Civilization Shanghai creates PepsiCo’s 2016 Chinese New Year campaign “Bring Happiness Home: The Monkey King Family”

2016 is the Year of the Monkey. So there will no doubt be a bevy of marketing campaigns showcasing the Monkey King or “Journey to the West”. How can PepsiCo’s “Bring Happiness Home” celebrate the Monkey King, this mythological simian symbol of irreverence  and fun (personality traits rarely found in the heroes of traditional Chinese literature), in a very PepsiCo manner? Believe it or not, it was easy. Because the core values of Pepsi Cola, youth and irreverence, are the very qualities the Monkey King naturally embodies.

VIEW THE FILM AND BACKGROUND

For those not living in China, what is PepsiCo’s “Bring Happiness Home”? It is an entertainment platform created in 2012 by, back then, PepsiCo CMO Richard Lee and his team, together with BBDO Shanghai and acclaimed commercials director David Tsui. In the ensuing years, CivilizationShanghai has played an ever increasing role in developing and evolving this platform, which ropes in multiple PepsiCo brands to pool their marketing resources together, with the aim of rising above the blaring voices of hundreds of thousands of brands in the nationwide marketing bazaar that is the Chinese New Year season.

Civilization’s contribution for “Bring Happiness Home” 2013 was a behind-the-scenes documentary centred on the theme of “Who is family to you?”. Its authentic depiction of PepsiCo’s celebrities revealing stories from their true lives resonated with the zeitgeist, which saw consumers who thirsted for celebrities they could relate to on a more human level rather than just venerate from a distance. This film eventually snowballed into a music video collaboration with China’s most popular TV show at that time, “China Voice”. While the film was produced on-the-fly as a tiny part of a much larger campaign, the content they created made a splash among consumers far bigger than its role in the marketing plan. This played a part in shaping Civilization Shanghai’s earliest belief, to surround a key idea with fascinating content rather than leverage, and be constricted by, paid media channels.

Credits –

Client: Danielle Jin, Shine Wei, Lia Pan, Yumiko Wang