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Getting China into Storytelling
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“What unites people? Armies? Gold? Flags? Stories. There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No one can defeat it.” These are the words uttered by Tyrion Lannister in the Game of Thrones series finale. Tyrion was right. Stories connect us in ways little else can. They make us laugh, smile, cry. They create and showcase our culture. And a lot of them these days can be found on YouTube.
But Chinese companies weren’t telling the right stories to global audiences on the platform. They were just repurposing domestic videos. The effects weren’t great. Tyrion wouldn’t have approved.
This is the story of how we convinced Chinese companies to tell their stories to the world.
China is one of the biggest buyers of YouTube advertising space. Our challenge was to convince Chinese companies that if they wanted to grow their business outside China they needed to tell their brand stories in ways that worked for the audience.
Show don’t tell.
Our message to Chinese companies was this: you don’t have to change your brand’s DNA, just change the way you tell its story. The solution? Drive awareness of the YouTube Academy, offering free online courses to help brands tell better stories and improve channel performance.
To illustrate the point, we told a story.
We told a universal story, one faced by any person who’s ever immigrated to another country. In ‘Bento’, a young Chinese boy arrives at a new school and quickly starts to feel separate and isolated. His resentment boils down to land on his lunch. He has rice, vegetables and chopsticks whilst his schoolmates always have sandwiches and chips. And he longs for a ‘normal’ lunch like the other children. When his mother realises his different bento box is causing him such distress, she comes up with an ingenious idea. And it doesn’t mean he has to eat any sandwiches to make new friends.
Being the outsider in a foreign land can be daunting, but storytelling can connect us all.