By LazBeat Staff
Dec. 16, 2021
On the evening of November 10, LazLive lit up with star-studded performances in the countdown to 11.11, the biggest one-day shopping festival in Southeast Asia. The spectacle, an example of Lazada’s famed Super Shows, garnered more than 7 million views through the eCommerce platform’s in-app livestreaming channel and was also broadcast through social media and TV networks across the region.
Originally launched region-wide to celebrate Lazada’s birthday in 2019, Super Shows have become integral parts of the eCommerce company’s large-scale shopping festivals. They are the epitome of Lazada’s “Shoppertainment” strategy, bringing together A-list celebrities, amazing products, incredible deals, giveaways and tech-powered engagement tools to drive up excitement – and sales – for brands and businesses.
“Super Shows are there to create additional noise and increase awareness about Lazada’s mega campaigns,” explained Neil Trinidad, the chief marketing officer of Lazada Philippines. “It’s the hype and anticipation the day before leading up to midnight of the actual event day. You want to drive those watching the Super Show to the Lazada app, have them add the products we feature into their carts and have them place their orders.”
This strategy has proven extremely successful. This year’s 11.11 Super Show generated three times the gross merchandise value from its live broadcast compared with last year. A significant amount of this GMV came from sales generated from voucher redemption during the show.
A key reason for this success is the amount of thought and effort that goes into every Super Show. it can take close to three months for a show to go from conceptualisation to actual broadcast. To ensure cohesiveness across all six markets where Lazada operates, the regional branding team usually comes up with the overall concept and headline acts, and the local teams will then identify additional celebrities, ambassadors, key opinion leaders and other features and mechanisms to tailor the show to their target audience.
Every show is also carefully designed to best amplify the mega campaign it’s promoting, explained Su Woon Ng, senior manager for content at Lazada. “For example, Lazada’s Birthday Super Shows tend to be performance-heavy concerts, while the ones for 11.11 usually have a more gamified format where brands are well-integrated within the segments. But the consistent features across all our gala shows are the interactive giveaways and brands’ seamless integrations within the show concepts. It’s a strategy that helps build our shoppertainment identity in the region,” Ng said.
Already behemoth undertakings, the production of Super Shows has become even more complex in the last two years as a result of the pandemic. While previous shows took place in front of live audiences, Lazada has had to shift these shoppertainment extravaganzas online with a hybrid format that includes pre-recorded performances and segments interlaced with Lazada’s many live customer-engagement tools, such as Voucher Rain, Balloon Rain and Shake It.
The virtual format has allowed audiences to still enjoy Super Shows in a safe way amid the ongoing pandemic and has even boosted traffic and guided GMV on the Lazada app. The challenge, however, is that viewers can leave at any moment during a livestream, which is why it has been of the utmost importance for Lazada to ensure all its virtual Super Shows are jam-packed with exciting and innovative content that engages with audiences and retains their attention.
This year’s 11.11 Super Show, for example, featured more than 80 celebrities, including K-pop group Seventeen, who wowed viewers across Southeast Asia as Lazada’s first regional Happiness Ambassadors. In addition, in Thailand, Lazada featured contestants from its first reality talent competition, LAZ iCON, during its 11.11 Super Show, much to the delight of fans in the country, who by early December had cast up to 20 million votes for their favourite contestants on the app. Similar localisations were made to other Super Shows across the region.
“All the challenges of putting together a Super Show and trying our best to make that magic happen are worth it because the end results are so rewarding,” said Trinidad. “Our Super Shows are celebrations and a way of giving back to our consumers for continuously supporting our brand.”
Sophia Hung, Ting Ting, Kim Martin Viray, Kris A. Aquino and Chanakarn Asawasathapon from Lazada’s regional and country marketing teams contributed to the article.