Category: Best Localised Campaign
Advertiser: HTC
Product/Service: HTC SENSE
Media Agency: MAXUS COMMUNICATIONS, Hong Kong, HONG KONG
Planning Supervisor: Kenix Lai (Maxus Hong Kong)
Buying Manager: Annie Tang (Maxus Hong Kong)
Strategic Planning Manager: Eugenia Chan (Maxus Hong Kong)
Managing Director: Caroline Chan (Maxus Hong Kong)
Media placement: Newspaper - 2 Spots - Full Page Ad - 28 Mar 2011
Media placement: Magazine - 21 Spots - Full Page Ad - 14 Mar 2011
Media placement: Outdoor - 200 Spots - Tutorial Schools - 25 Mar 2011
Media placement: Online - 25 Websites - Videos/ Forum Seeding - 10 Mar 2011
Insights, Strategy & the Idea
The Hong-Kong cellphone market is incredibly cluttered with 210% mobile penetration. Hong-Kongers love their iPhones, they’re fashionable and iOS is regarded as the most user-friendly operating system. Conversely, Android phones are regarded as ‘foreign’ and hard to use.
Our task was to gain share by launching a new, more intuitive ‘user experience’ called ’HTC Sense’. We needed to build awareness and understanding of ‘HTC Sense’ and break the ‘foreign Android’ misconception, while ensuring that this impacted sales.
Young people everywhere want to be more knowledgeable about technology than their friends but we found that amongst ultra-competitive Hong-Kongers it doesn’t end there. Here, it’s not what you know about technology that is most important but rather how ingenious you are at using it.
So, we changed the standard ‘handset as hero’ approach, building an integrated, interactive and shareable campaign that educated our young Hong-Kongers about how to get the most from their phone.
Creative Execution
To approach this, we took a tip from the Hong-Kong education system. Young Hong-Kongers are under massive pressure to achieve in public exams and their parents invest a fortune in private tutorial colleges to ensure that good grades are achieved.
Tutorial Colleges have become an industry in themselves: they advertise heavily, majoring on the intelligence, wit and pop-star good looks of the college tutors. The most famous of these have started to call themselves the “Star Tutors”.
So, we created our own online tutorial college. We developed a series of online tutorials hosted by Hong-Kong’s most popular DJ – the hilarious Sammi. He became our own “Star Tutor”, demonstrating ingenuity in everyday situations. Tutorials and quizzes were broadcast across YouTube and other major online properties. We seeded in social forums and then prompted discussion.
Offline, we also hosted 200 live tutorial classes and Sammi’s tips appeared in all of the most popular lifestyle titles.
Results and Effectiveness
Our online tutorials were viewed 100,000 times and 4,800 young Hong-Kongers completed our quizzes. The HTC Facebook fanbase grew by 30% and we were delighted to have driven over 200 separate forum discussions.
Importantly our campaign had a direct effect on HTC's brand image in Hong-Kong. Our tracking scores against 18-24s showed dramatic improvements: ‘Human’ increased 20%, ‘Energetic’ +19%, and ‘Thoughtful’ +17%.
But, most importantly, our campaign had a huge impact on HTC’s handset sales. During the campaign period, we exceeded sales expectations by 100%!