Starbucks; An Inspirational Love Drama in Shanghai Metro.

‘A Sunny Day’ scene: Sunny and CC

A love story can sell you cup of coffee (by which I mean Starbucks’) is a question or … maybe not.

Except than daily commercial bombardment, in late 2007, Shanghai metro travelers could find themselves a love drama being shown on the subway stations and trains several times a day. It tells an inspirational love story between CC (a struggling musician) and Sunny (a marketing executive). Actually its a campaign ran by Starbucks for its newly launched bottled frappuccino in disguise.

After initial trials with product placement in movies like ‘Akeelah and the Bee’ – 2006 and ‘Arctic Tale’ – 2007 in overseas market, Starbucks applied it to China market this time. Starbucks teamed up with local subway broadcasting company – DMG (Digital Media Group) and leading online media company – Sina for its integrated campaign. To local consumers, product placement in movies and soap operas wasn’t a rare scene, but to do it in metro LCD screen – this is the first time.

Well known local pop star Huang Xiao Ming as CC in the drama

Strategy: branding & new product launch through product placement in 2.5 minutes, 40 episode metro love drama

Media: Metro LCD screens on stations and trains, blog, Vlog, online viral marketing, word of the mouth

Other facts:

1. The campaign covers 2.2 million daily Shanghai metro passengers.

2. There are around 4000 Metro LCDs run by DMG across 85 stations and 81 trains in Shanghai (For Line 1, 2 and 3). DMG also covers other majors cities’ metro line, which includes Beijing, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Nanjing, Tianjin.

3. In 2008 New Media Annual Conference, Starbucks won the Best FMCG Industrial Integrated Marketing Campaign Awards.

4. In August 2008, DMG released another drama – Dancing without You for shoe maker ‘Nine West’, starred by Taiwanese actress Vivian HSU (TSUI Yeuk-Suen).

5. Sunny’s online blog visitors reached 9000 for nearly each entry. Some of the comments on its blog site for the final episode are as below:

‘Happy ending, not bad ah, but how come the story ends so quickly. If everyone could have such nice ending, that would really be the best blessing.’

‘Oh, it can’t be the ending! Hope she (Sunny) will keep writing the blog.’

6. Final episode (in Chinese, but you could enjoy the theme song.)