In 2014, Nokia was launching it's latest smartphones, the Lumia 830 and 930. However, it was a tough time for Nokia to sell its phones in China as a very large percentage of market share has been taken up by its competitors.

The only feature of Lumia 830 and 930 could be talked about was its intelligent voice assistant. We therefore decided to launch a campaign to promote the voice assistant to raise the awareness of it and to hopefully sell more phones eventually.

Our idea was unprecedented to put a comedian on stage together with a smartphone for an actual Xiang Sheng, the Chinese stand-up comedy usually features two performers, in a theatre in front of a live audience of about 200 people.

The performance was released on social networks and it rapidly generated massive curiosity, buzz, social engagements which helped sell out all the units in 3 months.

Everybody in China loves Xiang Sheng.

We have Xiang Sheng on the radio, on TV, in the theatre, and even at the nationwide Spring Festival Party every year. So, there’s a Xiang Sheng gene in each of us.

When Xiang Sheng was performed by human and artificial intelligence for the first time, it easily caught people's attention and they were amazed and highly entertained by it right away.

Since Nokia turned the most traditional and popular comedic arts in China into something really innovative whilst it still remained true to the essence of normal Xiang Sheng that highly entertains. It rapidly generated a lot of curiosity and interest on social platforms.

In just a few weeks, the results were astounding, with more than 2 million views on Youku, 332,031 shares on Weibo and Wechat, 383,057 social buzz and 440,125 social engagements across multi social platforms, and more than 1,500 user-generated content inspired by the Nokia’s Xiang Sheng were uploaded online.

The awareness of Cortana was increased by 160% month on month and Nokia sold out its latest smartphones within 3 months.