Branded entertainment in China today fall into 3 main approaches. Product placement in movies (expensive and prone to audience criticism). Being main sponsor of a popular primetime reality show (even more expensive). Shooting a long-format film for internet video portals (very low viewership unless there’s huge investment in paid views, and most clients have been so heavy-handed in terms of branding that the stories become unwatchable).

Through a partnership with MeiPai, China’s most popular Video Creation & Social Mobile App (with more than 100 million users), consumers were encouraged to shoot 10-second videos of their journeys and family moments, which were instantly broadcasted on an exclusive Pepsi-MeiPai platform, and shared to other popular social networks like WeiXin (500 million users) and WeiBo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter).

Employing 30% less marketing budget than 2014, PepsiCo’s 2015 Chinese New Year campaign beat their consumer engagement benchmark by 1739%.

In total, this co-creation sparked 15.4 million pieces of User Generated Content. That’s over 300 thousand submissions every day, one third of all activity on MeiPai.

The videos were viewed more than 1.2 billion times; that’s twice the number of Internet users in China.