Nobody Loves Father's Day. So How Do Tech Companies Market It?

Chasing one trending day after another seems to wear even the marketers out.

Even if you didn't know when Father's Day was, the WeChat service accounts of one company after another have probably reminded you, again and again: time to get something for Dad.

QQ, as on every holiday, dropped a Father's Day Easter egg onto your screen as you typed. The companies that love handing out coupons, true to form, used the holiday as an excuse to give, give, give. And Google, as usual, drew a Father's Day doodle for its homepage.

Father's Day has never been a holiday that gets much attention, and tech companies' Father's Day marketing is rarely as lively as what they do for Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, or even April Fools' Day.

This year it is especially quiet, because Father's Day falls on the same weekend as the Dragon Boat Festival. The e-commerce companies, which care most about promotions, are still caught up in the melee of the 6/18 mid-year sale and have no time for anything else. Other companies are still agonizing over their Dragon Boat Festival posters: should the zongzi be drawn sweet or savory?

QDaily spoke to quite a few tech companies. Only about half had prepared a Father's Day campaign that showed real effort. Most of the rest were simply marking the occasion, rushed and perfunctory.

Yidao Yongche invites you to record a message for your father

Of all the tech companies that love to ride a trending topic, the ride-hailing services are the keenest: they have plenty of cash, and what they need most is to stay visible by showing up on every date that matters.

Yidao Yongche's Father's Day page may have been the first to go live. Three days before the holiday, the company had already pushed out this interactive page, titled "A Father's Day Letter to Dad," through its WeChat service account.

With the people closest to us, some things are hard to say face to face. On this page, users can record a message for their father, turn it into a "letter to Dad," and share it with him on WeChat.

Yidao Yongche's head of communications, who planned the campaign, said the company has made a habit of jumping on every trending topic. The page took about two weeks from first idea to launch. She said that for the first few hours after launch, about 40,000 people were on it at any one time. "Less than ten minutes after it went live, our servers crashed."

Father's Day: A Letter to Dad

Uber x Amazon: order a Father's Day fresh-food pack with one tap

Every so often, Uber wants you to use its app to call something other than a car. The company makes headlines every week without buying ads, and it has already run a string of cross-over campaigns. So far we have tried (or tried to try) one-tap calls for a lion-dance troupe, a wupeng boat, a rickshaw, a helicopter, a Japanese bento, and even a CEO.

This time, with Amazon, it launched a one-tap fresh-food service in Beijing. On Saturday and Sunday, if your fingers were fast enough and your luck good enough, you could have the ingredients for a Father's Day dinner delivered to your door.

Calling Father's Day dinner with Uber

In an earlier interview, an Uber China employee told QDaily that Uber's app was designed from the start with a slot reserved for its frequent campaigns. Add a campaign's code name to the list of vehicle types, and a new outside partnership can begin.

Amazon China, which only recently opened its "fresh-food store," rarely runs offline promotions and hardly advertises at all. This Father's Day campaign looks like an exception.

A friendly warning from QDaily: there were only 100 packs for the whole city. Slow fingers get nothing; fast fingers... probably nothing either. One of our colleagues, with no dinner plans yet, kept trying through her whole lunch break. In the end she ordered takeout.

Google, which makes a doodle for every occasion, did it again

Turning its homepage logo into a creative doodle for holidays, anniversaries, and even special event days has become a Google tradition. It has a 16-person team that does nothing but make doodles.

We didn't expect Google to release anything like its Pac-Man Easter egg from April Fools' Day for Father's Day. For this neglected holiday, the creative work went, as usual, to the Doodles team of illustrators, engineers, and producers.

But does it look familiar? This Father's Day doodle, which shows family bonds in the animal world, already ran on Google's homepages in Belgium, Spain, Bolivia, and elsewhere earlier this year. Those countries celebrate Father's Day on March 19. Today Google simply brought the same doodle out again, unchanged.

The Father's Day doodle released in some countries on March 19 this year, shown again today

Baidu says the right way to start Father's Day is to search for "Mr. Perfect"

Since yesterday, a Baidu search for "Father's Day" has redirected to the page below. My Dad Is Mr. Perfect is a short film made for Father's Day by the product team behind Baidu's main search engine. In it, the heroine pursues the campus "Mr. Perfect" with her father's coaching, and all of that coaching turns out to be things her father secretly looked up online.

Mr. Li, head of brand promotion for Baidu Search, told QDaily that the team spent more than a month planning the campaign. The father in the film, "wearing reading glasses, facing the computer, searching and taking notes on paper at the same time," is a fair picture of how the older generation actually uses the internet, and the team hopes the film will make young people notice what their parents need when they go online.

Before the film went up, the team had already released a street-interview video asking, "What makes a Mr. Perfect?" On Wednesday, Baidu's official WeChat account also published an article titled "Is ____ the Only Test of a Mr. Perfect?" to build anticipation for the "Mr. Perfect search."

Besides the search homepage, the video will run over Father's Day on the homepages of Sina.com and Miaopai and on the major video sites. But only a Father's Day search on a computer leads to the "Mr. Perfect" page below. The Baidu mobile app is not part of the campaign.

That is because, inside Baidu, desktop search and mobile Baidu belong to two different departments. A separate department for the mobile app was once fashionable among internet companies. Many of them, Tencent included, have since abandoned the idea. Baidu has kept it.

Baidu search for Father's Day

We won't judge here whether the film is any "good." At the very least, it is one of the more thoughtful Father's Day campaigns from a tech company.

58 Daojia tells a true story about "after Dad leaves the house"

Photo taken on January 6, 2015. This worker is 46 years old and carries a total load of at least 40 jin (20 kg)

The story comes from Yang Weiguo, a masseur at Diandao Massage. The campaign began with a photo shared in Diandao Massage's internal work chat: on the way to work, a colleague had run into a masseur carrying more than 30 jin (15 kg) of massage equipment to a home visit.

Zhao Chunyan, head of brand operations at Diandao Massage, told QDaily: "From what we've seen, the media pay little attention to Father's Day. Most people only know that Dad is busy. They don't really understand the pressure he faces on the road and at work once he leaves the house. Even the people close to him often can't see it. So we started with the working life we know best, to record another side of fathers: as laborers."

Diandao Massage was among the first outside home-service providers to join the 58 Daojia platform. Zhao said 58 Daojia and Diandao Massage pooled their resources to shoot and promote the short film, and the full film went online late last night. In Diandao's own words, if you cry easily, don't watch it.

Breadtrip asks you to write a primary-school essay

Breadtrip is an app for sharing travel tips and travelogues. Starting today, it is running a special feature on its homepage that invites users to write a short essay in the comments titled "My Dad." Even the instructions sound like the ones from childhood: "You can write about your dad as you see him, or about a story between you and your dad."

We wrote this essay over and over as children, and now we can barely remember what we said. But judging from the responses, writing it again as grown-ups seems to meet the primary-school standard of "expressing genuine feelings" rather better.

Breadtrip's Father's Day campaign

Wen Min of Breadtrip's operations team told QDaily that the operations department planned and ran the campaign. It is presented as a travel feature, launched in the app and on the company's WeChat official account at the same time, and it relies mainly on users to supply the content.

Alibaba Pictures: take Dad home to watch a movie, but keep your eyes peeled

This mobile web game, "Take Dad Home," took Alibaba Pictures' public relations team about a month from planning to launch. The team was formed only after the Spring Festival and missed the Valentine's Day and Mother's Day marketing rush. Strictly speaking, this is the first campaign it has built around a topical moment.

A person in charge told QDaily that, according to Taobao's sales data, spending around Father's Day is less than a tenth of spending around Mother's Day. So the team wanted to do something fun while other companies weren't paying attention. Once they had settled on an idea, they hired an outside team to build the game: a child riding a bicycle to take his father home.

If you play carefully enough, and don't let your mind wander so that the characters trip over roadblocks, you may notice movie posters flashing past on either side of the screen. On the game's final page, you can also see 10 "dad" movies recommended by Alibaba Pictures. Er... the titles of the movies, that is.

Playing a somewhat rough game

As the staff admitted to QDaily, the game still has plenty of flaws. For example, "some users only noticed the movie posters flashing past on their third or even fourth play." But the question is: will users really play the game again and again just to see every one of those blurry posters?

Mofunshow: learn English with Dad

Also built on movies, the Father's Day campaign from this app, which teaches English through movie dubbing, is more of a gift for young dads.

Cai Hanyun, senior PR manager at Mofunshow, told QDaily that parents and children have always been one of its most important user groups. For Father's Day, it reorganized 21 parent-child courses and put them back online, so that children and their dads can dub selected "parent-child" movie clips together.

Mofunshow

For Mother's Day, Mofunshow ran a campaign called "Mom, I Want to Tell You," cutting lines spoken to mothers in a dozen or so movies into courses for users to dub. Over the Mother's Day weekend, nearly 2,000 such messages went out through Mofunshow.

With the people closest to us, it is sometimes hard to say what we feel. If you still haven't wished your father a happy Father's Day, maybe you can dub a clip in this app and send it to him. It doesn't matter if your father doesn't understand English: alongside the parent-child dubbing, the app launched another campaign, "Teach Dad Two Useful English Phrases." If you want to say something, there is always a way.

Taobao Crowdfunding: crowdfund a day off for the hardest-working dads

Crowdfunding, traditionally a way to raise money for creative products, has become a marketing tool. JD.com wanted to use it to solve the Spring Festival travel crush; QQ Music wanted to use it to promote a show; ordinary people use it to teach you how to make a better potato salad. On Valentine's Day, Taobao successfully crowdfunded a tourist attraction, a "landmark of love".

For Father's Day, it plans to crowdfund a paid day off with their children for 300 fathers on June 19, 21, and 28. Within a few hours of going live on Friday, the campaign had already raised more than 200,000 yuan.

The campaign comes from Yudou, a voice-interactive robot for children, which is currently running its own product crowdfunding campaign on Taobao. Users who back Yudou and post a parent-child leave note and a photo with their child on WeChat Moments can contact Yudou's customer service to claim one day's average wage for their city. Jin Jia, a director at Hangzhou Redianchang Technology Co., Ltd. and head of the Yudou team, told QDaily: "We don't have deep pockets, but this is a statement of what we stand for."

The campaign took about three weeks to plan. Besides Taobao Crowdfunding, the team also recruited CEOs and executives from other companies to help spread the word, including Focus Media CEO Jiang Nanchun, Baofeng Technology CEO Feng Xin, and Kuaidi vice president Tao Ran.

The parent-child quiz Yudou designed for the "hardest-working dads"

QDaily tried the quiz. Based on "time spent with Dad recently," our tester scored just 10 for "time with Dad."

We think that next Father's Day, crowdfunding a "family day" off so children can go home and spend time with their fathers would be a pretty good idea too.

Coupon giants Didi and Gongfuxiong keep giving on Father's Day

The "ding" of a text message as you leave work usually comes from Didi. It sends coupons in wind and rain, and it sends coupons when the sun shines. Sometimes you have to admire the copywriters: coming up with a different coupon message for each of 365 days is no easy job.

Didi pushed its Father's Day campaign page before the end of the working day on Friday. Besides Didi ride coupons, this time it teamed up with WeChat's phone top-up service to add a "claim phone credit" option.

Didi Time Machine

Another tech company that loves marketing with coupons is Gongfuxiong, which offers home massage services. Gao Xueli, its marketing lead, told QDaily that from the 18th to the 21st it is running a campaign called "Surprise Dad With One Tap," and is also giving vouchers to everyone through redemption codes.

If you can't get home to be with Dad, you can write him a message in the order notes when you book. The masseur will copy it onto a greeting card and hand it to your father during the home visit.

The father of one QDaily writer said he would rather pay for a "one-tap service that summons my child home to give me a quick massage." Perhaps some company could throw that together for next Father's Day?

Fork Camera: a set of limited-time stickers

Fork Camera's limited-time Father's Day stickers

Fork is a sticker camera app that has drawn attention since its closed beta. Its way of keeping up with trends is to keep releasing new stickers. Not long ago, for example, on the day a rainstorm flooded Shanghai and the whole city was "watching the sea," the "tap to call a car" sticker made with Uber became "tap to call a boat," as quickly as Uber swapped every car in its app for a wupeng boat icon.

Fork Camera builds on community rather than features. Its operations staff and the users it gathered during the beta steer what people create. Turning a photo into a comic with one tap is only the start; users keep discovering new ways to play, and newcomers are steadily drawn into the community's culture.

As a longtime Fork Camera user, when I contacted the app's developers about their Father's Day campaign, I was less curious about what the stickers would look like than about what Fork's users would do with them once they were out.

The eight limited-time Father's Day stickers landed in users' sticker libraries yesterday. Under Fork Camera's #FathersDay tag, you can already find plenty of photos of people showing off their dads in all sorts of creative ways.

One last friendly reminder from QDaily: if you haven't found time to buy a present for your father (or your children's father), or forgot Father's Day altogether, you can at least send him this article and tell him that one media outlet quietly remembered his day.

Cover image from Chris Martin Writes