Get Chinese consumers to reignite their love for Master Kong noodles by giving the Chinese team in Rio the fuel they needed to succeed on the global stage.

Create a wave of pride for Master Kong instant noodles, and Chinese food culture, by delivering a true taste of home to China’s athletes and support teams in Rio.

We would do this by building the “Master Kong Real Noodle House” in Rio. Inviting all Olympic teams to sample great Chinese food; and by working with key Chinese sports figures to show how much they love a taste of home when they are competing overseas.

The whole campaign would be activated and amplified though PR, social media and influencers, to keep the buzz authentic.

Opening our ‘Real Noodle House’ we served Master Kong Noodles with all the authentic tastes of home. Extending the invite to Chinese national (CCTV), provincial, local and digital news channels.

Our network of stars created content about the experience and we seeded the videos ahead of key competitions.

China’s hugely popular Volleyball coach, Lang Ping, posted on Weibo that she encouraged her team to eat Master Kong noodles and fuel up for their games.

We worked with popular influencers, provoking discussions about the role of Master Kong’s in the China team’s successes. Conversations surged that Fu Yuanhui’s (a global sensation for her candid post-swim interviews) success and her “Mystic Powers” were attributable to her pre-swim noodle fix.

Extending the fun we asked fans to wish their team luck at the same time as participating in a Social media-based noodle eating contest – tagging and sharing their videos with #MasterKongNoodleContest.

Master Kong Noodles were the underdog who came and took Gold in Rio.

With objective of restoring pride in noodles and addressing category decline, the campaign was a huge success on a tiny budget and minimal paid amplification:

• Earned media (completely unpaid) value for the campaign was calculated at over 75 Million RMB

• 50,000 of Weibo’s “top influencers” forwarded our content

• 670 MILLION social impressions

• National, Provincial and Local TV amplified our “Real Noodle House” content in news editorial with no paid placement

• August and September became the top months for Master Kong instant noodle sales, showing a 46% uplift and averaging 55% higher than annual mean sales.

• Despite no official Olympic sponsorship, Master Kong was 10% more strongly associated with the Olympics in China than top international sponsor McDonalds 6.8 times stronger association than national level sponsor and direct competitor COFCO.

Without any traditional media spend, we reasserted Master Kong noodles as a staple brand in Chinese culture and a symbol of national pride. How? By bringing this taste of home to Rio using a “Real Noodle House”, several Chinese Olympians and several million Chinese social media users.

Despite no formal sponsorship, the Master Kong Olympic campaign managed to deliver more consumer association with the Olympics than Chinese official national sponsors; delivered $11 million of earned media value and lifted noodle sales by 46%.

Executing the campaign meant understanding how to create and ride a wave of social discovery and sharing.

In China, social media is as much about following celebrities and influencers as it is about connecting with friends. Therefore, it was important for us to work with these figures to generate buzz, create content and amplify national pride.

We recruited high profile athletes and coaches to work with us. They created content on social media showing how much they missed the tastes of home.

This was picked up by local, national and even international media, ensuring virality and becoming a hot topic in advance of the Games.

We then planned content to be shared around the key Olympic events for each of our China Teams.

Master Kong is an iconic Chinese instant noodle brand: a market leader and driver of the category.

However tastes are changing. The market is losing relevance and sales have been in decline for several years. How could Master Kong regain pride as a Chinese cultural staple?

The 2016 summer Olympics gave us an opportunity to ride a wave of national pride, but Master Kong were not an official sponsor. So we had to think outside the noodle-box…

The opportunity lay in a simple, insightful truth: ‘Every Chinese person has a distinctly Chinese stomach’.

We love the tastes of home, wherever we are in the world. That’s why instant noodles are often on the ‘packing list’ for Chinese tourists when they travel, and why Chinatowns across the world are among the most popular epicurean destinations.

But Rio, home of the Summer Olympics, did not have good authentic Chinese food.