The Lantern Festival is one of the biggest holidays in Taiwan with iconic traditions such as admiring illuminated lanterns, solving riddles on lanterns, ... and more.

To celebrate the festival with citizens as well as attract tourists, , the Taipei City Government hosts a 10-day exhibition with many engaging activities. From exhibiting dozens of illuminated lanterns to throwing fascinating parades, the event has successfully attracted millions of visitors every year.

However, throughout the years, the Taipei Lantern Festival has always been a one-way, walk-and-see experience with limited new highlights. Moreover, to guide all the visitors, there were hundreds of thousands of one-off printed pamphlets wasted for the event.

This year, we decided to take one step further. We wanted to enable every visitor to experience the traditional festival in a whole new way and make the event more ecologically sustainable.

To reshape the way how consumers celebrate the Lantern Festival, we digitized the experience with AI technology and utilized the power of voice assistant.

We developed a customized Actions on Google (AoG) on Google Assistant that served as everyone’s personal digital guide to the Taipei Lantern Festival. With the AoG, people could easily access all the event information and get personalized help by talking to Google Assistant on their own mobile phones.

The AoG has not only played an important role in being everyone’s professional guide, but also equipped with engaging features like solving riddles or lighting the main lantern “Twinkling Blossoms” by voice. Visitors no longer needed to use the printed pamphlet to learn about the details or get directions, they could just simply ask!

To make the idea truly helpful and relevant to visitors, our strategy was three-pronged: Discover, Create, and Promote.

Discover the needs - A good initiative always stems from consumer insights. We interviewed previous event staff to uncover more insights about target audience behaviors, frequently asked questions, ...etc.

Create the experience - Based on the findings, four key features and one user-engaging activity were identified to create a comprehensive user experience. What’s more, we enhanced the quality of AoG by getting first-hand feedback through an internal pre-launch trial.

Promote the magic - The promotion started with creating pre-launch buzz and was amplified with onsite brand ambassadors. Two press events were held with news releases to generate excitement. The Taipei City Mayor demonstrated AoGat the opening ceremony. Trained brand ambassadors promoted and educated visitors how to use the AoG onsite.

The Innovation - Focused on 4 features & 1 engaging activity:

1. Ask event information: From the schedule to the highlights, the AoG contained everything you needed to know about the Taipei Lantern Festival.

2. Learn the lanterns: Visitors could learn more about the design concepts behind each lantern.

3. Navigate through the venue: With the integration of Google Maps, visitors would not get lost in the people-mountain-people-sea festival.

4. Solve lantern riddles: Different from before, people got to play the game with voice on smartphones for the first time ever!

5. Light the main lantern: Thanks to the IoT integration, visitors could light the “Twinkling Blossoms” with voice, making it a more engaging experience.

The Promotion

Pre-launch activities included two press events and Mayor’s endorsement. The 10-day event kicked off on February 16.

Brand ambassadors were trained to introduce visitors how to activate Google Assistant and demo the features.

This innovation reshaped the way consumers experienced local celebrations, changing the behaviour of the visitors. Instead of the one-way, walk-and-see experience, people got to talk, learn, play and interact with their mobile phones to enjoy the holiday in an unprecedented way.

Moreover, with $0 online media investment, this campaign has helped the brand gain 4M+ impressions to offline visitors, earned 6 TV news and 60+ online media stories, and drove 35K+ digital interactions within 9 days.

Last but not least, this AoG reduced hundreds of thousands of printed pamphlets for the sake of ecological sustainability.