From grabbing traffic to occupying minds, cracking the brand's Spring Festival marketing code

"The year is over with the sound of firecrackers, and the spring breeze brings warmth to Tusu." The Spring Festival, a traditional festival that carries the millennium cultural heritage of the Chinese nation, is an important time for family reunion and bidding farewell to the old and welcoming the new. This article explores the origin and evolution of Spring Festival customs. From pasting Spring Festival couplets, setting off firecrackers to eating New Year's Eve dinner, each tradition has a profound historical origin and cultural connotation. Let us travel through time and space together, unveil the mystery of Spring Festival customs, and feel the unique charm of traditional culture.

As the undisputed golden battlefield in China's consumer landscape, the Spring Festival period has always been an important arena for brand competition, among which the box office battle for Spring Festival movies is the most eye-catching.

The latest data from the State Film Administration shows that the 2025 Spring Festival period (January 28 to February 4) had a box office of 9.51 billion yuan and 187 million moviegoers, which not only broke the historical record of the Spring Festival period but also provided unprecedented traffic dividends for brand marketing.

In the battle for traffic during the 2025 Spring Festival, Amul entered the market as a partner brand of Douyin's [Happy New Year Movie Viewing Plan]. By deeply binding with Douyin's core Spring Festival IP "Detective Chinatown 1900", it used creative content and emotional resonance to build a global influence in the user's "movie viewing + social + consumption" complex scenario. This innovative practice not only redefined the value dimension of Spring Festival marketing, but also provided a replicable success paradigm for integrated marketing in the fast-moving consumer goods industry.

01 From emotional resonance to interactive fission

Reconstructing the participation link through content co-creation

In recent years, cooperation between brands and IPs has become common. How to accurately anchor people's preferences and find the entry point to build emotional resonance is the first step to successfully breaking the circle.

This time, Amul chose to cooperate with Detective Chinatown 1900, not only because of the national influence of the Detective Chinatown series IP, but also because of its high adaptability to the target population: on the one hand, the unique tone of the series of movies "comedy + suspense" accurately matches the dual needs of young users for content that is "relaxing and fresh"; on the other hand, the public's strong demand for a "happy atmosphere" during the Spring Festival forms a natural resonance with the "family-friendly" attribute of the Detective Chinatown IP. This dual fit provides the underlying logic for brands to leverage IP to achieve emotional penetration.

After clarifying this logic, Amul did not stop at traditional one-way implantation, but reconstructed the participation link with "content co-creation" to stimulate two-way interaction among users.

First, an exclusive extra-episode was used to spark the topic, and the original crew including "Detective Chinatown 1900" director Dai Mo and lead actor Bai Ke were linked to create a customized extra-episode "Detective Chinatown Detective "An"", which turned the core plot of the movie "look, smell, ask, and feel" into a fun-filled selling point for Amul's 1 billion probiotics, achieving a deep fusion of "laugh points and selling points".

Then, we aggregated platform resources to create the topic #安慕希请看唐探#. Through challenges, talent matrix dissemination, and free movie tickets, we transformed "free tickets" into a social currency that users actively share, activating the entire ecosystem.

The essence of this strategy is to upgrade the traditional "consumption scene penetration" to "emotional experience co-creation". When consumers actively @ friends and post creative videos during the activities, the brand has quietly upgraded its role from "welfare provider" to "social catalyst".

02 From IP potential to brand momentum

Full-link marketing upgrade under the Douyin ecosystem

After confirming the cooperation with "Detective Chinatown 1900", Amul needs to transform IP potential into brand momentum. As the exclusive short video promotion platform for the "Detective Chinatown" series, Douyin has become the core battlefield for brands to leverage young traffic and build a closed marketing loop with its 600 million daily active users, highly sticky social ecology and precise content distribution mechanism.

In this marketing campaign, Amul takes "light entertainment interaction" as its fulcrum, and through the refined operation of the four major modules of "watch-win-swipe-test", it upgrades the traditional welfare distribution into a social traffic engine, achieving full-link penetration from IP binding to user asset sedimentation.

The first is [Watch]. Amul teamed up with the original film team and main creator Bai Ke to create an exclusive extra episode "Exploring Chinatown with An". The short film continues the setting of San Francisco in 1900 in the feature film. Combined with the original plot of the film, it tells the story of Bai Ke going to Xieshengtang to solve the case based on 1 billion clues, but unexpectedly discovering that the clues point to Amul yogurt in an unexpected way.

This short episode does not disrupt the continuity of the plot itself, and is closely tied to the theme and elements of traditional Chinese medicine in the film. The plot is very smooth, and the switching between the jokes and the selling points is not abrupt. Many viewers only realized that they were "tricked" at the end of the film, and shouted "I almost thought it was a feature film." After laughing, the audience lived up to expectations and sent this carefully produced short film to the Douyin hot spot twice, achieving a flexible transformation of hard advertising.

The second is [Win]. Relying on Douyin's mature interactive product matrix, Amul has turned the traditional action of "sending movie tickets" into a social game with various tricks.

In the "Drink Amul and Win a Small Card" activity, you can get movie tickets by winning the Amul Baike small card; in the "Good Fortune" of the Spring Festival that appears in the information flow recommendation, you may get a big gift by turning over the good fortune lottery; "Search for Star Luck" triggers the drop of lucky bags through keywords; "Wish Gift" submits wishes, signs in every day, completes tasks to earn points, and then you can participate in the subsequent continuous lucky draws; "UGC Want to Watch" clicks on the movie you want to watch for a chance to win movie tickets; 100 reviews can win prizes by writing a review after watching the movie...

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These interactive designs not only make users enjoy themselves, but also transform brand information into social currency and achieve fission communication. While giving consumers a super-value welfare experience, it also effectively improves brand favorability.

Data shows that with the enthusiasm of users, the 20,000 movie tickets given away by the official were sold out quickly within a week. During the event, the brand A3 population increased by more than 20 million, which is enough to prove the effectiveness of this strategy.

There is also [Brush] Tang Detective's high-energy hot spots, and complete content penetration by occupying hot spots. Through Douyin hot list, brand information is implanted in high-heat scenes such as movie trailers and main creators' live broadcasts. After users click on relevant hot terms and live broadcast rooms, they can directly jump to the customized advertising page of Amul, realizing the seamless connection of "content is advertising". In the barrage of "Place an order immediately after watching", Amul has completed a strong binding with Tang Detective and greatly increased brand exposure.

In addition, there are exclusive customized challenges, which use the high-quality gameplay of the interesting Tang Detective characters to continuously roll up traffic and trigger a wave of user participation.

As of February 7, the number of people who submitted Amul-related stickers was over 98,000, which is 2.5 times the average number of commercial stickers used. The cumulative number of submissions to the National Mission exceeded 950,000, which is 27 times the number of submissions in the food and beverage industry. The number of views of videos submitted to the National Mission reached 880 million, which is 11 times the average number of views.

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This strategy of "taking advantage of the popularity of movies to inspire user creation" not only reduces the sense of incongruity of hard advertising, but also allows brand content to naturally integrate into the user's social circle. Users spontaneously spread product selling points in their creations, which also realizes the communication upgrade of "users are the medium".

03 From traffic carnival to mental precipitation

Win-win situation for both brand and effect after successfully breaking the circle

The ultimate value of Amul's Spring Festival marketing campaign lies not only in the short-term traffic burst, but also in relying on the Douyin ecosystem and transforming the traffic dividend of the Spring Festival into the brand's long-term social assets through the closed-loop design of "content-interaction-conversion", thus achieving a leap from "breaking the circle exposure" to "mind occupying".

The topic #安慕希请看唐探# topped the Spring Festival movie industry interactive list with 4.93 billion views. Users spontaneously became brand communication nodes through UGC content such as secondary creation videos and film review mashups;

Lightweight interactive forms such as "drawing small cards", "searching star luck", "good luck", and "wish gift" combine the entertainment needs of "watching movies" with the social motivation of "winning benefits", greatly improving the participation rate of activities;

What is more noteworthy is that the deep participation of users has built an upgrade in brand relations: with the popularity of "Detective Chinatown 1900", the emotional connection between the brand and the "happy New Year" continues to deepen; through the interesting combination of "looking, smelling, asking and feeling" in the movie's extra content and the selling point of probiotics, users' memory of product functions has been greatly improved...

These will all be accumulated as user assets, laying a solid foundation for the long-term operation of the brand.

Conclusion

The success of Amul is not accidental. Behind it is a set of replicable marketing logic. It selects IP that matches the brand tone (such as the "joy" gene of "Detective Chinatown"), stimulates users' emotional resonance through UGC content, opens up the whole link of "watching-interaction-purchase", and shortens the consumption decision path. Then, the traffic of the hot activities is deposited into data assets to achieve long-term conversion.

The practice of Amul has also brought us a deeper revelation, that is: in the era of fragmented attention, the core code for brand growth is to replace "brand's self-talking ads" with "stories that users are willing to participate in", so that traffic carnival can truly settle into brand assets.