WeChat Team: During the Olympics, there will also be an advertising competition in Moments!

For marketers , Olympic marketing is a big test held every four years. The Rio Olympics sparked heated social discussions. During the half-month period, brands tried their best to take advantage of the hot topics and create their own topics. The Olympics are over and it’s time to mark the papers.

Taking advantage of the Olympics, WeChat Moments ads performed well

Survey data shows that social media has become one of the main channels for users to follow the Olympics. The combined monthly active account numbers of WeChat and WeChat reached 806 million (Tencent’s Q2 2016 financial report), attracting a large amount of user attention during the Olympics.

Trends in the volume of Olympic content dissemination in WeChat Moments before and after the Olympics

With such high attention, marketers will naturally not let it go. Athletes compete on the field, and brands show off their prowess in the circle of friends. As the main battlefield of social marketing, how did the advertisements of major brands perform in WeChat Moments during the Olympics?

During the Olympics, nearly thirty brands followed the hot topics and placed ads in WeChat Moments. Based on the tracking and observation of advertising data, we found that during the Olympic Games, WeChat Moments advertising had a more significant effect on improving brand awareness, favorability, and memorability than ever before.

Among them, brands such as NIKE, Amul, Samsung Galaxy, Yili, Tencent News and Golden Dragon Fish were the first brands to launch native promotion page ads. Along with the opening of the Olympic Games, they met with WeChat users one after another in the early morning of August 6. The total exposure of the 6 advertisements reached 980 million people. Compared with historical advertising data, the performance of each advertisement was higher than the average, and the overall performance was good.

Native expressiveness, creating a smooth immersive experience

The characteristics of the native promotion page ads in Moments are "extreme speed" and "immersion" . The content is presented in the form of a large scroll, with a variety of presentation styles such as video, carousel, panorama, etc. At the same time, new advertising technology is used to achieve "instant loading", breaking the "natural" law that the more content a web page has, the slower the opening speed.

On August 6, NIKE’s “Don’t Believe in Limits” themed advertisement was launched, telling the sports spirit of ordinary people who constantly break through themselves and challenge their limits through a long streaming video. The full-screen, non-stop featured long image, from Su Bingtian to Neymar, shows the extremely fast immersive experience of the native promotion page with wonderful creativity. At the end, you can jump to the official NIKE website to buy the same running shoes as Olympic stars, which helps NIKE convey its brand spirit and promote sales conversion.

NIKE native promotion page advertising diagram

As the first brand to be launched, Nike’s advertising performance is outstanding. The page dwell time is 4 times the average, and the number of likes and comments is higher than the industry average. In addition, excellent creativity and product forms led to spontaneous sharing by users: the secondary exposure brought by NIKE advertisements after sharing reached more than 2 million times.

Other companies that also used native promotion page ads to present creativity include Samsung , Tencent News , etc., and they all performed well in terms of ad dwell time and social interaction. Native promotion page ads seamlessly connect social scenarios and commercial content, taking the advertising experience to a new level.

Keep up with the schedule and seize the golden opportunity

What is the most important thing about following hot topics? Timing!

After the diving team won the second gold medal for China, P&G’s “Mothers Behind the Champions” themed advertisement was immediately launched on WeChat Moments, seizing the best opportunity for hot marketing . In this Olympic marketing, P&G continued the theme of "maternal love" and continued to move people with emotion. The strong correlation between the creative content of the advertisement and the diving competition attracted users to click and discuss. The click rate of the outer layer pictures in the circle of friends was twice the industry average, and the video playback completion rate was three times the average level.

Diagram of P&G's original promotion page advertisement

Brands that are also good at keeping up with hot topics and seizing opportunities include Guangming Mosilian , which launched its ads right after the women's volleyball team won the championship, and Anta , which launched its ads in pursuit of the gold medal list. The social interaction rates of these ads are significantly higher than historical advertising data. It seems that in addition to keeping up with hot topics, you also need to seize the opportunity.

Sports stars support and use hot events to increase popularity

Sports stars are an important element in attracting attention and creating topics in Olympic marketing. The athletes of this Rio Olympics are full of personality, enriching our emoticon package and giving birth to a group of new "national husbands".

FAW Toyota’s advertising used the “Tencent Sports” account and multiple waves of sports star resources (Yi Siling, Wu Minxia, ​​Ding Ning, Ma Long, fencing team, Chen Long) to cooperate with the event delivery. The brand was exposed 300 million times and the interactive click rate reached 6.5%. The high popularity of the stars effectively drove brand attention and interaction.

Schematic diagram of FAW Toyota’s WeChat Moments advertisement

In addition, the two advertisements of Amul - "Come on Ning Zetao" and Wrigley - "Su Bingtian's smile is powerful" also utilized sports star resources, followed the hot spots of the events, and gained widespread discussion and sharing among users in the circle of friends. Although the most popular young actor Ning Zetao did not show off his eight-pack abs in the Amul advertisement, his two-dimensional style and cute smile were also very pleasing to the eye.

The effect of WeChat Moments advertising: significant brand enhancement

From the above cases, we can see that in the circle of friends arena of Olympic marketing, each brand has demonstrated a high level of advertising creativity and delivery strategy, but to answer the original question: how did the advertising perform? It still needs to be implemented to achieve results.

In order to better understand the actual contribution of these WeChat Moments ads to the brands, we worked with Yunsi Technology Research Institute to conduct a sampling comparative study of exposed and non-exposed populations on five of the Olympic WeChat Moments ads (NIKE, Amul, Samsung, Yili, and Golden Dragon Fish), and evaluated the advertising effectiveness from several dimensions of brand promotion.

Survey data shows that after placing WeChat Moments ads, the brands’ popularity, brand preference, purchase intention, active search volume and discussion have all increased significantly . Moments ads can effectively trigger consumers’ interest in brands, strengthen users’ associations and memories of brands, and promote short-term consumer behavior.

Schematic diagram of brand improvement in various dimensions before and after placing WeChat Moments ads

At the same time, the advertisement received positive reviews . More than 80% of consumers gave a favorable evaluation of the advertisement, especially in terms of understandability, brand favorability, credibility, sharing and novelty, reflecting the trend that consumers are willing to share and discuss brands after watching the advertisement.

Distribution of positive comments on advertisements

The social scene of Moments advertising allows brands to take advantage of the Olympic Games to attract user attention and discussion; at the same time, the constantly innovative product forms help brands better tell their brand stories and multiply their marketing value.

Similar to the Olympic spirit, Moments ads have been committed to meeting advertisers' diverse marketing needs higher, faster and better since their launch.

The next Olympics will not be held for another four years, but the next hot spot may be tomorrow. Will your brand be the next classic case?