What kind of amazing moments will be created when a centrally-administered cultural tourism enterprise that positions itself as a “quality life visionary” meets a short video platform that uses creativity to “record the beauty of life”?
Recently, Overseas Chinese Town Group collaborated with Douyin to launch the #HappinessTogether Douyin Challenge, linking together amusing short videos of various people, things, and scenic areas. The campaign also integrated creative short video ads, Douyin challenges, influencer IPs, and social network marketing to enhance the spread of joy. The topic page has accumulated over 250 million views, achieving outstanding results right from the start. The #HappinessTogether topic quickly became a Douyin sensation.
Strong traffic driven by KOLsComprehensive exposure both on and off the platform
With nearly 30,000 participants, over 250 million cumulative views, and more than 6 million likes, these figures present no small challenge on any traffic platform. Choosing #HappinessTogether as the theme for the brand’s first Douyin challenge made the topic instantly relatable for participants in terms of video content, while still leaving ample room for creative interpretation.
More importantly, the theme is highly inclusive. The brand empowers users by offering a low-barrier interactive mechanism, allowing every Douyin user to engage with the brand.
Overseas Chinese Town also paid great attention to the details of the Douyin challenge. “A song that makes you want to take a vacation” — that’s how many users described the challenge’s theme song, “Happiness Together.” This song was specially commissioned by Overseas Chinese Town for the challenge, crafted by musicians to align with the characteristics of the Overseas Chinese Town Cultural Tourism Festival and the features of Douyin. Its upbeat melody and catchy lyrics make it instantly memorable.
The demo dance is designed to be simple and easy to learn, featuring low barriers to entry — classic traits of viral Douyin dances. Given that regular Douyin users can only shoot 15-second videos, the #HappinessTogether challenge ingeniously incorporated “OCT” (Overseas Chinese Town) into the dance moves, paired with equally distinctive background music, boosting brand recognition among users.
Low barriers reduce participation difficulty, while top KOLs ignite participation enthusiasm. During the event, Overseas Chinese Town invited nearly 10 high-quality video creators, including Mr.Pea, 王小麦, 小雾宝宝, 洋洋猫carinad, 球迷G妹, and 睿智先生, to kick off the challenge. These influencers cover fan groups such as couples, parents and children, families, and students. The top creators garnered over 1.5 million likes. Through PGC (professionally generated content) from influencers, users were encouraged to document the beautiful moments of their travels, attracting a large volume of high-quality UGC (user-generated content).
Achieving a “rallying response” in a single marketing campaign relies not only on influencer traffic but also on comprehensive exposure both on and off the platform. The #HappinessTogether Douyin Challenge covered Douyin’s premium promotional resources, utilizing splash screens, discovery page banners, hot searches, and information feeds to fully engage users along their Douyin journey. This approach stimulated participation within the platform and attracted spontaneous involvement from KOLs with millions to tens of millions of followers, such as 僵小鱼, 街探社, and Misaya若风. Meanwhile, Overseas Chinese Town’s official Weibo, WeChat, and new media matrices across its scenic spots also actively participated, encouraging users to express diverse forms of happiness and generating greater exposure on Weibo and WeChat.
Data shows that by October 2018, Douyin had surpassed 200 million daily active users (DAU) and 400 million monthly active users (MAU) in China. On this hundreds-of-millions-user platform, “sharing travel” is a high-frequency activity and has helped propel a number of internet-famous tourist cities and attractions. For the veteran tourism group Overseas Chinese Town, this represents an entirely new blue ocean of traffic.
It can be said that the #HappinessTogether Douyin campaign is a co-created travel IP initiative by Overseas Chinese Town and Douyin. By aggregating interactive outcomes on the “Happiness Together” brand homepage, it fosters the creation of an original, beautiful lifestyle, perfectly integrating the two brands through travel-related content.
Meeting the People’s Aspirations for a Better Life, Leading High-Quality Tourism Development
“Happiness Together” is not only the theme of this Douyin challenge by Overseas Chinese Town but also the theme of the Overseas Chinese Town Cultural Tourism Festival. This theme aligns with the brand’s positioning as a “quality life visionary” and highlights the group’s unwavering commitment to meeting people’s aspirations for a better life.
Starting in October this year, Overseas Chinese Town Group coordinated over 100 theme parks, natural attractions, characteristic towns, beautiful villages, themed hotels, cultural performances, holiday resorts, and art and ecological venues across nearly 50 cities. Together, they created an unprecedentedly large-scale cultural tourism festival — the world’s first corporate-hosted event with the longest duration, most activities, widest coverage, and richest variety.
Diversity is where joy lies. In the Overseas Chinese Town Cultural Tourism Festival, theme parks transform into joy theaters, natural attractions showcase joyful culture, characteristic towns become joyful hubs, beautiful villages elevate into joyful countryside, themed hotels partner with joyful art, cultural performances enrich joyful holidays, holiday resorts create new joyful lifestyles, Yunnan’s all-for-one tourism presents a joy-filled experience, and art and ecology craft a joyful literary vibe. This launches a cross-time, cross-space, cross-industry, and cross online-offline tourism festival.
Today, tourism has entered a new era of mass travel and a new phase of cultural-tourism integration, bringing both new opportunities and challenges to the industry. Across every theme park, scenic area, characteristic town, and art venue under Overseas Chinese Town, culture is the soul. Culture is an essential component of tourism, and tourism is a vital medium for cultural dissemination. Their integrated development is an inevitable trend. Overseas Chinese Town continuously innovates its tourism offerings, evolving from single-format to mixed experiences, embedding cultural meaning into tourism, and then using culture to recreate tourism’s charm.
The people’s aspiration for a better life guides the tourism industry toward high-quality development, and the new era will ultimately choose outstanding tourism enterprises. Whether in terms of tourism product innovation, cultural festival enrichment, service quality enhancement, or diverse cultural communication, Overseas Chinese Town Group continuously innovates, putting people first to deliver high-quality tourism products. It responds to the public’s desire for a better life and demonstrates the exemplary and leading role of a large cultural tourism enterprise in the new era of cultural-tourism integration.