PepsiCo China courts crowdsourcers in 2015 CNY co-creation

Project: Bring Happiness Home 2015 (把乐带回家 2015)

Client: PepsiCo

Agencies: Civilization, Arkr Digital

Market: China

Campaign scope: TV, digital, CSR, microsite

Details: Eschewing last year's music-video treatment, Pepsi enlisted the help of award-winning director Wei-Ran Li (李蔚然) as well as China’s top celebrities to co-create with consumers an ongoing, unfinished movie about the most important festival on the Chinese calendar. Through a popular mobile video app, Mei Pai (美拍), consumers can submit 15-second videos surrounding six topics that are then curated and edited to form a tribute to family reunions. The crowdsourced final cut will be eventually simulcast on the big screen in New York’s Times Square. Two of PepsiCo’s brands, Pepsi and Lays are in focus.

According to Pepsi’s recent research, mobile phone ‘overuse’ is found to be at scale. 51 per cent of young people will use their mobile phones even in the presence of friends and relatives; and spending more time on their mobile phones and computers is what more than 45 per cent of youths will do during the Spring Festival, rather than accompany their parents. The youths physically went home as a familial obligation but their hearts did not follow, and some even regarded the trek home as a dreaded task. ‘人回家了，心没回家' is how it was described.

Since Chinese New Year reunions are precious family time, PepsiCo saw it fit to initiate a campaign to get young people out of the detested ‘lowered-head tribe’ (低头族, a societal label for people looking down at their phones all the time), but to put their phones to good use – to shoot video.

Also, a tailor-made talkshow '新年大变YOUNG' on iQiyi altered an existing program 《奇葩说：You Can You BiBi!》 to have friendly debates about the themes in PepsiCo’s campaign.

Combined with a CSR push via China Women's Development Foundation (中国妇女发展基金会), PepsiCo tried to encourage youths to care for people apart from family and friends. A donation of 200 yuan on Tencent’s mobile charity platform (腾讯公益) or iQiyi’s microsite will sponsor a parcel to be sent to needy mothers in impoverished regions with harsh living conditions.

Press release quote: PepsiCo Greater China chief marketing officer Richard Lee (李自强): "For the first time, we subverted the traditional micro-film/mini-movie/video-vignette (微电影) format. We returned the ‘right to direct’ to consumers so that every Chinese can be personally involved this year.”

Campaign Asia Pacific's comments: The insight behind the campaign centres largely around a reconciliation of family values between different generations and a desire to dictate what 'festive happiness' should be like among Chinese youths.

Nationwide campaigns for FMCG brands make little sense unless they leverage a social platform to amplify the core idea. In this case, the Mei Pai app seems perfect as it is a tool for consumers to be 'directors' of self-created video content—a parallel to the way members of the post-90s generation are coming of age to become the 'main characters' in their own families.

Chinese New Year means a lot of high-frequency marketing inundated with keywords like ‘home’, ‘holiday’, ‘spring’, ‘gift’, and it really depends how each FMCG brand applies their own-nuanced approach to the season.

The annual ‘Bring Happiness Home’ blast has evolved throughout the years, from 2012’s ‘Your return home is your parents' greatest joy’ (你回家是父母最大的快乐) to 2013’s ‘Where there is love there is home, where there is home there is joy’ (有爱的地方就有家，有家就有快乐) to 2014’s campaign advocating ‘Home is not in the distance, joy has no level of magnitude’ (家不以远近，乐无为大小).

In 2015, this year’s crowdsourcing effort is reminiscent of Pepsi capitalising on plum Super Bowl advertising slots in the past with the help of fans' user-generated content. Though not considered a breakthrough, it allows consumers to personally participate, rather than respond passively to the brand’s marketing message as in previous years.

We enjoyed watching long-time Pepsi brand ambassador Huang Xiaoming (黄晓明) staging a dumpling-making contest with his parents—certainly a more authentic interpretation of the campaign’s value than a excessively-photoshopped fashion spread.

Watch the rest here:
Show Luo 罗志祥: http: //v.youku.com/v_show/id_XODY0MTkyNTEy.html
Jolin Tsai 蔡依林: http: //v.youku.com/v_show/id_XODY0MTkxNzA0.html
Li Yi Feng 李易峰: http: //v.youku.com/v_show/id_XODY0MTkxMjIw.html
Amber Kuo 郭采洁: http: //v.youku.com/v_show/id_XODY0MTkwNzc2.html

CREDITS

Project: Bring Happiness Home 2015
Client: PepsiCo
Creative Agency: Civilization
Digital Agencies: Civilization / Arkr Digital
Social Agency: Arkr Digital
PR Agency: Bluefocus
Media Agency: Mindshare
Production Company: Perfect Life Beijing
Post-Production Companies: Digit-Digit Beijing & Hong Kong, PO Shanghai, Touches Hong Kong