“Tales from a Thousand and One Nights”—Something to Soothe the Soul

Our series titled "Tales from A Thousand and One Nights" not only borrows the title of the popular Arabian stories, but also the concept that engaging content can keep people coming back for more.

Each episode was based on a topic that consumers could really relate to, such as feeling homesick, working until the early hours of the morning. We combined this with Chinese culture’s strong connection to food.

With this in mind we created a fictional chef that would travel the world in his magical tent, bringing delicious midnight snacks to a range of characters. The short films we produced were only available between 10pm and 12pm to coincide with our increase in user traffic.

After watching each episode, we made the particular midnight snack that was cooked by our chef available for purchase on our website.

Create suspense and attract attention.

In order to inform our audience about our new creative content we released a trailer detailing how Taobao will shoot a film together with a golden horse award winning director. This led to the trending weibo hashtags #Taobao, #TalesfromAThousandandOneNights and #TheNewTaobao.

Universal participation, generated topics continue to trend.

Our first season of "Tales from A Thousand and One Nights" went online successively. Each episode was split into various categories such as an “emotional” category, a “geographical” category etc.

Cooperating with different social media platforms and the combined use of discussion and interaction we continued to push the topics #Taobao’sCreativePlatform and #TalesfromAThousandandOneNights.

We partnered with the Liuzhou municipal government to start an online campaign for snail rice noodles, as well as holding a “T20 World Gourmet Food Summit” offline, where we invited leaders from Australia, Liuzhou and Chengdu to introduce their areas specialist foods.

Business impact:

During the campaign "Tales from A Thousand and One Nights" had a total PV of more than 6700W, overall our videos generated more than 7800W. The products our 16 episodes promoted were very popular with consumers accumulating a total revenue of 138 million RMB, the volume of mackerel dumplings sold doubled 200 times, Iberian ham was sold out after being online for 1 and a half hours and 2000 Australian steaks sold out in 6 minutes.

Response rate:

"Taobao’s Tales from A Thousand and One Nights" + "Taobao’s Creative Platform" in Baidu reached 2,149,000. Within two weeks, the visit volume of the topics #Taobao’sCreativePlatform and #TalesfromAThousandandOneNights reached 500 million.

Change in behavior:

"Tales from A Thousand and One Nights" has become a must-see for users before going to sleep. Making purchases based on viewing our creative content has become a new medium for online shopping.