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Pinduoduo loses exclusive partnership with CCTV for China’s Spring Festival Gala
- China Central Television is said to have cancelled its exclusive advertising deal with Pinduoduo for this year’s Spring Festival Gala
- The annual event has been a promotional battleground among China’s largest internet companies since virtual red packets were introduced in 2015
State broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) has cancelled its exclusive advertising deal with e-commerce giant Pinduoduo for this year’s Spring Festival Gala, the country’s most-watched national network TV broadcast, as the company remains embroiled in a controversy over working conditions, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
Pinduoduo, operator of China’s second-largest e-commerce platform, landed an exclusive advertising package deal worth about 1 billion yuan (US$154 million) with CCTV in September last year. The deal involves giving away cash via virtual red packets at the Spring Festival Gala, which has been a promotional battleground among China’s largest internet companies since Alipay and WeChat first introduced virtual red packets in 2015.
“CCTV felt recent public opinion [about Pinduoduo] was quite bad, so they decided to end the deal,” said one person, who asked for anonymity because the information was still private.
One source said ByteDance-owned short-video sharing app operator Douyin, which runs the Chinese version of TikTok, has been in contact with the CCTV to replace Pinduoduo in the event, but no deal has been reached.
Pinduoduo and ByteDance did not immediately respond to inquiries for comment.
CCTV’s action comes amid Shanghai-based Pinduoduo’s growing public relations crisis after conflicting public statements in response to the death last week of an employee, who collapsed on the way home after working long hours.
The outrage over the incident prompted calls from some netizens to get users to uninstall the Pinduoduo app, while others called on CCTV to cancel its partnership with the company for this year’s Spring Festival Gala.
That controversy has also sparked an investigation of Pinduoduo by Shanghai authorities and renewed discussions on social media about Chinese tech companies’ notorious “996” overwork culture. This practice sparked nationwide debate in March 2019, when a group of Chinese programmers started a repository on Microsoft’s code-hosting service GitHub, called 996.ICU, to complain about their unreasonable work schedules, calling out several companies that included e-commerce firms Youzan and JD.com.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Pinduoduo loses exclusive deal for popular TV show
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