Live at the ‘Chivalry’.

You throw in a few ice cold celebrities, high-end whisky and a dash of ‘life’ and you end up with Chivas new-ish campaign reposition to ‘Live with Chivalry’. A small shift from the previous feature ‘This is Chivas Life’.

Fortunately for Chivas the budget was didn’t seem to be a problem, with a mix of club events intergarted with an online ‘buzz’ push. The campaign was based primarily on a central Chivas site and used the big 4 video sites + featured celebrity blogs to drive ‘conversations’ around the parties across the Mainland.

So what else could Chivas have done?…

…And what sites could Chivas have leaned on? And; most importantly why didn’t they call us? The last question is easy – we weren’t around then!

September, 2008. It started. The strategy went a little like this:

1. Throw big parties in key cities
2. Invite celebs to the party
3. Ask them to blog about the party (specifically talk about ‘Chivalry’ theme)
4. Record the great parties with stories, photos, videos
5. Upload the content across the Chivas site.
6. Upload to the big 4 video sites
7. Include a game to play online – touching on the key brand points
8. Feed more content to the celebrities to blog
9. Talk Talk Talk on forums
10. DONE

To number 3, the following sites are a list of celebrity blogs/statistics:

Mo WanDan, Model

http://mowandan.blog.sohu.com/105471950.html

Views: 776

Comments: 5

1. Zhang JunNing, famous actor
http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4769263d0100b0ic.html

Views: 5558
Comments: 97

2. Yan Kuan, famous actor
http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4851e7ed01000724.html

Views: 12471
Comments: 40

3. Liang Qingqing
http://www.lzlqq.com/post/26.html

Views: 77
Comments: 9

TOTAL VIEWS: 18,882
COMMENTS: 151

There were several posts on BBS forums:

Relative entries on the key word “Live with Chivalry” on baidu.com: 11,700 entries.

Using the key word “Live with Chivalry” across bbs.sina.com bought up 52 entries.

1. http://bbs.book.sina.com.cn/thread-273-0/table-130073-229.html

A very touching piece was written about a famous singing competition. The singer, whose name is Jiang Yingrong performed well, then presented with ‘excellent moral quality’ (the Chinese translation sometimes doesn’t fit?) – which matched the brand position of “live with chivalry”. Noted, in the world of Chivas the real victory is not only to win the competition but to live with ‘chivalry’. I got a chill.

Views: 106

2. http://bbs.club.sina.com.cn/thread-272-0/tree-88714-1224-25532.html
http://bbs.club.sina.com.cn/thread-272-0/tree-85027-3151-31147.html?ref=1

Views: 4,107&3,434
Comments: 24&11

Generally the comments were positive.

3. http://bbs.book.sina.com.cn/thread-9-0/tree-591926-4978-14501.html?ref=1

Views: 29,687
Comments: 90

This article was traced from Huang Jianxiang’s blog which has 215 comments.
4. http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5137be260100bosq.html

http://bbs.book.sina.com.cn/thread-9-0/tree-523554-6425-21632.html?ref=1

Funny enough Huang Jianxiang shows his preference to “live with chivalry”.

Views: 33,490
Comments: 215

1. http://bbs.ent.163.com/bbs/jiepai/115203140.html

All together:
TOTAL VIEWS: 70,824
TOTAL COMMENTS: 340

VIDEOS MADE A SPLASH

This is the party video with the views of 30410.
http://www.56.com/u35/v_Mzk5MTMyMTY.html

Youku.com – It includes several small stories of different people enjoying Chivas.

http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/SzbPZEes-Qw/

Total views of the TVC’:

Tudou.com: 213,531

Youku.com: 6,000

ku6.com: 3,000

56. Com: 28,591

The host site for the TVC can be found at http://www.chivas.com.cn/tvc.html

Tudou – This clip featured the Chinese characters of “courage and friendship”.

http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/GU5ZmraWrQA/

Total Views for this one:

Tudou.com: 83,405

Youku.com: 37,763

ku6.com: 99

56.com: Not available

GAME TIME

Like all great campaigns before them – a game was created. The game was based on a principle of hunting for the code or ‘code hunting’ as it was called. It was shared and generally achieved moderate success – no rave reviews simply a sense of ‘it’s OK’.

Prizes – included a trip to Scotland which was impressive. I’m sure the winner would have some great content to share on the return…

Total participants is vague but I can safely say no more than 1,740 groups.

FURTHER EXPOSURE

http://www.dfdaily.com/node2/node31/node262/userobject1ai132668.shtml

http://yule.sohu.com/20081120/n260749492.shtml

http://lady.163.com/08/1202/18/4S66U16P002624HG.html

http://fashion.ifeng.com/luxury/newstore/200812/1206_3865_910504.shtml

There is no statistics to show the hits on these posts.

WRAP UP

OK so on the surface it looks like a pretty smooth campaign. I think we all agree the Chivas brand is very solid and has a lot of ‘stuff’ to play with – by stuff i mean things to talk about. One of the great things about this campaign is that it uses a lot of celebrity content; which most brands do not have the luxury of. Celebrities can pull a crowd – period. As they do offline they can also draw a big crowd online.

I would have liked to see that content really stretched and maximised, for starters more seeding throughout the following SNS sites:

Douban, Neocha, Shanghaining, Babybluefolk, P1, MCC, Clubzone, Yoho to name some popular o few more. these sites specifically cater to a market Chivas would like to serve. You can go general SNS but these sites have the potential to create followers, fans and provide a springboard for new connections – many of who are at the pinnacle of the social calendar. I’m sure P1 can attest to that. My team saw little targeted content seeding or traffic generated from these popular sites.

It’s easy to pick now so let’s simply learn from this – the key point was Chivas either had great content or were generating great content. It was content that people naturally like to read about (celebrities) – so it makes sense to fully maximize that content with a dedicated seeding plan; the focus pulling traffic back to the key Chivas site. ‘We pull them back and then we maximise our engagement opportunities’ with subscriptions, games, entries to win things, etc.

A dedicated seeding plan would have generated a lot more buzz across those forums and i believed the traffic numbers would have topped 1m+ across all key video sites + the Chivas site.

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