Final night time, the buying app Temu, which isn’t fairly a 12 months and a half outdated, ran its second Tremendous Bowl advert in as a few years.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 onerous 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 midst of gameplay would have price an eye-watering $21 million alone.
Alongside advertisements by 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 a substitute, a forged 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 costume she was sporting from Temu for $9.99. All of this performed out beneath a jingle that inspired viewers to store like a billionaire—which is to say to buy continually, for enjoyable and leisure, with out a 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 huge bucks on Tremendous Bowl advert time go to nice lengths and nice expense to make commercials which can be plausibly well worth the priciest actual property in American advertising—the form of factor that folks may truly like, or at the least focus on, 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 other strategy: an advert that wouldn’t have appeared misplaced throughout a block of Regulation & Order reruns or a house-flipping actuality present on HGTV however that performed over and over to the most important 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 saying the app’s title incorrectly all alongside. (It’s TEH-moo, apparently, versus TEE-moo.)
Temu, in case you’re among the many uninitiated whom the advert was supposed to achieve, is certainly one of a wave of fast-growing retailers with ties to China, together with Shein and TikTok Store, which have emerged in recent times. These retailers provide an enormous choice of dirt-cheap shopper items, they usually’re competing towards 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 supposed, at the least judging by my celebration company. Temu is spending a literal fortune in an try and speedrun familiarity amongst American buyers.
From the start, Temu has appeared to know that one of many largest obstacles it faces on its obvious quest to rise to the highest of American buying is solely getting its title on the market. The US is a mature shopper market—Amazon dominates on-line retail, and Walmart and Goal, lengthy a few Amazon’s chief digital opponents, even have a chokehold on on a regular basis in-person purchasing for a lot of the nation. On the lowest finish of the market, Greenback Tree and Greenback Normal function tens of hundreds of shops in North America, largely focusing on prospects in poorer or extra rural areas. People aren’t precisely at a loss for locations to purchase bizarre junk, and it wasn’t clear that they actually wanted or wished 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 guardian firm, PDD Holdings, which till not too long ago was headquartered in Shanghai and likewise operates the Chinese language retail large 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 can be 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 haven’t any clue who you’re, 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 infinite viewers; it additionally means that your organization belongs alongside these which have been 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 precious to its future. A majority of People have lengthy mentioned 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 apply, 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 large variety of listings created by non-native English audio system appear to be acclimating tens of millions of individuals to the sorts of transactions that will have appeared intolerably dangerous a decade in the past. Shopping for straight from a overseas retailer is a step that Temu clearly is betting many of those identical buyers 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 ought to be skeptical of companies making an attempt 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 a whole lot 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 signifies that the advert will likely be simple to rerun many times throughout every kind of broadcasts, educating tens of millions extra People learn how to 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 considered harder to alter than these of youthful shoppers who’re snug buying everywhere in the web; older individuals additionally watch much more broadcast TV.)
This strategy is strictly consistent with plenty of different advertising strikes that Temu has made previously 12 months, which have seen the retailer pouring tens of millions 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 accordance 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 everywhere in the web. In flip, that has buoyed the fortunes of Google and Meta, which management the majority of internet advertising. It’s additionally begun to eat into the underside strains of a few of Temu’s opponents, 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 business watchers attribute this unprecedented scale-up to a mix of ubiquity and worth—the corporate is spending a ton to get in entrance of as many individuals as attainable, as rapidly as attainable, and it’s promoting a lot of its merchandise at costs so low that they appear mathematically inconceivable. Temu has been accused of promoting items made with compelled labor with the intention to obtain these costs. The corporate can also be broadly believed to be briefly promoting merchandise at a loss in an try to purchase market share from opponents. (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 rapidly acquire floor on its rivals.) Amazon, too, has tamped down costs for years with the intention 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 individuals 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 budgets. However within the world shopper system, promoting of some type normally is a needed pretext for no matter success you’re making an attempt to realize. In any other case, it’s uncommon that many individuals will even discover out your small business exists. Temu’s long-term success will depend upon much more than advertisements, but when it fails, it received’t be as a result of nobody knew its title.
