NetEase Cloud Music prints users' song comments across a Hangzhou subway train

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.