At the beginning of each winter season, we always see a spike in search results for automotive care products and especially for motor oil, which is not surprising with winter temperatures as low as -35° Celsius. As motorists are preparing for winter, we wanted to educate them about Helix's optimum performance even at extreme temperatures and convert this awareness into sales.

Despite Shell’s superior functionalities, motor oil is a low involvement category and end up choosing “whatever works” – believing that all brands in the category are pretty much the same. Being higher priced is a disadvantage for Shell Helix.

Primarily, the campaign was intended to create educated awareness of Shell Helix as delivering superior ultimate performance, even in extreme conditions. We needed to generate reach and build distinctive recall for the brand.

Secondly, we also wanted to capitalize on the pre-winter preparations and generate immediate sales for Helix.

We partnered up with iQiyi, China’s largest online video platform for our audience.

We built our execution around China's two biggest winter online shopping festivals, Double 11 and Double 12. These are the days (and weeks) during which our audience has the highest intention to buy automotive care products – so this is when we had to win!

In partnership with iQiyi, we created three 10-minute “Top Gear” style episodes. Each episode focused on a different competitive challenge relating to winter performance, pitting both drivers against each other and enabling us to talk about the most commonly experienced engine problems:

- Racing speed

- Snow drifting

- Wilderness expedition

To build initial hype around our campaign, we created a series of cut-downs to be placed on the newest short clip channels such as DouYin and MiaoPai. And of course, we leveraged the country’s key social platform, Weibo, to amplify views.