5 best WeChat campaigns of 2016
Imagine Zhu Yuanzhang, the emperor of Ming Dynasty, coming to life from an ancient painting and starting to sing rap, taking funny selfies and posting on his WeChat Moments.
This is a campaign launched by the Forbidden city in collaboration with Tencent team to promote Next Idea, a creativity competition. It went viral on WeChat hours after its launch. The QQ emoji mentioned during the campaign hit 800 million downloads within just two days.
Why such a big hit?
Besides the creative combination of modern and ancient art and the catchy music, the campaign has a clear structure. It also has a clear call to action.
Emperor Zhu takes the audience through several features of WeChat (WeChat Moments, short video and WeChat Moments) and QQ (QQ emojis, QQ mail, video feature).
The call to action takes users to the Next Idea website. The campaign also has a clear target of a young and creative crowd: game developers, smart hardware designers, emoji artists, dancers, graphic designers and even cartoon artists.
Scan to view the Forbidden City campaign
Besides this memorable WeChat campaign, the Forbidden City has also done a great job at attracting a young audience on Weibo. It posts pictures that users can use as background screens.
It also posts combinations of paintings with contemporary art and funny comments.
Fenda is a WeChat-based Q&A platform. 24 days after its launch in the middle of May, it had finished its series A funding round with a 100 million valuation.
Using Fenda, you can answer a questions raised by your WeChat friends and earn money. The campaign was kicked off with online celebrities, investors and other experts to answer questions about anything within 60 seconds. And since anyone can be and expert of something, the campaign soon spread at an incredible rate. It was joined by a lot of doctors, teachers and scientists.
Wang Sicong, the son of the richest man in China, made 260,000 RMB by answering 32 questions, including this one: “Is there anything you cannot afford as the son of the richest man in Asia?”
Scan to view Fenda Q&A Platform
The BMW M2 campaign went viral for a couple of reasons.
This is a great example of "click-bait" title and thumbnail picture. The articles starts with “this news has just been deleted by BMW” with a classic WeChat warning sign after an article is censored. That’s enough to drive the users to click on Read More to see the campaign. The campaign reached 100,000 page view after 2 hours of launch thanks to this attractive title.
The campaign starts from a H5 copying the design of a WeChat article. The article is torn-off to give way to an exciting video presenting the latest BMW model. BMW is here using a now classic technique of creating a "fake" article and surprising the user by revealing an H5. The key is however in the outstanding design of the overall campaign which takes the user smoothly from the first click to the final action call.
Scan to view this BMW campaign
Douban is a popular review based social network. And this is Douban's first ad campaign since its launch in 2005. The campaign was created by creative agency W. It is unique since it does not follow any of the conventional H5 rules. It is a puzzle game which requires users to click on almost everything on the screen to access the next round.
This might be the first ever WeChat H5 campaign that:
Requires users to click that many times in order to get to the "download App" page
Has 5 levels of separate puzzles that users have to pass through
The unique setting of the campaign is especially appealing to Douban users since a large group of the users are book lovers who love to solve puzzles.
Scan this to play on your phone
Tencent launched a viral campaign at the beginning of the year. After a simple WeChat login, each user could get a list of data points about their own WeChat account. For example:
User's first WeChat friend
The number of WeChat red envelopes a user has ever send and received
The city user visited the most during last year
This campaign was so popular that it went viral even before the official release: a beta version of the campaign got leaked from WeChat internal team and soon was spread all over WeChat Moments.
The key take away from this campaign is WeChat users love a personal customized campaign, they love data, and they also love to show off on WeChat Moments. Brands could combine these elements to engineer the next viral campaign.
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