In Summer of 2023, Magnum was launching two limited edition products: Magnum Double Starchaser and Sunlover – two indulgent new flavors that sought to capture the hedonistic energy and spirit of summer festivals.

As part of the global rollout, we needed to tailor the product launch for China, where Magnum had immense pressure to perform in the face of a major economic slowdown and pullback in consumer spending.

Despite a very limited budget, we were tasked with doing it all – specifically, our objectives were to:

• Drive ecommerce sales, especially on the key strategic platform of Douyin (China’s TikTok)

• Increase engagement and brand affinity with our target audience

• But ALSO build our brand equity, reinforcing our premium brand positioning and retaining the core spirit of the new products

In other words, we had to generate both demand and branding in one campaign, all under tight budget constraints.

We had to find a better way to leverage influencers – one that fully took advantage of the influencer’s audience and reach, but still made the brand distinctly memorable.

Building on our audience insight, we came up with a bold idea – what if we could take the brand building advantage of TVCs and merge it with the engagement and reach advantage of influencers?

And so we set out to combine the best of both worlds, creating a slick, branded social campaign where we took on the role of director, and the influencers became the stars. Together, we created visually stunning pieces of content that featured the influencers but were undeniably Magnum, dazzling our audiences and giving them exactly what they wanted: to see their favorite influencers shine, made possible by Magnum.

Digging into the ice cream category audience data on Douyin, we analyzed the top content preferences and carefully selected a star roster of 5 Douyin influencers that matched our audience’s taste.

We then worked closely with these influencers to create the winning play – a short video content formula with consistent visual cues, showing off the product, taste, and feel of our new products, all using our signature sound from the global launch campaign.

As long as we could bring some consistency to the visuals and structure of the influencer's videos while letting them shine, we were confident we could convey a consistent brand image to the audience.

Drawing on our extensive experience in creating premium, high quality productions befitting Magnum’s stature, we directed and advised our influencers from start to finish, taking the production value of their content to another level and creating a win-win partnership.

Of course, we still gave them ample room to add their own flair to the content, ensuring that it was still unique to them, and they executed the play perfectly with their own style.

We launched all five influencer videos in tandem with our local product launch, delivering an influencer campaign that blended perfectly with our branded content, as if the influencers were being starred in our TVCs.

Once we launched the campaign on Douyin, all of the influencers’ content was met with overwhelmingly positive feedback – the comments were filled with users gushing about how classy and impressive the videos looked. And this time, the Magnum brand was front and center along with the influencers, with users mentioning all the right keywords associated with Magnum (premium, attractive, juicy, tasty), demonstrating extremely accurate brand recall.

The campaign wasn’t just a win for brand building either.

We garnered over 600,000 engagements, with engagement rates on our influencers’ content all surpassing their own average engagement rates. Our Douyin followers grew 22% as well, beating industry benchmarks.

On top of that, our search volume exploded, with Ecommerce search increasing over 800%, driving a 20% increase in online sales.

In short, by creatively leveraging influencers and data, we managed to deliver demand by building a consistent brand.