EMA winners: Best Creative Idea

This is part of our coverage on GOLD winners from the Event Marketing Awards 2018. See the full list of winners here. 

GOLD winner: Ogilvy Beijing
Event: Nescafé Sense Café
Brand: Nescafé

A study by Millward Brown found Nescafé ranked considerably lower than its competitors on a “sense of meaningfulness” – an increasingly important driver for brand strength in the coffee industry. To celebrate International Coffee Day, Nescafé decided to create a pop-up café to manifest its brand purpose – “starting real connections”.

But Beijing was reaching peak pop-up, so Nescafé chose fashion landmark Taikoo Li Sanlitun and brought in renowned architect Shuhei Aoyama and famous barista Wei Hanye to create something memorable.

The café contained five zones, each connected by a meandering counter where Nescafé could be served. The zones represented different senses: self, vitality, belonging, security and achievement. Each space had unique facilities and a unique coffee with which visitors were able to connect – and with each other.

Actor Li Yifeng acted as honorary café manager, mixing the first cup of coffee and promoting the café to his social media followers. Visitors were also encouraged to share their experiences, with small gifts for those who did so. KOLs were invited to visit the café and share their experience online through text, images and video.

Online registration was fully booked and nearly 6,000 people visited across the seven days. Over 1,000 media articles were published, and there were 968 million impressions (target 600 million), 2.3 million interactions (1.5 million) and brand buzz volume of 134,677 (10,000).

* Ogilvy Beijing also won GOLD in Best Experiential Marketing, Best Brand Experience – B2C and Best Integrated Marketing