Yili holiday companion ad: Key takeaways
- Three days of annual leave can give Chinese workers a 13-day break spanning Mid-Autumn Festival and the National Day holiday
- Yili places its milk across more than a dozen leisure scenarios to extend the product beyond breakfast and family consumption
- The campaign develops an idea from previous Yili campaigns
If Chinese employees take three days of annual leave between Mid-Autumn Festival and Golden Week they can string together 13 straight days off. Yili (伊利) wants them drinking milk for the whole stretch.
As always, the Chinese dairy giant is getting the message across with its characteristic humour
As always, the Chinese dairy giant is getting the message across with its characteristic humour. It has hired actors Shen Teng (沈腾) and Li Xian (李现) and director Zhang Dapeng (张大鹏) for a campaign film that follows Li and Shen through more than a dozen possible holiday activities.
The funny part is that the actors appear only as faces on Yili milk cartons, the cartons held in the hands of people doing everything from going to gigs, cycling and gaming to live music or mountain climbing.
Yili is calling itself the consumer’s jiaqi dazi (假期搭子), or ‘holiday companion’. The term dazi usually describes a person, someone you rope into various activities and pastimes. The term gives Yili an element of cultural relevance and the advert levity.
Unusual pairings is an idea that Yili has used in a previous campaign film, New Year’s Good Companion, also directed by Zhang Dapeng. It was based around the concept that holiday gift giving can be a headache, then positioned Yili as an easy addition to whatever gifts consumers were already buying.
The Dao view: from gift companion to holiday companion
Yili is broadening its appeal from a position of strong familiarity. They can do this because they’re already a household name and therefore don’t need to spend time explaining the product. That gives Yili room for creative freedom.
Yili is broadening its appeal from a position of strong familiarity
It also gives Yili a way to create more reasons to buy familiar products. Milk is conventionally associated with breakfast and family households. Placing it at hotpot tables, campsites and gaming sessions asks consumers to imagine it in a much wider range of situations. Carrying milk to a gig or up a mountain is certainly more comic than credible, but that’s Yili’s style.
