JD Says Sorry for Controversial Loan Adverts, Puts Them Down to Bad Team Culture
Dou Shicong
DATE:  Dec 18 2020
/ SOURCE:  Yicai
JD Says Sorry for Controversial Loan Adverts, Puts Them Down to Bad Team Culture JD Says Sorry for Controversial Loan Adverts, Puts Them Down to Bad Team Culture

(Yicai Global) Dec. 18 -- JD Finance and its parent company have apologized in recent days for a series of controversial adverts the lender released online.

The internet finance platform of Chinese e-commerce giant JD.Com launched the adverts on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and immediately drew flak for their vulgar, seriously misleading and discriminatory content.

In the ads, wealthy-looking individuals ask low-income workers such as migrant laborers and food delivery staff for their mobile phones. They then show them JD Finance’s online loan products offering generous credit lines and low interest rates. The commercials are suspected of deliberately concealing loan risks and encouraging low-income groups to live beyond their means.

JD Finance issued an apology on Dec. 15, stating that it had taken down the videos which it admitted were inappropriate due to poor team management and lax censorship. Beijing-based JD.Com apologized last night, saying that the incident was also a problem with the relevant department’s team culture. It has authorized special investigators to look into the root cause and punish relevant managers and other individuals.

The emergence of similar adverts was essentially the result of agencies competing for long-tail customers, Dong Ximiao, chief researcher at the Zhongguancun Internet Finance Institute, told Yicai Global. Such commercials are designed to harvest low-income groups with lower risk awareness via means of a vulgar production style, embedded in short video platforms represented by Kuaishou and Douyin.

More attention should be paid to regulating marketing campaigns and protecting the rights of consumers with relatively poor financial knowledge, instead of inducing or even misleading them, Dong said.

JD Finance, founded in 2013 on the basis of JD’s e-commerce platform, has grown its business over the years to cover supply chain finance, consumer loans, payments, wealth management and insurance, with an official user count of 400 million.

Editor: Peter Thomas

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Keywords:   Jd.Com,Online Loan,Vulgar Advertisement