The encyclopedia · Advertising & PR · Marketing decision · 2025
A Qingdao ointment seller scripted a mini-drama where the product cured blocked meridians
Komanqi Trading dressed a livestream ad as a story — pain, ointment, meridians unblocked on cue — Qingdao's regulator called it a fake medical claim.
Komanqi Trading
What happened
Komanqi Trading (青岛科曼奇商贸) sold a topical ointment through livestream shopping channels. Rather than list ingredients or file for a medical claim, the company scripted a short fictional drama for its livestream ads: a character in pain, the ointment applied, relief following as the story's resolution — with the product credited on-screen with unblocking the body's meridians, a traditional-medicine claim no ordinary topical product is licensed to make.
The format mattered as much as the claim. A testimonial ad reads as marketing and a viewer discounts it accordingly; a mini-drama reads as a story, and a story's ending — the pain relieved — lands as a fact the plot demonstrated rather than a claim the seller asserted. Regulators had flagged the same structure in traditional-medicine-adjacent products before: dramatize the cure so the audience never has to evaluate the sentence 'this product unblocks your meridians' as a sentence.
Qingdao's market regulator fined Komanqi ¥100,000 in March 2025 for the fictionalized medical claim, one of five livestream-commerce cases the national market regulator circulated that spring as examples of tactics under active enforcement.
Why it happened
- Wrapping a medical claim in a dramatized scene doesn't change what the claim is — it changes how skeptically the audience reads it, which is the entire reason to wrap it.
- A claim too regulated to say directly in an ad is too regulated to say indirectly through a character in one.
The lesson
If a claim needs a story to carry it past a regulator or a skeptical viewer, the story is doing the work an approved label isn't allowed to do.
Sources
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