Objectives

October 20, 2021, Xiaomi officially announced the launch of the Xiaomi Master Class series. The new project brought together professional photographers from around the world specializing in different fields such as portrait photography, street photography, monochrome photography, providing them a platform to share their experiences with mobile photography.

Xiaomi, as an Internet company with smartphones and smart hardware connected by an IoT platform at its core, has been dedicated to bringing quality products with pro-grade mobile photography features, offering everyone a platform to express their creativity to the fullest. The first season of Xiaomi Master Class saw professional photographers share their mobile photography insights, and more importantly, talk about why they decided to pick up the craft and how they found their personal style – all part of the theme "The Moments That Made Me", inspiring those who look to create with the phone in their pocket and capture their moments.

Objective:

1. Establish Xiaomi's leading imagery capabilities in mobile photography and video
2. Combine pure social media activities with offline Xiaomi Store sales
3. Enable users to actively participate in activities and show the brand's care for the user experience

Strategy and Execution

Xiaomi Master Class is a long-term project, and we would like to attract attention through this inaugural campaign. As a long-term campaign, we hope to make full use of different content and platforms to achieve our objectives.

1. Multiple content composition

• Invite professional photographers who are recognized in the photography field as the Master Candidates and share their experience in the Xiaomi Master Class.
• Invite influencer photographers from different genres to join the topic and share their stories through photos shot on Xiaomi smartphones. 
• Invite Xiaomi Creators, who are Xiaomi’s official creative collaborators to join the conversation and share their stories through photos shot on Xiaomi smartphones.
• Encourage social media audiences to join online and offline Xiaomi Master Classes as well as share their photos shot on a phone to join our competetion.

2. Multiple social media platforms

• Xiaomi social media platforms worked as the main platform to kick off this campaign. Influencers joined this campaign through their own social media. Audience/users engage in this campaign with their own social media accounts.
• Launched on all platforms at the same time, unified with the same message, and reached audience/users with the advantages of different platforms as an organic system.
  • Twitter and Facebook: convey message and online/offline information sharing
  • Instagram: still visual sharing and UGC engagement
  • YouTube: Main platform to watch online Xiaomi Master Class videos
  • TikTok: short and engaging videos

3. Regional participation

Because this is a long-term project for audiences all over the world, this campaign was kicked off by Xiaomi global account and joined by different Xiaomi region accounts.

By using the same campaign message and the same visual template, we were able to connect all stages into one campaign. By inviting local master photographers and influencers, we were also able to successfully reach local audiences.

4. Combine online and offline activities

In this campaign, together with the different collaborators/organizations, we launched Xiaomi Master Classes both online and offline. Thus audiences not only could learn at home on social media, but they also get the chance to our offline class in Xiaomi Stores or special edition to get hands on our newest phones and learned with the Master onsite step by step.

All offline recruitment was run on Social Media and our Xiaomi Community.

5. Not promote our products but instead focus on branding

This campaign is not for promoting one specific product from Xiaomi, instead, we want to showcase Xiaomi's focus on creative expression and Xiaomi’s overall visual capabilities

Thus we have focused more on the creative mindset and methods, not just simple techniques.

Results

1. Nearly 60M impression on Xiaomi Global social media and influencers' social media. Total video views of online Xiaomi Master Classes is 1.5M.
2. 3 online Xiaomi Master Classes and 5 offline Xiaomi Master Classes were successfully held, 1400 people joined (400 onsite, 1000 through internal livestream system)
3. Total 8(group) photographers joined this campaign, gather 1000+ UGC photos.

Media