Lunar New Year is one of the most critical advertising moments for brands: expensive, crowded, long emotional pre-rolls driven by massive media investment. It is the biggest culture-relevant time of the year in China. BMW’s 2022 Lunar New Year campaign not only overturned the convention of story-telling, but it also turned into an authentic way for people to celebrate the festival across diverse media touch points with platform first tactics, all under one big idea that clearly stood out and turned the campaign into a cultural phenomenon during the Lunar New Year.

Each year, we are tasked to create a Lunar New Year campaign to fulfil BMW’s brand promise of bringing joy to consumers during this period of family reunion. But advertising during this festival in China is as difficult as Christmas in the West. Expensive, crowded, and full of long format emotional stories about family and reunions. How to stand out when every story about family has been told? How to be seen when every brand is spending huge amounts on media. How to make it brand relevant so ad-saturated consumers can remember who was talking?

People were increasingly using social media to express their wishes when travel was restricted. In 2021 during the same festive period, we observed 17 million more users active on key social platforms.

The “NOTHING BUT SHEER JOY” campaign uses mixed media, visual gags, and the energy and pace of music to show a mind-boggling interplay between a horse (BMW’s Chinese name translates as “Precious Horse”) and the tiger. The film plays on the Chinese words “Ma” horse and “Hu” tiger in a straight forward, repeating and memorable audio-visual feast. The two words combined “Ma” and “Hu” also have a second Chinese meaning, “don’t be too serious, just enjoy.”

This seemingly crazy and mind-blowing campaign rooted in social media, went for the most direct path to joy which sits at the heart of BMW’s brand promise, and was extended to diversified engagement formats.

The campaign has a broad national target audience, but with a focus on Gen Z.

In addition to the use of BMW’s own social channels, we also identified the ways people celebrate Lunar New year across social media platforms, and designed the campaign based on the consumer behaviour and the unique nature of each platform.

Weibo, the entertainment centric platform - inviting cultural pioneers to participate in the campaign;

WeChat, the brand community gathering platform - creating digital red pockets and stickers as gifts to BMW fans;

China’s TikTok, the UGC based music and dancing platform - engaging with leading creators and dealers to create their own content by leveraging campaign elements.

The campaign’s influence was fueled with pre-rolls in cinema, an important occasion and touch point for gathering during Chinese New Year.

After the release of the launch film on BMW’s owned social platforms featuring UGC-friendly dance moves and meme-able iconic imagery three days in advance of the Lunar New Year eve, attention was ramped up with a targeted media-mix approach in the next three days:

The flim was featured in pre-rolls in 1,470 cinemas across China and pushed by the top 8 smart TV brands.

Two leading artists/ rappers on Weibo (Jackson Yee and Ma Siwei), posted the campaign film with their own content remix. We promoted the posts, driving 56M+ exposure on the first day;

The China TikTok dance challenge reached 9M+ exposure with no paid media;

The engagement peaked on the Lunar New Year eve with the release and post promotion of 30 collectible digital red packets and stickers as gifts for fans to share, which extended the influence of the iconic imagery.

The campaign broke nearly every BMW viewership and engagement record on every platform. But more importantly, the success was driven by consumers who amplified the campaign by generating UGC on multiple social platforms, even on platforms that weren’t part of the campaign! The launch in cinemas was so popular, a fan recorded it and uploaded the video to China’s TikTok. The post received 200k likes!

The campaign generated:

- 258 million views;

- 4.02 million social engagements, igniting 600k+ pieces of UGC content;

- 140k new fans across social media platforms, 65% from Gen Z;

Spontaneously re-posted by 28 influencers, generating over 1M likes;

- Fifty dealerships also created their own dance videos from the campaign assets;

- It became a cultural topic widely discussed on Weibo (China’s Twitter) and transferred by fans into new and niche social media platforms.