Nike rolls out its first mobile campaign in China via Tencent's WeChat

Calling it a 'sports brand subscription platform' with a 'Nike sports-on-the-go' concept, the brand will launch its official WeChat account, which is available on Android and Apple smartphones from 23 August onwards—in time for the Nike Festival Of Sport 2012 taking place in Shanghai until the 26th.

Before that, the QR code (above) is being utilised as a teaser ad for online rich-media and outdoor advertising, such as on Baidu, taxis, posters, billboards, and on retail flyers, to draw attention to Nike's WeChat account.

More than 100 million WeChat users will be able to opt-in to subscribe to Nike's account. Upon subscription, fans will be able to activate daily news feeds from Nike.

“WeChat is our ultimate platform to build up our CRM system,” said Vicky Huang, media manager of Nike Greater China. “We want to deepen the connection with consumers, from broadcasting to conversing, from 'one to many' to 'one to one'," she added.

“We chose the WeChat platform because mobile penetration for China's youths is extremely high, tipping over 50 per cent. In terms of usage habits, they practically depend on their mobiles for all forms of communication, including scanning QR codes” explained Stella Jamie Lui, digital partner of Team Nike at Mindshare.

RazorFish's Carolina Lam and Martin Li are responsible for pushing daily content out on the Nike WeChat account. Overall, Nike's mobile campaign will be launched in three phases. For the second and third phases, Tencent has allowed Nike's agencies on its open API (application programming interface) to integrate existing sports applications such as the Nike+ running app with WeChat.

A Tencent spokesperson told Campaign Asia-Pacific that other multinational brands such as Pepsi and Starbucks have used WeChat for mobile campaigns before, but Nike is the first sports brand to do so in China.

Different from traditional text-based mobile communication tools such as QQ, SMS/MMS etc, WeChat supports voice chats (one to one and group) as well as sharing of photos and videos.