The Campaign

The creative brief was for an integrated campaign to drive awareness and recruit followers to GOblue social media, opening up a channel for education and engagement. But even if everyone in China were to adopt sky- friendly habits, it would be a long time before they see an impact on the nation’s skies. Without the promise of measurable impact on air pollution, how could we motivate people to engage with GOblue, and recruit a community of followers ready to change?

Creative Execution

The Hairy Nose campaign was distributed in China on TV, online, and OOH platforms starting February 2016. We launched with a viral video distributed through online networks with key promotional space including Tencent Video, Bilibili, Youku, Meipai, Eyepetizer, and more. Then, we followed up with OOH campaign in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, featuring outdoor billboards, subway billboards and outdoor LED screens, including a high visibility media placement on The Bund, the most visited destination in China. In April, we released a digital sticker set for WeChat, China’s largest social media, and a photo customization H5 site leading to education assets. To date, the campaign has been aired on 11 TV networks, 7 outdoor/mobile LED screen networks (with confirmed 500+ screens), as well as at least 350 outdoor/subway billboards.

The first week, the viral video earned 1.25 million views. Our WeChat sticker set earned over 30 000 downloads and over 100 000 shares, making the #3 most shared set on WeChat that week. Until April 20 2016, trackable online video views on Chinese websites reached 1.7 million views and internationally reached over 160,000 views on Youtube and Vimeo. Millions of viewers will have seen the outdoor billboards in Shanghai and Beijing. Over 15 international media outlets including BBC, the Guardian, and South China Morning Post also reported on the campaign, forwarded by over 17 domestic Chinese media outlets. And most importantly, followers of GOblue increased more than 600%.

The objective of this campaign was to create awareness and recruit followers for GOblue, a low- carbon lifestyle initiative by WildAID China. The call to action was to follow GOblue on social media, creating a direct relationship with the brand for ongoing low- carbon lifestyle education and behavior change. The campaign was all about generating a measurable response and creating a one- to- one channel for brand engagement, and as such is relevant for Integrated Spikes.

Our target was affluent young Chinese urbanites in major cities, a group open to change, and influential to lifestyle trends in China. GOblue commissioned several reports on air pollution in China, covering the contributing factors to air pollution, and the motivations and barriers to the adoption of low carbon mobility choices among Chinese urbanites. Data revealed that individual habit change would not have an impact on China’s air pollution problem without policy change on a macro level. The target was well aware of the problem, but without the promise of impact, felt lifestyle changes were too impractical to consider. Facing these barriers, our approach was to make the problem personal. Less about promising macro impact, and more about dramatizing how air pollution is already changing our lifestyle. The call to action was to change air pollution before it changes you.