Yili integrated famous football players and an interactive digital portal to gain brand visibility in China during the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
Objective
The 2022 FIFA World Cup was set to be the most watched sporting event in China, with over 660 million viewers tuning in to watch the last match. But Yili's biggest competitor had earned the official sponsor status that year, meaning Yili wouldn't have access to any of the official matches or their broadcasts.
Faced with this steep uphill battle, Yili set out to achieve 3 objectives:
Context
As a leading dairy brand in China, Yili has built a longstanding brand association with sports throughout the years and is a long-time sponsor of major sporting events, like the Olympics.
However, one area where it has struggled to build a significant presence is the World Cup. Yili needed to be creative to stand out from the official sponsors and make a lasting impression with the spectators without any resources from FIFA.
Target Audience
Focusing on the Chinese World Cup viewers, Yili uncovered two insights that were critical to its strategy.
First, while the World Cup draws huge viewership in China, most are casual viewers, and what they care about most isn't the match itself or even the teams. They watch for the players — specifically, the generation of football stars represented by the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. And second, for millennial and generation Z Chinese football fans, this generation of football stars aren't just celebrities — they're childhood heroes that these young fans grew up watching. It made this World Cup extra-special for these viewers, because this would be the last World Cup for many of their childhood heroes.
Creative and Media Strategy
Recognizing that the younger fans yearned to say farewell to their childhood heroes, Yili developed a two-tiered strategy centered around what mattered most to viewers: the players.
First, Yili signed some of the most beloved players by Chinese fans as brand ambassadors and created a "Yili dream team" for the average viewer.
Then, leveraging the relationships with those signed players, Yili created a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for young Chinese fans via its "Yili Passion Mailbox," a digital portal where fans could write letters to their favorite players and have them delivered to those football stars.
After signing star players Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar Júnior, and Karim Benzema, Yili launched an omnichannel campaign on key platforms for World Cup content:
At the same time, Yili used OOH areas in Tier 1 cities where the World Cup was most popular, while also redesigning its flagship milk product's packaging to reflect its dream team players.
Using the Yili Passion Mailbox on DongQiuDi, China's foremost football interest app with a large millennial and generation Z user base, Yili received over 10,000 fan letters. From these letters, Yili selected some of the most touching, heartfelt ones and printed them onto a Chinese-style scroll with the fan's social ID attached to their respective message, and then delivered them to the football stars.
There was never a guarantee that the players would respond, but some of them actually did —including Ronaldo, who received the scroll of messages on his birthday. He was so moved by the messages that he posted on Weibo and thanked the fans for their letters. This gesture meant the world to those fans, fulfilling their wish to personally say farewell to their childhood hero.
By focusing solely on the players throughout the World Cup and delivering on its promise to young fans, Yili was able to successfully steal the show from its main competitor with only one-sixth of the budget.
Yili's campaign achieved the following:
The campaign marked the beginning of Yili's comeback to football marketing, with core football fans doling out high praise for Yili because of the DongQiuDi Passion Mailbox event.
