The Campaign

Our core target audience, male car owners from 25-44, have a special relationship with their cars. Our research indicated that these motorists are more competitive than other segments. This attitude translates into their mentality on the road: they believe they are better drivers than most and that they also know more about cars than most. Incidentally, this machismo also manifests into their views on gender roles, reinforcing a commonly held stereotype in China that men are better drivers than women. Many even think of women as “road killers”, according to a Tencent online survey! We knew that our audience innately have a deep care for their vehicles, so we knew they’d be open to choose Helix if our communications broke through. Our past functional communications failed to do so, thus we are elevating to an emotional level to challenge their misconceptions around female drivers & motor oil.

Creative Execution

We partnered up with iQiyi, China’s largest online video platform for our audience. We built our execution around China's two biggest winter online shopping festivals, Double 11 and Double 12. These are the days (and weeks) during which our audience has the highest intention to buy automotive care products – so this is when we had to win! In partnership with iQiyi, we created three 10-minute “Top Gear” style episodes. Each episode focused on a different competitive challenge relating to winter performance, pitting both drivers against each other and enabling us to talk about the most commonly experienced engine problems: - Racing speed - Snow drifting - Wilderness expedition To build initial hype around our campaign, we created a series of cut-downs to be placed on the newest short clip channels such as DouYin and MiaoPai. And of course, we leveraged the country’s key social platform, Weibo, to amplify views.

With a comparatively tiny budget, we generated a total of over 40 million video views for the whole series – 2x more than the most popular variety show on iQiyi during the same period! A tremendous 25% of all views came from organic sharing, demonstrating impressively how relevant and engaging our content really was. A great content campaign doesn't just deliver on quantity – it also generates quality views. The average time spent on each 10-minute episode was 6.4 minutes with a completion rate of over 50%. This is 20% higher than all benchmarks for branded content. Finally, our campaign was highly effective. We saw drastic increases across brand metrics: - Weibo buzz index for keyword “Shell” increased by +99% - CTR to watch our content was 2.5%, +150% above the benchmark - Compared to the previous year, traffic to Shell's own e-Store was up +250%

IQiyi is one of the largest online video website in China. With the aid of their professional shooting team, Shell can present a high quality video episode and spread rapidly among users.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

DEBUNK MISCONCEPTIONS Challenge the common perceptions that: - All motor oil are the same - Men are superior drivers We selected an alpha male celebrity, Jiang Jinfu, one of the most competitive celebrities in China (i.e. he played in the 2017 NBA All Star Game). A true role model for our competitive audience. We took our idea even futher, to break expectations. We paired him up with someone completely unexpected – one of the best stunt drivers in China, Hua Tingting … who happens to be a woman. We intentionally chose a female driver because if she could show the male host a thing or two about driving, then we would be able to tell our audience a thing or two about their cars surviving the winter. And hopefully change their perception of female drivers & motor oil.