The Campaign

Content calendars; with their pre-planned agendas were not going to cut it. To make Asian millennials see past the surface of a “kids movie”, we needed them to identify with the film and see it as relevant to their life. We picked out their passions, the issues they were most connecting with, and who they were rooting for. We discovered that the Miss Universe beauty pageant is like the Superbowl in the Philippines. We discovered that café hopping is a pastime in Singapore. We used tidbits like these to customise all creative ideas to resonate with the ASEAN millennial. We created an outbreak of localised content – a barrage of targeted stories that had our fans believing that Disney, a global company associated principally with Western stories, were finally talking directly to them – the Asian fan. We didn’t just invite millennials into Zootopia, we brought Zootopia to them.

Creative Execution

Following our idea of bringing Zootopia into the ASEAN, each market evolved independently. Building from our hero content, we developed stories and engaged customers in their favourite social channels (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) and around the topics that mattered in their location. We shared salutations for EDSA Day. We tapped into pop culture like the hit band The Sam Willows in Singapore, and the TV show “Rap Is Now” in Thailand. We spoke to audiences at key times and with messages that fit their daily activities, like when we shared a video of Chief Bogo telling people to “Get Back to Work” just after lunchtime. In the end, we created 436 unique pieces of content and generated 371M engagements with people liking, sharing, even participate in singalongs to Shakira – all to help spread the excitement.

Generating upwards of 371 million engagements across our six key markets, we successfully surpassed our media strategy forecast and objectives 125 million engagements. The campaign acquired 355K new fans for Disney social channels in the region, with our target millennial demographic making up over 90%. Overall, 17 million unique fans engaged with our the campaign, again with millennials making up 76.5% proving that we could create relevance in a demographic group beyond young kids and their moms. All of this contributed to Disney's highest grossing global opening weekend and the #3 Disney film release in Southeast Asian history.

Disney needed a social strategy to reach millennials in all of their ASEAN markets, including Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. Knowing localisation was key to resonating with ASEAN audiences, we took a two-pronged approach, looking at targeting both media buying and localised content – leveraging real-time, trending topics in each of our markets. Through social listening, we identified the highest trending topics amongst ASEAN millennials, and developed content that spoke right to the heart of the story. Merging global film assets with local market events and news-jacking, we were able to seamlessly enter the world of the audience. Leveraging whatever millennials were talking about, and quickly turning around posts about trending celebrities, pop-culture news, and daily hot topics, we found interesting conversations in every market and dove in – becoming part of the story.