Warcraft was THE most anticipated movie of 2016 in China. Warcraft is a story of escape from an old world to a new world, perfectly embodying Intel’s message. And half the worldwide Warcraft fan base lives in China.

We made Intel the enabler behind the best Warcraft experiences imaginable. We forged an integrated entertainment partnership with Legendary Pictures, the movie’s distributor, to use the film, its characters and animation style in original social digital content and designed experiential events to complement the movie’s release and showcase Intel at its best.

Digital video content: shot by one of China’s hottest directors and packed with Hollywood-designed special effects. It featured Intel’s China brand ambassador on a journey with Warcraft’s star character, Orgrim, and ended on the characters smashing an old computer to bits. Paid media extended reach across all online search results for the film.

Experiential: To target non-Warcraft fans, an exhibition in one of Beijing’s trendiest shopping centers ran the week before the movie’s opening night. Virtual reality games showed Intel’s premier technology and visitors snapped selfies with a 3 metre tall Orgrim smashing an old PC with his Doomhammer.

eCommerce: We partnered with Tmall, China’s largest e-commerce platform, to create a 3D augmented reality ad.

Instore: A 2-month, 50-stop roadshow took our message to brick-and-mortar retail outlets to drive conversion instore.

Our campaign was exposed to over 80 million people on social media, and our digital video gained over 10 million views. The Beijing experiential exhibition saw over 32,000 visitors in 6 days.

To ensure consumers connected the activity with Intel, we tracked mentions of Intel on social accounts and recorded 80.2 million impressions during May and June 2016.

This drove intent to upgrade their PC. Quantitative research measured intent to upgrade among people exposed vs not exposed to the campaign. Against our KPI of a 6% increase in intent to refresh their PC, we scored a 12% intent level (from 39% to 51% intent).

Against our business objective to turn around the declining PC market with ANY positive signs of growth, we saw an 8.1% increase in PC sales in the 4 months after, compared to the previous 5 months (which included the peak Chinese New Year sales season).

The writing is on the wall for the PC market. As chip market leader, Intel is maximizing PC chip revenue in China through promotions that drive spurts in PC sales. Our insight leveraged emotional reasons to upgrade a PC over the rational urge to let old PC’s die. An entertainment partnership was brought to life with digital content for social media supported by experiential and instore activation to shorten the purchase decision journey. This campaign drove an 8.1% increase in PC sales all through PR-driven BTL support, reversing the 8% decline of 2015.

FOMO, the fear of missing out. We know what it is, we know what it feels like, and we know that it is a major driver in Chinese consumption culture.

Consumer studies ranked functional triggers as the main drivers for a new PC, but we could see FOMO played a larger role than most admit.

We leveraged FOMO by showing people the incredible Warcraft experience the latest Intel chips brought to PC’s, and startled them with the realisation that their old PC meant they were missing out on the new world.

But we needed to expand our target audience beyond the community of gamers to appeal to all consumers excited about the release of this major Hollywood blockbuster.

PC sales had been declining for years in China, but 2015 saw this drop accelerate, with laptop sales declining 8% and desktop PCs down 11%. Intel chips are inside around 80% of these PC’s and Intel’s marketing strategy is maximise profitable sales in this segment as long as possible.

While Chinese are snapping up the latest smartphones and tablets, they persevere with old PCs - over 30 million Chinese PC’s are over 5 years old. We needed to speed up their replacement, overcoming the US$600 price tag and a typical 6 month decision journey. Our objectives were:

- Stop the downward PC sales spiral with ANY positive signs of growth within 3 months

- Increase willingness to buy a new PC by 6% in consumer tracking

- Reach 80 million consumers across paid, owned and earned media channels with our message