengthy after it splashed lots of money on TV advertisements. That Temu is again for a second 12 months is notable, as is the selection to pursue familiarity as a substitute of glitz or buzzy superstar associations. The absence of choosy megawatt stars, costly licensing for well-known songs or characters, and football-specific themes implies that the advert shall be simple to rerun time and again throughout all types of broadcasts, educating hundreds of thousands extra People say the app’s title by way of a easy jingle. The lesson was already spreading earlier than the Tremendous Bowl: Temu has been blanketing earlier “store like a billionaire” advertisements throughout different broadcasts all 12 months. (That is maybe one rationalization for Temu’s counterintuitive reputation amongst older adults, whose buying habits are regarded as harder to vary than these of youthful shoppers who’re comfy buying all around the web; older folks additionally watch much more broadcast TV.)
This method is precisely consistent with a variety of different advertising and marketing strikes that Temu has made previously 12 months, which have seen the retailer pouring hundreds of thousands of {dollars} into surfacing its merchandise in search listings and online-ad placements. Mixed with its efforts on TV and elsewhere, these campaigns price an estimated $1.7 billion. In keeping with a latest article in The Wall Road Journal, these huge expenditures—together with a smaller marketing campaign by Shein—have been sufficient to push up the price of promoting all around the web. In flip, that has buoyed the fortunes of Google and Meta, which management the majority of internet marketing. It’s additionally begun to eat into the underside traces of a few of Temu’s rivals, which now should pay greater costs for promoting whereas Temu undercuts them on the costs of its merchandise.
Final 12 months, Temu did an estimated $16 billion in gross sales, which was roughly greater than three-quarters of Goal’s on-line income in 2022. Most trade watchers attribute this unprecedented scale-up to a mixture of ubiquity and worth—the corporate is spending a ton to get in entrance of as many individuals as potential, as shortly as potential, and it’s promoting lots of its merchandise at costs so low that they appear mathematically unimaginable. Temu has been accused of promoting items made with compelled labor with a view to obtain these costs. The corporate can also be broadly believed to be quickly promoting merchandise at a loss in an try to purchase market share from rivals. (Temu has denied accusations about its working circumstances. In a press release to the WSJ, a spokesperson for Temu additionally denied that the corporate was shedding cash in an effort to shortly acquire floor on its rivals.) Amazon, too, has tamped down costs for years with a view to convert online-shopping skeptics, although it has denied that pushing for decrease costs is predatory.
Promoting is each extra and fewer highly effective than folks generally consider it to be. It’s nearly by no means sufficient, by itself, to make a services or products right into a phenomenon from scratch; if it have been, shopper historical past wouldn’t be riddled with so many well-known failures as soon as hoisted aloft by luxurious advertising and marketing budgets. However within the international shopper system, promoting of some type often is a essential pretext for no matter success you’re attempting to realize. In any other case, it’s uncommon that many individuals will even discover out what you are promoting exists. Temu’s long-term success will rely on much more than advertisements, but when it fails, it received’t be as a result of nobody knew its title.
