With Amazon Prime Day (two days!) finally over and the never ending parade of deals at an end, you might be thinking that the next big sales event will be Black Friday. Not so, this year Alibaba are aiming to make the 11th Single’s Day a Global Shopping Festival in 2019.
This year will be the 11th 11.11 festival. Last year’s gross merchandise volume, which reached $30.8 billion, outstripped the online revenues of U.S. retail’s biggest shopping holiday – from Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday to Cyber Monday – combined.
To achieve global reach, Alibaba who launch the Single’s Day Global Shopping Festival with an annual 11.11 Countdown Gala Celebration, will bring the live variety show, which runs in the hours leading up to the world’s biggest shopping day of the year, to different markets around the world. They aim to broadcast the Gala on about 10 cable networks in China, Southeast Asia, Africa and North America. While the Gala broadcast in Southeast Asia last year, Alibaba said that 2019 would be the first time the event had a truly global audience.
Just as in previous years, Alibaba will deliver interactive experiences for the audience and opportunities for brands to engage with consumers during the broadcast.
“The gala is extremely valuable, capable of bringing in conversion and brand impressions that far exceed any period in the campaign. All of the energy, attention and emotions of consumers are concentrated within those few hours leading up to midnight.”
– Liu Bo, general manager of Alibaba’s marketing-platform business and lead for this year’s 11.11
Since its inception in 2015, the countdown gala has become a red-carpet event, with celebrities around the world joining the show each year, including big-name talent such as Nicole Kidman, Scarlett Johansson, Mariah Carey and Pharrell Williams to sports stars such as David Beckham, Maria Sharapova and Kobe Bryant. Alibaba has not announced the line-up for this year’s event.
Just like any other form of content, the gala is a space for brands to engage and learn about their customers, the value of that interaction stretches beyond the gala into the long term.
