Anna Melnova — Growth & P&L Executive, CMO at Lesta Games. From 2019 to 2022: Marketing Director, then VP of Growth at AliExpress Russia. Effie Russia 2022 winner in Brand Experience Online & Offline for the "Loudest Sale" 11.11 campaign.
When people ask me about 11.11, they usually expect to hear about GMV records or the moment everything explodes on the night of November 10th. That part is real. But it's not the point.
The point is what happens six weeks before the start — and what isn't visible from the outside. That's where the decisions get made that determine whether a sale will be just another discounting event or a cultural moment that audiences remember and look forward to the following year.
I worked through several 11.11 cycles at AliExpress Russia. In 2020–2021 we took the top Effie prize in Brand Experience Online & Offline — for the "Loudest Sale" campaign. That wasn't a lucky idea. It was the output of a fairly rigorous system. That system is what I want to write about here.
Why 11.11 Is a Product, Not a Promotion
The most common mistake I see: brands treat a major sale as an amplified version of regular promotional activity. Bigger discount, more banners, longer flight. That's a losing strategy — especially when the competitive field is crowded and everyone is doing roughly the same thing.
At AliExpress, 11.11 was a standalone product with its own identity, narrative, and user experience. It had a visual language that evolved each year. Its own engagement mechanics — not just "discounts are waiting," but a reason to open the app before the sale even started and actually do something. In 2020 we built a "screaming" mechanic: users literally screamed into the app, and the volume of their scream determined the size of their bonus. Three million screams, twelve and a half million users on sale day, and an Effie.
But more important than the result is the logic: we weren't amplifying a discount message, we were creating an event. The sale became a pretext — scream, earn a bonus, win a prize — rather than a storefront with red price tags.
The principle I took from this: a major sale functions like a product. It needs positioning, a user journey, and a retention hook. Remove those three elements and you're left with a discount. And a discount can always be beaten by a competitor the next morning.
Campaign Architecture: 60 Days Out
In the year we won the Effie, I often heard from colleagues: "Great idea with the screaming." But the idea was the last thing that mattered. Before the idea came six weeks of work that's invisible from the outside.
First: aligning the economics. A sale is always a P&L story — how much GMV we want to drive, what share of sales will come from promotional items, what budget is justified at a given margin. Without this framework, any creative idea floats in the air. You can't defend it internally and you can't scale it.
Second: synchronising supply and demand. Sale marketing fails if the category teams haven't prepared enough inventory at promotional prices, or if logistics isn't ready for peak load. At the CMO level, this means literally sitting in joint meetings with category managers and the operations team eight weeks out — not two.
Third: media architecture. I'm fundamentally against launching a flat media plan across the entire campaign period. Our approach at AliExpress was different: building in waves. First wave — warmup and intrigue (3–4 weeks out). Second wave — mechanic announcement and engagement (1–2 weeks out). Third wave — final sprint on day X. Each wave had its own KPI and its own channel mix. OLV for reach, digital for conversion, PR and influencers for cultural context.
Fourth — and this is something rarely talked about — the content factory. At campaign peak we needed dozens of formats simultaneously: banners, stories, video for different platforms, email, push. If you start producing this two weeks out, you're already late. The production calendar is part of campaign architecture, not an appendix to it.
Creative That Cuts Through (Without Inverting Your ROI)
The 11.11 market in Russia went from being AliExpress's near-monopoly to a crowded competitive field over a few years. Ozon, Wildberries, major retailers — everyone began activating around the date. November media noise became one of the highest of the year. In that environment, "more media spend" doesn't solve the problem — it just gets more expensive.
The only strategy that works is building an idea that generates earned media and user-created content. So that people are talking about your sale, not just hearing about it in ads.
The screaming mechanic worked exactly like this: it was absurd, physically engaging, and highly shareable. People filmed themselves screaming and posted it. That wasn't planned UGC — it was an organic reaction to the mechanic. And earned impressions ended up multiplying the effect of paid many times over.
There's a principle I've tested across multiple campaigns: the best marketing creative is the kind that creates behaviour, not just perception. If someone has done something — screamed, shared, invited a friend — they're already invested in the event. Their conversion to purchase is fundamentally higher than that of someone who merely saw a banner.
A separate story is the "Alibox" capsule we created for 11.11 as a PR object — a sound-insulated work pod with everything needed to work from home, winnable during the sale. It wasn't the "main idea" of the campaign — it was a tool for creating a media hook several days before the launch. It worked precisely because it was specific, unexpected, and inherently conversational.
The balance that's hardest to hold: between creative boldness and P&L effectiveness. Creatively loud, commercially sound. That's the formula I tested every time. An idea that doesn't drive revenue is beautiful but useless. An idea that only drives revenue works once and then drowns when a competitor clones it.
What I Would Do Differently Today
If I were launching 11.11 in 2026, I'd change several things.
More emphasis on personalised pre-sale journeys. At AliExpress we worked at massive reach, but communication personalisation was constrained by the tools available at the time. Today the infrastructure allows for fundamentally different pre-sale journeys for different segments: new user, lapsed customer, active buyer, VIP. Each should receive a different narrative and a different offer.
Omnichannel as a system, not a set of channels. In 2020–2021 we built a 360-degree campaign and launched AliExpress LIVE, but integration across channels was more about message synchronisation than user experience synchronisation. We aligned what we said, but we didn't align the journey. Today I would build cross-channel flow more rigorously — from the first OLV impression to the final push notification on day X — as one continuous stream, not parallel activations running alongside each other.
Post-sale as a distinct campaign phase. This is my biggest regret from those years. We invested everything into pre-sale and in-day, then switched off on November 12th. But a user who made their first purchase on 11.11 is in the most receptive state imaginable for a second. I would now build a separate 2–3 week stream for converting those new users into repeat buyers.
Fewer channels, more depth. In a large organisation there's always pressure to "claim territory" on every platform during a major event. That's a dilution mistake. Two or three channels executed at a high level outperform ten channels executed at average. Prioritisation is not a resource constraint — it's strategic discipline.
Lessons That Transfer to Any Major Sale
Several years have passed since I was directly running 11.11. But the principles I took from that experience remain relevant — regardless of platform, category, or scale.
1. A sale is a brand event, not a discount mechanic. Audiences don't remember the size of the discount — they remember what they did or felt that day. Mega-sale branding is an investment in making sure people come back to you next year rather than a competitor.
2. Economics before ideas. The P&L framework for the sale needs to be locked before you start on creative. Otherwise you risk falling in love with an idea you can't defend at the business level.
3. Earned media is the only way to scale without proportional budget growth. Mechanics that generate organic behaviour — virality, UGC, PR hooks — aren't a "nice bonus." In a high-noise media environment, they're a strategic necessity.
4. Operational readiness is part of marketing. The best campaign in the world won't save you if the app goes down under load or inventory sells out by noon. A CMO is responsible for making sure this conversation happens with the operations team well in advance.
5. After the event is also an event. The 2–3 weeks following a major sale are a conversion window for the new audience you just acquired. Closing the campaign on day X means leaving money on the table.
Major sales are one of the most demanding marketing formats I know. They require strategic thinking, operational precision, and cultural instinct simultaneously. When all three align, you get what Effie judges call a brand experience. When they don't — you get a loud week with discounts.