LIPTON set out to bring the tea break into the 21st century by acting as an enabler of spontaneous, confident chat, reinforcing LIPTON’s role as a social connector.Introducing LIPTON Social Tea Talk; An online and social media campaign that replicated the real dynamics of an office conversation. Teaming up with China’s most popular IM office chat tool, MSN Instant Messenger got our audience to fully engage with LIPTON and socially connect without having to leave their digital comfort zone.•Personalised video invites made the gesture of initiating a conversation simple and attractive and encouraged face-to-face chats.•Co-workers shared video content delivered through IM and factoids for posting on social networks.•Downloadable tools (emoticons, LIPTON winks picture uploads) allowed for personalised conversations.

Workers were incentivised - points for every conversation started could be used to win an afternoon Tea & Snack Pack for their office.

The Social Tea Talk campaign was an innovative digital first for China and became one of LIPTON’s highlights of the year.

In just seven short weeks and with a highly targeted budget, over 2m MSN users engaged with a campaign that really captured people’s imagination – as evidenced by a conversation rate of 45% from 4.4m banner clicks to 2 million invitations to Tea Talk being sent.Sales volume increased 36% and tea drinking frequency rose by 30% from the previous year (Millward Brown & Unilever Sales Results), successfully re-establishing the LIPTON social tea occasion in the office.