​To drive traffic to its book reading channel during Covid, Tencent launched an online campaign of a series of short films that draws parallel between real life and quotes from fiction books.

Short Summary:

 To drive traffic to its book reading channel during Covid, Tencent launched an online campaign of a series of short films that draws parallel between real life and quotes from fiction books.

Challenge:

The 2020 World Book Day was an unusual one.
Under the impact of Covid-19, libraries and bookstores were off-limits, pushing the youth to increasingly look for quality content online.

Tencent, one of China’s internet giants, seized this opportunity and answered this need by giving its users free access to the book reading channel that they recently launched on its platform. Problem is, whilst the Chinese youth are voraciously consuming online content, reading novels remain low on the list of preferences. The youth simply don’t find the relevance of novels to their world. 

 Idea:

To help them see the relevance of novels to their lives, we launched a campaign under the theme of 大世界从,小说起“ which literally translates to “Big World begins from a Little Book” (the term Little Book carries the dual meaning of “a novel” and “begins from childhood”).

The creative executions are a series of short film and key visuals (in storybook cover form), that draws parallel between real life and fictional stories.

We re-enacted famous quotes from famous novels and set them against the real life hot social topics - a nurse in Wuhan amidst Covid-19, students back to school post-Covid and “Beipiao”, the phenomenon of migrants working in the big city. 

Teasers are seeded via the usual social platforms that the users are used to, - Wechat and QQ; that links them to a H5 personality test. Answering six simple questions will result in to a personalized book list that Tencent users can access for free on any of the Tencent book reading channel. Users are also given a QR code that linked them to live streaming and book reading from 24 authors and KOLs, giving them an inside view of the fictional world.

Impact:

The response of our audience overtook all our expectations: 288% increase in engagement rate during campaign period (compared to 2019 World Book Day Campaign)

Total views of relevant content on Weibo reached 21 million, with readership of 1.8M (which is a 800% increase).