The Campaign

A popular line from a Chinese movie goes, "only kids judge between right and wrong, adults always weigh gain and loss." This is exactly a true portrayal of China's advertising industry. Some brands assert their own interests so much as to ignore business ethics and harm the interests of agencies, and that explains why it’s common to see them poaching ideas from free pitches and delaying payment. Though our client broke the contract and abandoned the film, we decided to pay out of our own pocket to get the film completed and released online.

Execution

On May.21st, we launched the abandoned film on wechat and KARMA official site, including showcasing all related creative materials such as subway posters, script, online posters, etc.

With zero media budget, we released the film on KARMA’s official WeChat account. Within 1 week, the film got 304,000 views and created an SNS buzz in the entire China’s marketing circle. It also attracted free forwarding from 130 media outlets in the advertising industry, and its PR value estimates at RMB 192,000. Thanks to KARMA’s action, media started to discuss how to ensure the cooperation process to be done ‘right and fair’ between clients and agencies, with heads of various advertising agencies joining in the discussion. China's advertising environment will not become perfect overnight, but at least we are on the way to improving it.

The Situation

In China, it’s not surprising to see advertisers discarding agencies' proposals, poaching ideas from free pitches and delaying payment. When encountering such misfortune, most agencies will make the decision based on business interest just as normal adults do.Unfortunately, in early 2017, KARMA suffered such an unscrupulous incident.But facing the dilemma, we made a not-so-mature decision.That is we paying out of our own pocket to get the film launched.With things as such, we decided to let the whole industry hear our voice and see what we have done, to know there are advertising people can stick to their faith.

The Strategy

Leave aside the artistic value of the original film, releasing an abandoned film became the core creative idea of this non-profit campaign. So we officially released the film online with the client’s logo blurred, and made our attitude clear to the public: the client may break its promise to KARMA, but KARMA won’t do that to our contracted vendors. We need to honor our words to complete the film with our production company, director and staff involved in the project and release it. It is the best way to maintain the trust with our vendors, even though it means KARMA would suffer economic losses. Taking this opportunity, KARMA would like to speak out to the whole advertising industry, "it is much more important to do right things rather than do profitable things."