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LOTUS :
LOTUS ROOTS
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ENTRANT COMPANY :
PUBLICIS GROUPE HONG KONG, HONG KONG
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TITLE :
RERIGHTING HISTORY
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BRAND :
CATHAY
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ADVERTISER :
CATHAY
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AGENCY :
PUBLICIS GROUPE HONG KONG,
HONG KONG
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MANAGING DIRECTOR :
DENNIS YEUNG
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CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER :
CHRISTOPHER LEE
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HEAD OF CREATIVE EXCELLENCE :
JASON WILLIAMS
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GROUP CREATIVE DIRECTOR :
HALO CHENG
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SENIOR ART DIRECTOR :
MARCO LAM
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ART DIRECTOR :
TOM TSANG
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COPYWRITER :
ABBIE CHAN
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CLIENT SERVICE DIRECTOR :
KENNETH POON
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SENIOR ACCOUNT DIRECTOR :
KALE NG
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ACCOUNT MANAGER :
GERTIE TSANG
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STRATEGIC PLANNING DIRECTOR :
GARRON CHIU
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CULTURAL CONTEXT EXPLANATION :
The work uncovered the deeper societal Hong Kong insight on why the Paralympic games gets so little fanfare despite the fact that Hong Kong Paralympians have won over 100 medals; that the Paralympics throughout history has been covered so little that its actual history doesn’t exist.
By twisting this insight on its head, and “re-creating” a history that was sorely missed, we managed to not only get people to finally engage with the 2024 Paris Olympic games in Hong Kong, but also got people to engage with its history as well.
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CAMPAIGN SUMMARY :
Cathay, while being Hong Kong's home carrier, was still trying to regain brand love and affinity coming out of a slow recovery.
Brand affinity had dropped by 9% in Q4 of 2023, with many in Hong Kong believing that Cathay needed to care more about the needs of Hong Kong and its community
As the airline sponsor of the China Hong Kong Paralympics Commitee, Cathay wanted to leverage the 2024 Paralympics as a way to improve its brand affinity with its home market, and return the brand to its place in Hong Kongers hearts.
Our objective was twofold:
- Increase Brand Affinity by strengthening our connection to our home market through our Paralympics team sponsorship
- Drive awareness, engagement and viewership for the Paralympic games and our local athletes
Hong Kong is in two cycles of Olympic fever, with unprecedented success in 2021 and 2024 leading to 10 medals that every citizen can recount.
The Paralympics however has not seen the same attention. Despite over 100 medal wins, most Hong Kongers would assume that number was zero. Part of the reason was that there was so little coverage of the dominant early era of Hong Kong Paralympians
So Cathay, as the official airline sponsor of the China Hong Kong Paralympics Committee, got people to support the 2024 paralympics by understanding its glorious history.
The campaign used AI to recreate championship moments lost to history, and recruited a wave of citizen journalists to fill in Hong Kong's paralympics history online
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CREATIVITY/IDEA/INSIGHT :
Hong Kong loves winners
Yet when it comes to our Paralympians and their over 100 medal wins, Hong Kongers haven’t seemed to notice.
Our initial thought was indifference the the games itselves.
And the breakthrough came when we began to do our own research
And realized we could not
Nearly no coverage by newspapers. No videos on YouTube. No photos on the official Paralympics website. No working Wikipedia links for any Hong Kong Paralympian in the 20th century.
When we interviewed some of the greatest Paralympians, they said the same thing. Benny Cheung, who won a wheelchair-fencing Gold Medal in the 1996 Atlanta Paralympics said “there were no Hong Kong fans or media there…I had to ask a European reporter if he could call my mom and tell her her son won a medal”
No wonder nobody in the city knows about our successes.
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STRATEGY :
Our target audience was the entirety of Hong Kong, who had previously paid little attention to the Paralympic games. This included the Tokyo Paralympic games, despite the fact that Tokyo shared a time zone with Hong Kong. This made the Paris Paralympic Games, that mostly took place after midnight, a much more difficult sell.
Previous campaigns that were more straight forward in advertising the games fell on deaf ears.
Which is why in order to get eyeballs on the games, we needed an execution that accomplished the following things
Challenge the perception of Hong Kong Paralympians and their successes
Give them a reason to watch the games, by understanding the history (or lackthereof) of Hong Kong’s Paralympians
By doing so, we create a proper call-to-action that would create a conversation and a bigger reason to view the games, as well as build Cathay Pacific as the brand that brought these issues to light.
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EXECUTION :
A film was launched in the week leading up to the Paralympic games, celebrating the over hundred medals that Hong Kong Paralympians have won over the years, with footage of Paralympic successes from the 1980’s in track and field and fencing.
The video culmiinates in the fact that none of the footage was real; it was all in fact AI created based on the stories of our first Paralympic medalists. This is because much of Hong Kong’s Paralympics history was never recorde, by the media or even online. None of the footage of our early successes actually existed. This is followed by a call-to-action, that while we may have missed hundreds of medal wins, it is not too late to cheer on our Paralympians in 2024.
The video was launched on digital channels, social and Out-of-Home video, which was accompanied by a PR and influencer campaign to shed light on how much success our Paralympians have had, and how little coverage there was of it. This generated a conversation that drove more awareness towards the upcoming games.
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RESULT :
+4% Brand Affinity
+1pppt Brand Awareness
7.1x Hong Kong Google search interest in Paralympics (vs 2021)
+40% in Paralympics Viewership (vs 2021)
Lead to the highest viewership of Paralympics in the history of Hong Kong, despite the time zone difference, and drove increase awareness and search volume for Paralympic sports beyond the games
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