• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms and Conditions
  • DMCA
  • Blog

Davis Network Advertising

Success is in our D-N-A

Prosperity Marketing System

  • Home
  • About
  • News
  • Mobile
  • Resources
  • Contact Page
You are here: Home / News / WeChat Made Addicted Users Go Cold Turkey For 12 Hours and Filmed Everything

WeChat Made Addicted Users Go Cold Turkey For 12 Hours and Filmed Everything

March 29, 2017 by davis

Young love Young love Credit: Saatchi & Saatchi Guangzhou

Most Popular

For people outside China, it can be difficult to understand how tight of a grasp the WeChat app has on people’s lives. The average user sent 74 messages a day on the app, WeChat parent company Tencent Holdings said last year. Half of users spent over 90 minutes a day using it.

WeChat is only six years old, but with 889 million monthly active users, it has transformed the way people in China interact, do business, read the news, buy things and pay their bills. It just did a little experiment to see what happens when people are forced to log off for 12 hours.

Tencent worked with Saatchi & Saatchi Guangzhou to film six short documentaries about the experience of people going cold turkey. The videos seem designed to remind people of how much they rely on WeChat, while encouraging them to disconnect sometimes to have more authentic human experiences. Yes, the company is apparently encouraging people to think about what WeChat addiction is doing to their lives.

That’s perhaps a sign of how confident WeChat is that everybody’s already hooked.

One of the documentaries shows a young couple in constant contact via WeChat. “Without WeChat things wouldn’t have moved so fast,” the woman says. That’s a thought-provoking but debatable point, since they’re shown in bed together peering into their respective smartphones.

Deprived of WeChat, they argue, walk their pet rabbit, go to a café and stare at their smartphones (they still have their phones, just not WeChat.) But when the 12 hours are up, the woman gets curious and jealous about who her boyfriend is texting. That relationship didn’t make it, according to a release from Saatchi, but their situation must have struck a chord, because the video got around 1 million views.

Before people log off the app, there are some cringeworthy (and at times familiar) scenes of WeChat addiction. A 5-year-old pleads with his mom to put down her WeChat and read him a book. An older woman stays in bed playing with her phone, even when her husband asks her to eat breakfast with him. An exhausted, ill real estate agent scrolls through her messages while hooked to an IV. She’s always on, fearing that she’ll miss a message from a client and lose a sale. But things were even harder for her without the app for 12 hours: She hit the street with real estate brochures, bundled up against the cold and dealing with constant rejection.

On a personal note: When I got a message about the experiment, I made a tally of every time I used the app for the past 12 hours. I paid for a Starbucks latte; did a group buy of wine; logged in at a business lunch conference and made new connections there; and booked tickets to see “Beauty and the Beast” with my kids. I read two news stories shared by contacts, including one about WeChat parent Tencent buying a 5% stake in Tesla. I sent and received dozens of text messages, personal and professional, indulging in the occasional laughing-crying smiley or heart emoji. During all that time, I was served only one ad, from Canon. WeChat helped the ad revenues of its parent company grow significantly, but it still puts customer experience first.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)

Related

This news item is brought to you by http://adage.com/article/global-news/wechat-made-addicted-users-cold-turkey-12-hours-filmed/308463/?utm_source=Global%20News&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+AdvertisingAge/Global%20News

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

Be the most informed person in your circle

Recent Posts

  • The F8 of Digital Advertising Sits with Fb and Google – Which-50 (website)
  • Why Sports Will Play a Greater Role in Fox’s Upfront Pitch
  • Google turns to artists to mold Assistant into an amiable companion
  • “Alexa, how can my brand shine in the age of ask”
  • Twitter amplifies branding opportunities in Periscope broadcasts

Archives

  • April 2017 (140)
  • March 2017 (15)
  • February 2017 (11)
  • January 2017 (5)
  • December 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (1)
  • April 2016 (1)
  • March 2016 (1)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • October 2015 (1)
  • September 2015 (1)
  • June 2015 (1)
  • May 2015 (2)
  • April 2015 (3)

Footer

RSS Subscribe to our news feed…

  • The F8 of Digital Advertising Sits with Fb and Google – Which-50 (website)
  • Why Sports Will Play a Greater Role in Fox’s Upfront Pitch

Pages

  • About
  • Archive Page
  • Blog
  • Contact Page
  • DMCA
  • Home
  • Privacy Policy
  • Resources
  • Terms and Conditions

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms and Conditions
  • DMCA
  • Blog

Tags

amazon apple awards B2B B2C bitmoji branding campaigns chatbot marketing chatbots digital advertising direct response e-commerce facebook google influencer marketing Interview Mobile mobile app mobile video music non-profit PR regulations search technology snapchat sports TV twitter viral video

Categories

  • Mobile (54)
  • News (132)

#1 Tool for 2017

Prosperity Marketing System

Be successful by copying what we are doing in our own business [Earn money before you spend money]!

Copyright © 2023 · News Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in