Idol Culture Starts Being Questioned In China After ‘Youth With You’ Milk Scandal
On May 4, Beijing Municipal Bureau of Radio and Television posted an article on its official WeChat account, criticizing the newest season of IQIYI’s popular reality TV show Youth With You.
The next day, at 5am, the Youth With You official Weibo account posted a statement saying it take responsibility for its wrongdoings. What shocked everyone was that the statement also announced that the show would stop filming.
What is Youth With You?
The boy band/girl group contest show involves 119 trainees from different entertainment agencies competing to form a 9-member male group. This is the 3rd season of Youth With You. The first two seasons achieved great success, producing popular idols such as Yu Shuxin (虞书欣) and Kong Xueer (孔雪儿). The show carries strong idol culture for the reason that its contestants are young and they succeed because of viewers/fans’ votes.
According to 36kr, Season 2 helped its lead sponsor Zhen Guo Li (真果粒), a milk beverage brand developed by Mengniu Diary, drive nearly 30 million RMB in sales when the show was on air. To stop filming the show would cause massive loss for both brands and IQIYI.
Why did the government stop such a popular show?
Buying Extra Votes Produced Massive Food Waste
As we mentioned, a key element for those contestants to win is viewers’ votes. To create a win-win situation for brand sponsors and the show itself, IQIYI invented a new way for viewers to get extra votes for their idols. To get an extra chance to vote, viewers need to purchase Zhen Guo Li’s beverages. Inside the bottle cap is a QR code which fans can scan to vote.
While this is a creative way to boost sales for Zhen Guo Li, iQiyi and the brand obviously did not think this through. Idol culture is extremely strong in China. Young fans will easily spend thousands of RMB to support their idols. iQiyi and Zhen Guo Li didn’t set a limit to how many extra votes a person could cast through the bottle cap QR codes. With the drinks at such a low price point, a diehard fan could easily purchase hundreds of bottles if it meant helping their idol win.
Dairy beverages have short expiration periods to begin with. But then add in that in order to get the QR code, fans have to open the bottle. This breaks the seal and makes the beverage expire even faster. There’s no way they can drink all of these beverages. They may not even like them.
It was discovered that fans are pouring the drinks out, leading to great food waste. While this is never a good thing, this is especially bad timing as the Chinese government has been cracking down on food waste. For example, many social media platforms such as Kuaishou and Douyin have been banning food live streamers and KOLs who are overordering and overeating in their content.
Scalpers Selling the Bottle Cap QR Codes
Sometimes it’s not even the fans that are pouring the drinks out. Scalpers saw the opportunity to profit off of this campaign and began buying up Zhen Guo Li drinks. They then throw away the contents and the bottle, selling the caps to fans at extremely high prices.
Scandalous Rumors Around Top Youth With You Contestant
Prior to the show being cancelled, contestant Tony Yu or Yu Jingtian (余景天) suddenly quit the show. This surprised lots of people as he was often the top-ranked contestant with the most audience votes. So of course this also drove additional buzz about the show on Weibo’s hot topic ranking board.
Rumors stated that it was discovered that Tony’s parents run a KTV that had been caught up in illegal activities. There were also other voices saying Tony himself takes drugs. At the moment, we don’t know if any of this is true but it appears the rumors had gotten so bad that Yu had to leave the show because of “health purposes”.
Source: 163.com.
Crazy Idol Culture Is Not Encouraged In China
If an idol can bring positive effects for his/her fans, then there is no harm following him/her. But the government highly discourages fans blindly following an idol just because of his/her look and spending a lot of money supporting the idol.
The idol culture in those contest shows is even crazier than usual because of the relationship that fans feel like they have with the idol. They support their idols at the very beginning, before idols become famous. Fans see the growth and development of their idols and have deeper engagement with them, which means when it comes to support, whether it is voting or financial support, fans are more than willing to spend money for their idols.
On the bright side, this is a happy thing for idols, their entertainment agencies, and brands who are sponsoring them. But on most occasions, excessive support causes waste, such as the milk being thrown away.
Working with idol shows and young idols can be very lucrative for brands, but it is also full of risk, especially because their fans tend to be young, impressionable, and immature. Brands should be cautious when working with these new celebrities and think through the potential side effects of their campaigns.
Read more: 《青春有你3》暂停录制：偶像失格还是打投失当？
