The Campaign

Branded Entertainment is just beginning to become well-used in China where this film was shown. In China, there are fairly strict censorship laws, restricting any kind of entertainment that doesn't follow the guidelines of the state in terms of violence, sexual promiscuity, or events or conduct that would seem detrimental to society. This is, of course, why most of the programming in China, branded or otherwise, tends to be on the bland side.

Results

The GM Buick Encore proposition is 'the fun of exploring'. But when the target for this campaign, post 1980s-born Chinese, think about exploring, they usually think video games. So the campaign needed to trigger something unexpected. The insight was when they were kids, they spent a lot of time exploring their neighborhood streets, which was their playground. So the campaign leveraged this insight to create the biggest ever game of Hide 'n' Seek, right there in the streets where they used to play. But this location-based mobile app reinvented the traditional kids' game by playing Hide 'n' Seek for a virtual Buick Encore across 16 Chinese cities, and in the end giving away 16 new Buick Encores.

There was an online TV show which created buzz around the game and got people interested. In fact, over half a million viewed it. To start playing, users had to create a login, so we pushed them to use their weibo (China's twitter) account. This would automatically send a feed to their Weibo page mentioning that they had just started playing the game and inviting others to join them. While they were playing, at every capture of the car, their phone would take a photo of where the virtual car was found and automatically post it to Weibo with a message indicated they had just found the car.

Over 487,000 downloaded the app, making it a top 20 app for 7 weeks running. The virtual Encore was hidden over 8,500 times, The campaign received over 4 million comments and retweets, increased Encore followers more than 30% (65,000 added), and hit the 6-month sales target just 6 weeks after the game began.