Chatime Bubble Tea

Opportunity

Bubble tea is not your average drink, and Chatime is not your average bubble tea brand. 

Known for their unorthodox approach to flavour mashups, Chatime tasked us with taking their equally unorthodox campaign to the masses. 

Our challenge was to use a relatively small budget (for the size of the Australian market) and earn the attention of the notoriously mistrustful Gen Z audience at a time when they were sick of being told to stay indoors! 

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Approach

In our channel selection process, we knew there were three key things we needed to make this work:

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1. Targeted Reach. 

Our aim was to get in front of as many Gen Z eyeballs as we could afford within a 5km proximity to Chatime stores across Australia.

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2. Attention-grabbing placements.

We needed to choose a channel and formats that gave us the best chance to be discovered in environments that aligned with our target audience's lifestyle, fulfilled their desire for unique brand experiences and gave them the opportunity to create kudos by sharing with their peers. 

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3. Unconventional formats.

Like Gen Z, we needed to be authentic and unique in relation to the campaign idea.  Developed in partnership with Special Group Australia we took the idea of “strange” to a whole new level!  The creative featured an eclectic cast of weird and wonderful characters that were brought to life through an AR experience activated via a QR code. 

From shimmering caterpillars whose udders squirted tea, to a dancing centaur with human baby legs and a flying dog that led you to the nearest Chatime store and gave you a discount, these incredible experiences were captivating, wholly unique, and totally shareable. 

The obvious channel solution for us was Out Of Home.

We were able to choose locations that hit our geographical requirements, in spaces that we knew Gen Z audiences frequented, using a combination of formats that encouraged interaction; we created curiosity at launch, with 2 weeks of old school street posters and floor stickers showing up in strange places (under bridges, alleyways, etc), we stopped our audience in their tracks with enormous interactive digital panels in shopping centres and bus shelter takeovers, then drove targeted footfall with retail and rail formats all placed within 5k of stores.

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We secured over 1870 Out of Home locations across Australia that fit this bill through the following formats:

Fly Posters

Mega SItes

Decals

Static Street Furnitiure

Bus/Tram Stops - Special Builds

Static Retail Panels

Digital Large Format

Retail 2D - Special Builds

Static 'Study" panels in Universities

Citylights

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The Result

The "Satisfy Your Strange" campaign took the world by storm, sparking fan art, memes, and even news headlines. This was the most successful (and weirdest by any brand’s measure) campaign Chatime had ever run. Attention:

Chatime saw a 20% increase YOY of 160,000 new users to their website Over 46 Million earned impressions A single (unpaid) reaction video on Tik Tok received over 5 Million views Engagement:

Scans of the AR QR code peaked at 50,000 in a single day due to the fact that the posters shared online could also be scanned

Social media engagement increased by 310% Trial :

Chatime had its biggest ever sales week during the peak of the campaign

1 in 3 people who saw the OOH campaign went on to purchase a Chatime drink

Sales increased by 20% YOY with over 1.5 Million new transactions across the 8-week period

There was a 35% increase in “Loyaltea” member sign-ups

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