The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2017
NetEase Cloud Music prints users' song comments across a Hangzhou subway train
NetEase picked 85 of users' 400M song comments, printed them across a Hangzhou metro line and station, letting the community be the ad.
NetEase Cloud Music · Hangzhou MTR
What it had to solve
In 2017, Chinese music apps competed almost entirely on licensed catalogues, leaving NetEase Cloud Music little to differentiate on. Its one un-copyable asset was its comment community: users wrote about 640,000 new comments a day, many moving enough to stand alone as poems.
How it works
In spring 2017 the Chinese music streaming market was a licensing war: apps competed on who owned more songs, and NetEase Cloud Music had no way to win that fight on catalogue alone. What it did have was a community habit its rivals lacked — users had written an enormous library of song comments, some of which read like tiny emotional poems, and the app generated about 640,000 new comments every day.
Vice president Li Yin had the idea after spending more than an hour reading comments and being moved by them. The team narrowed the 400M comments to the 5,000 most-liked, then hand-picked 85 lines and printed them across Hangzhou Metro Line 1 and the whole Jiangling Road station in the app's signature red and white. The campaign name was "See the Power of Music", and passengers who stopped at the posters were interviewed for a follow-up documentary.
The result was one of 2017's defining marketing moments in China. The red train flooded social feeds, and the numbers followed: over 200M total exposure, 2,000+ media reports, the official WeChat article breaking 100k reads, the WeChat index climbing 24x from 540k to 13M, daily active users up 1.5M, and a No.1 spot in the App Store music charts. The work later took the Grand Prix at the 2017 Golden Mouse Awards — the only one in the brand group — and a Greater China Effie gold.
The campaign's originality was that the creative was the product's community itself: no invented slogans, no celebrity, just users' own words placed where urban commuters were already feeling the loneliness the comments described.
Why it lands
- The idea turned an un-copyable asset — the comment community — into the entire creative, so competitors could not imitate it without the same user base.
- It picked a physically captive audience: an underground train and station where riders already felt the loneliness the comments named, making recognition immediate.
- It designed for self-propagation, letting passengers photograph and share the posters, turning every rider into a media channel.
- It proved the strategy in numbers the industry trusts, winning ROI-based awards that measured exposure growth and app rankings rather than just creativity.
What it did
The campaign generated over 200M total exposure and 2,000+ media reports; the brand's WeChat post broke 100k reads, the WeChat index rose 24x from 540k to 13M, daily active users grew by 1.5M, and NetEase Cloud Music hit No.1 in the App Store music charts. It won the Grand Prix at the 2017 Golden Mouse Awards and a Greater China Effie gold.
What you can take
The asset rivals can't copy is often the community itself: put users' own words in a shared public space and let their recognition of themselves do the spreading.
Since then
The format became a template for Chinese UGC out-of-home marketing: rival platforms and brands launched their own comment-based trains and billboards, and the campaign is still cited as the canonical case for using user content as media. NetEase Cloud Music followed with repeated review-train and comment-out-of-home projects, and the 2017 effort also picked up a One Show China creative award and a China Outstanding Marketing award that year.
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