Results and Effectiveness

Within short span of 2 weeks, we reached over 90% of Renren users – 7x more than average RenRen campaign. This was a first for the social networking site; an unprecedented feat with such a small budget. Over 3.7 million people participated and more than 2.6 million of them played tricks.This participation rate is 430% higher than RenRen’s average benchmark. Consumers loved this idea, spreading the word and chatting about it – we found more than 320,000 pages on Baidu (China’s #1 search site) about this campaign, all completely user generated. What a busy April Fool’s for Red & Yellow!

Creative Execution

April Fool’s proved to be ideal for showcasing M&M’s spokescandies Red & Yellow’s fun, silly, and sometimes cheeky personalities. Using the most popular social network among Chinese youth – RenRen, we created an M&M’s app which enabled users to play tricks right on their friends’ profile pages. The app was promoted via a prominent online box unit throughout RenRen. When clicked, it asked users if they wanted to play an April Fool’s joke on their friends. From there, they selected the friend they wanted to fool and chose from one of three profile page-altering tricks - switching their profile pictures, posting prank messages, or shooting down their page using an M&M’s chocolates gun. Also, there was a little twist. Randomly chosen, the trickster could be the one being tricked! To spread the fun and to increase participation, all this activity was automatically posted to users’ status updates.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

M&M’s is a highly differentiated global brand known for its fun, irresistible image and personality, and especially its “spokescandies” Red & Yellow. Unfortunately, this brand image doesn’t extend to China mostly due to inconsistency in marketing and advertising support since its launch in 1990. We needed to drive awareness and amplify M&M’s fun, irresistible brand image in China. Chinese youth, the post 90s generation, are highly influenced by western culture, and have the same, if not even higher connectivity with their friends via social networks. Western culture – music, fashion, movies and even western holidays, are very appealing to them. Holidays such as April’s Fool, Christmas and Valentine’s Day are seen as another excuse for celebrating, having fun and enjoying time with their friends. This insight is the core of our idea. We chose to join in, and actually help fuel the fun spirit of April Fool’s Day.