The Campaign

Insight: Our audience love reading about the change makers investing their time and ideas into creating a better future, especially in the areas of space, science, and sustainable living. In order to present Huawei to our audience as an innovator for the world’s future, we looked at the top performing subject areas in our vertical BBC future and across BB’s Tech index. We then selected from that some KOL’s who appealed to a diverse range of our audience segments, and who embodied the heart of Huawei’s mission, to explore and further the human race, and developed four films with accompanying articles on an interactive content hub.

Creative Execution

‘The Explorers’ stories, as told by Huawei and StoryWorks, illuminate human endeavors that personify the brands’ key values. The stories feature a creative mathematician, a naturalist and scientist, a humanitarian astronaut, and two young environmentalists in 4 x2 minute documentary shorts, with 4 x 60 and 30 second cut down teasers that drove traffic to the main campaign site. Each piece of content corresponds to Huawei’s values and adds a tangible human element to an illusive brand value. The brand also utilized these videos to launch their brand at major IT events like IFA and CES. Content was also shared in social media optimized bits to drive brand engagement. Through stories and across platforms, we helped Huawei shift its perception to a global trusted brand.

‘The Explorers’ stories, as told by Huawei and StoryWorks, illuminate human endeavors that personify the brands’ key values. Each piece of content adds a tangible human element to an illusive brand value, resulting in over 18 million video views and substantial impacts on all Huawei’s key brand KPI’s - Identified high levels of subconscious positivity towards Huawei – creating a deeper emotional relationship. - Increased recall to 50% - a high cut through rate for all audiences - ‘Girls Protecting Paradise’ was able to spur audiences into direct action to investigate the brand - Increased overall brand awareness by 19% - 73% uplift in positivity towards Huawei amongst BBC consumers - Likelihood to recommend Huawei increased by 49% for BBC readers - Considering Huawei as a product increased by 71% after being exposed to the content

As Huawei struggled with both brand awareness and reputational issues, their traditional marketing, even that with high profile celebrities on high impact platforms had failed to create the change to perception they were looking for, they needed to communicate through a platform that had a trusted relationship with their audience, through content that added real interest and value to it's audience. The explorers series looked beyond Huawei's own messaging to the maths and engineering that is shaping our world in new ways, to sustainability, to one of the biggest issues in all our hearts and minds, unity versus nationalism.

A main challenges of the campaign was to ensure the stories we told through the eyes of polymaths, scientists, astronauts and exceptional teenagers remained relatable and interesting. As a multimarket campaign, we tapped into universal themes to ensure our audience would not be alienated by the subjects of videos. The second challenge was to communicate Huawei’s message without pushing Huawei sales messages. We over came these challenges by tapping into messages of hope, dreams, and adventures. We captured the passions of these incredible individuals into short, engaging stories that reflected the client’s key message. StoryWorks used findings from BBC’s Science of Engagement (SOE) study and our editorial insights to ideate on a content series that would deliver emotional impact. Using Huawei’s corporate values and the SOE's learnings we were able to develop content that will resonate with BBC audience and Huawei’s target demographic. We also optimized content for multiple platforms.