Creative Execution

2 days before the dinner, we posted QiongEr’s Elysée invitation on her Weibo page, and then asked her to share her real-time, true emotion while she was attending this dinner. The execution was then all about live-24h 7-managing, observing the audience’s reactions to this post to react accordingly in real-time. We noticed chinese people started addressing President Xi Jinping directly in the comments.

QiongEr’s weibo page literally turned into a digital hotline to the President Xi Jinping: people asked tons of questions to him through the comments. Due to the virality of the campaign hashtag #PleaseAskXiJinping and indeed due to this unexpected and huge number of President’s name mentions, Sina Weibo locked the repost function. In total, the whole digital campaign generated more than 5 million views, with 2.8 million views only recorded for QiongEr’s and Shang Xia’s posts.

Western and Chinese leaders are quite different. While western leaders are urged to multiply speeches and movements to justify their power, Chinese leaders don’t even need to over-signify: one single word, one single gesture is enough to be followed by a nation of 1.3 billion people. For instance, a simple picture of China’s current president Xi Jinping kicking a football during his visit in Ireland was enough to set off the construction of hundreds of stadiums in China. When QiongEr, Shang Xia’s Founder and Art Director, was invited for a dinner in French President Palace l’Elysée, at the same table with President Xi Jinping for the 50 years anniversary of Franco-Chinese relationship, it did mean a lot! Instead of publishing the traditional post-ceremony press release, we created a pre-release combined with a real-time Weibo reporting co-operation.