Chips Ahoy Makes Digital Move in China on April Fools

Chips Ahoy deployed real time marketing to debut its digital launch in the country.

Chips Ahoy rolls out its first digital campaign in China dominating major local search and social platforms Baidu, Tencent, and Sina on April Fools’ Day.

The 24-hour campaign unveiled on April 1 targeted the post-80s young adults demographic in the country’s top-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.

A key component of the campaign was to deploy a real-time “hijack strategy” where a team of social specialists led by Wang Fan, head of Carat Social were housed together with clients to pick up hot topics and reacted accordingly as well as created visual content to hype up conversations online.

“One of the topics that garnered a lot of attention was the Chips Ahoy (Chipper) cushion which became so sought after by netizens that the selling price of it on Taobao propelled to RMB888 within a day,” Stella Jaime Lui, general manager at Carat digital notes.

American confectionery Mondelez International aims to assure local millennials, often socially pressured to be perfect, that it is all right to be unconventional through its Chipper brand mascot, a cookie with quirky personality.

Centered on the notion of “Don’t be too serious, just have fun (Chips Ahoy!),” Carat China secured a partnership with Baidu so that Internet users searching for April Fools’ Day related content would be able to see visuals of the brand campaign on the leading engine’s image section for the day.

baidu

On the social front, Chips Ahoy communicated to the bulk of its target audience through Tencent weibo. The brand does not have an official Sina weibo account but leveraged on relevant and influential KOLs (key opinion leaders) to help amplify the buzz on the day.

 tencent

For example, the agency seeded astonishing news headers such as “woman made to change her identity card after losing 25 kg post-diet” or “female in china asking for RMB 200,000 as starting bid for match making session” across social platforms on Tencent and Sina Weibo that would transit into the campaign tagline.

The digital campaign also integrates with TV through a Chips Ahoy branded content sponsorship on the local popular 80s talk show featuring celebrity host Wang Zhi Jian.

Chips Ahoy used April Fool’s day to launch its original content recruitment from netizens to submit their creation via its Tencent weibo account, which will be an on-going activity for the year as with its partnership with the TV show. The TV station will be able to adopt original and strong submissions to be used as the script for one of the episodes for the talk show that the cookie brand has sponsored, Lui explains.

Additionally, Chips Ahoy serves as the launchpad for video pockets, a new video viewing solution from Carat, which embeds content into a micro TVC or video compatible across multiple platforms.

videopocket
At different stages when the Chips Ahoy video is playing, a user can click on the content that opens up another video for viewing and the ability to share it with other users on their social networks through Weibo and Renren.

Because 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.

Video pockets allow content to appear within content to enable viewers to capture information at a glance, Lui said in a statement.

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