Compared to Christmas, Chinese New Year (CNY) is China’s most emotional season and the best opportunity for Chinese to express their love to their family. Reunion is the main topic. However, many stay home.

How can Airbnb use this occasion to connect with an audience who weren't planning to travel for family reunion, and allow them to embrace the brand naturally, not only for its offerings but for a unique emotional benefit: a new kind of reunion.

Fú is a touching animation demonstrating how Airbnb properties can become homes away from home at a time of year where young Chinese are finding it increasingly difficult to return to their family hometowns.

The 3D animation tells the story of Jia Jia, a young nurse whose pursuit of her career dreams in the big city prevents her from returning to her hometown for Chinese New year, much to the disappointment of herself and her parents. Fortunately, Airbnb’s platform is on-hand to enable a unique solution.

At the core of the film is the age old Chinese New Year tradition of hanging a ? ‘Fú’ (meaning ‘happiness’) poster upside down, symbolizing "the arrival of happiness", tying in to the overall campaign idea of turning traditional concepts on their head; in this case, 'home' coming to Jia Jia rather than the other way around.

In 2019, there were over 3 billion trips during Chinese New Year. But for millennials, this annual trip is in decline, as they are not following the tradition of going back to their hometown anymore. Those who have migrated to the big cities are accustomed to their career and responsibilities, they have become less inclined to undertake the long trip back home for their yearly reunion. Much to their own and their family’s heartbreak.

Surprisingly our data showed a new trend, instead of the children coming home for CNY, there was an increase of parents leaving their hometown and travelling to their millennials and celebrating reunion there or midway– a new CNY phenomenon called “reverse travel”. As Airbnb stands for Belonging, we found our role more relevant than ever– if you can’t go home, home comes to you.

To explain the reversal of homecoming to local audiences, we created a story inspired by the local custom of hanging a “Fu´” poster in Chinese households, the character means “happiness”. The unique part of this ancient ritual is that it is always turned upside down. In Chinese, upside-down is “Dào”, which has the double meaning of “arrival”, thus bringing a different meaning to the square poster: “the arrival of happiness”.

We launched an animated film to tell the CNY story of Jia Jia, a young nurse whose pursuit of her career dreams in the big city prevents her from returning to her hometown for CNY much to the disappointment of herself and her parents. Fortunately, Airbnb’s platform is on-hand to enable a unique solution of 'home' coming to Jia Jia rather than the other way around, tying in to the overall campaign idea of turning traditional concepts on their head.

Through an integrated campaign that included social media, events, OOH, cinema, customized in-app integration, and also an IP partnership with China’s biggest entertainment platforms BiliBili we built intrigue and curiosity to finally launch the main film. The campaign got over 824 million impressions, with 8.1million unique visitors to our travel platform to explore a new way to reunite for Chinese New Year.