Chatime is a Taiwanese bubble tea brand that specialises in uncommon and unexpected flavours, from chewy tapioca balls, popping boba, grass jelly, agar jelly, and puddings. While the brand is hugely successful in Asian markets, their foray into Australia hadn't been as effective. Chatime wanted to grow their younger millennial audience, drive trial, and establish themselves as a fun, quirky brand that found the fun in the everyday. Problem was, they had a budget of less than $50,000 to do it.

To showcase our range of crazy tastes, we found inspiration in the one place our younger target audience were unleashing their own crazy tastes every day - their Google search history. A recent Google Survey found that, in the age of social media currency, millennials were comfortable sharing almost everything except their search histories. In fact, millennials were more likely to share their salary information than their search history. After all, that's where their wildest, craziest tastes really come out.

So, to drive trial and raise brand awareness, our creative idea challenged a millennial audience to swap their crazy tastes for ours.

In an era where standing out earns social kudos, millennials are increasingly finding themselves becoming more, not less, unique on social platforms (insert your #blessed #lit #TBT shots here, just like everyone else).

Our strategy was to intersect Chatime and our audiences with a part of their lives where they could truly let their authentic, creative selves shine – their personal data.

Not just as a way of retargeting and optimising comms with a new audience, but as an idea in and of itself.

How could we show that we were as unique and wild and creative as our audience, in a way that would cut through the clutter?

We created the #HistoryCha_llenge; an Instagram-based social challenge that encouraged people not to hide their Google search history, but to screenshot it, and share it on Instagram Stories with our hashtag, where it would be visible to the public for 24 hours. Tracking our hashtag, we rewarded the weirdest and wildest search histories with a year's worth of free Chatime bubble tea.

Every facet of our campaign was made from user-generated search history content.

Asking our fanbase for initial entries, we launched with an online film that set up the promotion and called for entries.

On pack stickers and in-store digital posters made from the weirdest entries, further raised awareness of the promotion.

As well as calling out the winning entries, we posted regular social content, calling out particularly crazy searches.

Through SEO, we even bought over 1,000 search words, that when pieced together in combinations, would serve up ads driving people to take part in the challenge.

In just 3 weeks, and with a budget of just $50,000, we increased Chatime's social audience by 17%.

#HistoryCha-llenge recieved national coverage, and helped the brand achieve one of their highest sales periods since launching in Australia.