Halloween, beloved for its festive traditions, has in recent years become a social media sensation. This year, TCL Electronics saw an opportunity to drive greater awareness of its brand while celebrating Halloween with a global audience, and decided that its key messaging would be “#TCLHallowin - A Halloween Giveaway.”
TCL engaged the Hylink team to design a campaign that would drive more users to TCL’s social media accounts while communicating the idea that the image quality of TCL televisions is so real that monsters are terrified when they see their greatest fears on a TCL television screen.
The Hylink team implemented several artistic design factors in the campaign, such as hand-drawn art and flipped genre conventions, to highlight the spirit of Halloween while incorporating key messages about TCL products.
The art team designed a series of Halloween-themed poll posts featuring the most popular and terrifying monsters (Frankenstein, Dracula, a ghost, and a witch) as the “victims” of their own worst fears. For each post, the Hylink team illustrated the monsters using a comic book art style that was meant to stir feelings of childhood nostalgia in social media users.
While the Hylink team planned to use the classic iterations of these monsters, we also decided to give them a modern twist. The design of the living- better yet “dying-” rooms featured in the images came from the team’s conception of how each monster would spend their evenings unwinding in 2019. An immense amount of planning went into designing every detail seen in each monster’s living room, even though the monster and the TCL television are the focus of each image. These artistic posts stand in stark contrast to TCL’s usual posts featuring real-life images.
Hylink launched the campaign on TCL’s social accounts with a teaser video of Frankenstein in horror over a “hospital scene” he is watching on the screen of his TCL television. The video also contained strong call to action captions encouraging the audience to consistently check TCL’s social accounts for information on entering the contest tied to the campaign.
Next, Hylink published three sets of poll posts featuring the other three monsters. The first set of posts displayed a monster’s living room and a TCL television playing their greatest fear, along with a question that hinted at the monster’s identity. We used the Instagram poll feature and post comment section to collect user’s guesses to the monsters’ identities. For the second set of posts, we added the horrified monsters to their respective living rooms from the first set of posts, emphasizing the campaign’s message that TCL television image quality is indistinguishable from real-life.
Key performance metrics (KPIs) were measured through impressions and engagement numbers and the campaign surpassed the initial benchmarks for each (impressions by 929% and engagements by 14,740%). The specific results are listed below.
12.7 million impressions across all three social platforms
574,581 engagements
247,000 participants
During the week of Halloween, October 28th through October 30th, 247K users participated in the campaign across all three platforms. The Hylink team found that the highest engagement rates among users of all three platforms were from 18-24-year-olds (82.4%), out of which at least 77% were male. It was also evident that out of the eight regions participating in the campaign, India, France, and Australia had the highest engagement numbers.
Hylink’s campaign demonstrated the effectiveness of combining striking holiday-themed visuals with interactive content formats to capture the attention of social media users in the 18-24 age range. Furthermore, the campaign’s series format guaranteed consistent user visits to TCL’s profile, resulting in additional follower acquisition.
It's evident that tapping into the spirit of a holiday and childhood nostalgia through striking visuals can be the most effective means to reach a global audience. Despite different cultural backgrounds, there are some concepts that all users relate and respond to.
