ASIA-PACIFIC – CHINA, APRIL 1, 2013 – Chips Ahoy! China assures high-strung city dwellers in the Middle Kingdom that it is perfectly alright to be Chipper, through an integrated digital campaign, on April Fool’s Day.
Based on the consumer insight that young adults in China’s top-tier cities are highly pressured by societal expectations to be “conventionally perfect”, Chips Ahoy! tells consumers otherwise through the appearance of Chipper – the unconventionally shaped cookie with a quirky personality. Chipper will appear across all of China’s digital and social media platforms beginning midnight of April 1.
Carat China, the agency behind the strategy and execution of the integrated digital effort ‘Don’t Be Too Serious, Just Have Fun (Chips Ahoy!)’, launched the campaign by strategically placing Chipper across all of China’s most highly-used digital and social media platforms, to resonate with the product’s target consumers.
“Carat China has rich knowledge of consumer’s digital habits, knowing exactly where they dwell virtually 24/7. We are delighted with their clever, innovative media execution,” said Rasheed Zhao, marketing manager for media, Mondelez China.
Search and Social Media Execution
Part of the holistic digital campaign includes the use of social and search. These include seeding of “astonishing news headlines” across China’s largest search engine and social media platforms such as Baidu, Tencent and Sina. Based on their publicly available profile information, users will see news headers on their banners, which will later transit into the campaign tagline, “Don’t Be Too Serious, Just Have Fun (Chips Ahoy!)”. These headlines include, “Woman Made to Change Her Identity Card After Losing 25 kg Post-Diet”, “Influenced by Movie Star, 4 Year Old Child in England Starts Diet”, “Female in China asking for RMB200,000 as Starting Bid for Match Making Session”, among others.
“Our rationale for using search and social as a key execution tool for the campaign is simple – in addition to search engines, Chinese consumers are increasingly turning to social media such as Weibo and WeChat as their primary news source. For some, it is the first platform they turn to when they wake up each morning and the last platform they see before they catch their forty winks,” said Wang Fan, head of Carat Social.
China’s largest search engine, Baidu, has also signed up with Chips Ahoy!, featuring visuals of the campaign at Baidu Images for a full 24 hours.
In partnership with Carat China, Chips Ahoy! also rolled out ‘Video Pockets’, where additional content is embedded into a micro-TVC or video. This is a new video viewing solution compatible across multiple platforms, making it a media first in China.
“We are very pleased to be able to use the Chips Ahoy! April Fool’s Day campaign as a launch pad for Video Pockets. Consumers no longer view their screens in a mono-dimensional way. Their attention spans are shorter and they stay on a webpage for a shorter period of time. Hence the birth of ‘Video Pockets’, which allows content to appear within content, enabling viewers to capture information at a glance,” said Stella Jamie Lui, general manager of Carat Digital.
In addition to the digital campaign, Chips Ahoy! will be also sponsoring the popular 80s Talk Show.
The digital campaign closes at 11.59pm tonight. Experience it here: http://t.qq.com/zhiyaoquduoduo
