In the annals of television history, China's “Tmall Double-11 Night Carnival” might go down as the watershed moment when 21st century retailing geniuses first truly fused online shopping and entertainment into one awe-inspiring juggernaut of consumerism.
More cynical types may see the star-studded, three-hour live broadcast — created by e-commerce behemoth Alibaba and featuring celebrities such as 007 actor Daniel Craig, “House of Cards” star Kevin Spacey and singer Adam Lambert — as the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it.
A combination of the Grammys, the Oscars, a game show, the Home Shopping Networkand Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve — all counting down to China's equivalent ofBlack Friday or Cyber Monday — the program was created by Alibaba to stoke interest in “Double 11,” a newfangled Chinese holiday also known as Singles Day.
The Nov. 11 event, which originated in the 1990s as a sort of anti-consumerist Valentine's Day for the singles set, has quickly become China's biggest shopping day of the year, thanks to a blitzkrieg of publicity efforts by Alibaba starting in 2009.
This year, Alibaba said total transaction volume on its Tmall.com platform alone hit $14.4 billion on Wednesday, far ahead of last year's record $9.3 billion. By comparison, U.S. retail store sales reached $9.1 billion on last year's Black Friday and about $53 billion for the entire Thanksgiving weekend, including online sales through Cyber Monday.
http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fi-alibaba-china-double-11-singles-day-shopping-20151111-story.html
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