Yili and Weibo have their eyes on the prize this Olympics

Brands are doing things differently for the Paris Olympics, with Yili turning to Sina Weibo, avoiding conventional marketing and instead opting for ‘Chinese-style hard ads’ which have allowed the brand to enjoy domestic success and international recognition.

Yili is one of China’s largest manufacturers of dairy products, and the brand turned to Weibo for a shot at glory this Olympics. With over 605 million users, Sina Weibo is one of China’s premier social media platforms and is rich in user generated content (UGC) surrounding culture and experiences, making it the perfect platform to host content related to 2024’s biggest cross-cultural events.

Yili chose Sina Weibo for its simplicity, asymmetry, and decentralisation, all of which foster a dynamic, multi-party topic stream ideal for real-time engagement and content distribution. The brand leveraged Weibo’s strengths by crafting a ‘Paris Olympics’ topic flow, activated via select steps:

1. A promotional video featuring Olympic athletes, driving engagement and preheating the event
2. Nostalgic content celebrating China’s Olympic pioneers, echoing Yili’s founding year
3. A campaign showcasing Yili as the official dairy partner for the 2024 Olympics, generating buzz and solidarity around Chinese athletes. This comprehensive approach harnessed Weibo’s power to propel Yili’s brand to the forefront of online discourse.

This strategic campaign brilliantly leveraged Weibo’s broadcast-style format and user-centric ecosystem to create a viral buzz around the Paris Olympics. By adopting a trendy Chinese-style narrative, Yili seamlessly transitioned from domestic to international scenes, showcasing its passion for the Olympics and reinforcing its status as a dairy industry leader.

Marketers can learn from this success by tapping into cultural trends, leveraging social media’s multimedia capabilities, and fostering real-time engagement with diverse audiences. The campaign’s impressive results, with over 420 million views and 4.279 million discussions for the official dairy topic, and 85.3 million views and 541,000 discussions for the promotional video, demonstrate the power of strategic content marketing on Weibo.