Web Star Wang Dachui and the Ambitions of *Unexpected*

As Unexpected grew from a hit web series into a video property young people kept watching and talking about, the ambitions of its producer, Wanhe Tianyi, grew with it.

Over the past six months, Fan Jun has traveled to Shanghai on business more often than usual.

Alongside his routine meetings with advertisers, he has been making final preparations for an important partnership: a joint venture with Oriental DreamWorks to launch an online channel making videos for young Chinese audiences.

It may be the most important item on Fan’s agenda this year. For him and the company he founded, Wanhe Tianyi, working with a company as large as Oriental DreamWorks means stepping onto a bigger stage.

Most people first encountered Wanhe Tianyi through the white logo at the start of Unexpected.

Co-produced by Youku and Wanhe Tianyi, the web series has been among the internet’s most popular video offerings since its 2013 debut. Its two seasons, including the New Year special, have drawn more than 1.5 billion views in total, or over 41 million per episode on average. Its protagonist, Wang Dachui, a blank-faced optimist who runs into one setback after another, quickly became a new internet idol.

Unlike other hit web series, the “Wanwan effect” did not end with a spike in traffic whenever a new episode appeared on Tuesday. Social media amplified it further.

Lines such as “I just want to be a handsome man in peace” and “Come to think of it, I’m a little excited” became online catchphrases. Key creators, including “Jiaoshou” Yi Xiaoxing, Laoshi and Bai Ke, each gained more than a million Weibo followers and interacted with viewers often. Young fans never tired of discussing the show’s amusing product placements, Wang Dachui’s half-asleep expression, or when he and Kong Lianshun, known as “Goddess Kong,” would finally get together.

As Unexpected became a video property young people returned to and kept discussing, it caught the attention of Oriental DreamWorks, which has ambitions of its own in China.

“Oriental DreamWorks approached us about making online content for young people here, aimed at 15- to 20-year-olds and leaning toward subjects that appeal to women,” Fan told QDaily. “That’s an area we wanted to expand into, too, so the talks went fairly smoothly.”

A few months earlier, Fan had been guarded and reluctant to say much. Back in his Beijing office to discuss the partnership with us, he seemed more confident—and more excited.

“We’ll form a joint venture, work with a video site and set up a dedicated channel there,” Fan said. “The whole company, dozens of people, will create content for that channel and run it. There’s no company like that in China yet.” Five shows are already in preparation, including one that will combine Oriental DreamWorks’ animation technology with live-action footage. Oriental DreamWorks declined to comment on the partnership.

Fan singled out the YouTube channel AwesomenessTV. Its reality shows have drawn more than 1.17 billion views on YouTube, and DreamWorks Animation bought it for US$33 million in May of this year.

More professional channels like AwesomenessTV are appearing. YouTube has become television for a new generation. A similar shift is under way in China, from user-generated content (UGC) toward content made by professional producers (PGC). Suppliers such as Wanhe Tianyi can bring greater commercial value to video sites.

(AwesomenessTV’s shows are among the videos most popular with teenagers on YouTube)

Wanhe Tianyi is also trying to gather a larger audience on video platforms and build a brand of its own.

At the end of every episode of Unexpected, one of the creators reminds viewers to “click the button below the screen to subscribe to Wanwan updates.” It is usually the moment when an actor looks most serious. In the second season, the “Produced by Youku” button was replaced with one labeled “Unexpected.” It was an early attempt by Wanhe Tianyi to run a channel of its own; 1.09 million people have subscribed.

Those 1.09 million subscribers and more than 1.5 billion views are figures advertisers hear repeatedly from salespeople. For advertisers eager to reach young consumers, the calculation is simpler: back the biggest hit.

Yuan Yumei, Youku’s producer of Unexpected, told QDaily that the recently completed second season brought in more than 30 million yuan in advertising revenue, above the previously reported 20 million yuan and three times the first season’s total.

Wanhe Tianyi has an advertising sales team of fewer than 20 people. Two directors, based in Beijing and Shanghai, handle different kinds of clients. Games, internet-related electronics and fast-moving consumer goods are its three largest categories. According to Youku’s audience data, more than 60% of Unexpected viewers are men, so brands targeting men were the first to buy ads.

That helps explain why Wanhe Tianyi and DreamWorks want to create an online channel for young women. Both hope to attract other kinds of advertisers, especially major international brands aimed at women, and build influence among young female consumers.

(Season two of Unexpected featured testosterone-heavy subjects such as Crows Zero)

Some changes are already under way.

At the start of several second-season episodes of Unexpected, a few seconds of footage show the creators at an event in a theater-like venue, leading several thousand people in a chant of the show’s slogan. The footage comes from the “Wanhe Tianyi Youth Ideals Exchange,” a campus event for university students. The company has held five so far.

Each has the scale of a fan meeting for a major star. An hour before it starts, the line is already long. Many students carry Unexpected merchandise—novels, postcards or posters—while others huddle in twos and threes around a phone to revisit earlier episodes. The creators’ entrance and the games draw screams from the crowd.

The team running these events has grown from one person to five. The “Exchange” follows a fairly set routine: Wanhe Tianyi sends invitations through Weibo and WeChat, and schools submit proposals. Three weeks before an event, the team contacts interested schools, narrows the choices to two or three, and settles on a theme and script. To keep things moving onstage, the script may go through more than a dozen revisions, with each part worked out in detail, so even a student host who struggles to improvise can avoid an awkward silence. The team then picks a school based on the creators’ schedules, the venue, how well the theme fits and the publicity support the school can provide, before finalizing the itinerary.

Wanhe Tianyi tries to bring the stars students know—“Jiaoshou” Yi Xiaoxing, Bai Ke, Zhizun Yu, Xiao Ai, Ben Yu and Zimo—to every event, so fans who have queued for two hours will not be disappointed.

University students matter greatly to a company trying to strengthen the Wanhe Tianyi brand and pursue bigger ambitions.

Youku’s figures show that students make up 41% of the audience for Unexpected, and more than half of those students are undergraduates. They are the show’s most loyal fans and keenest promoters, but their attention is also easily drawn elsewhere.

(The Youth Ideals Exchange gives Wanhe Tianyi a way to meet university fans and deepen its connection with them)

Campus visits serve another purpose: recruiting talented students. As at any fast-growing startup, hiring has become one of Fan’s most pressing problems.

When Wanhe Tianyi began operating in early 2012, all 10 members of its team came from Tudou’s advertising production department; three or four were interns. At the time, Yi Xiaoxing, known as “Jiaoshou” and Tudou’s chief podcaster, had built a following on social platforms. When he joined CEO Fan Jun and COO Bai Zhongchun to start the company, the first employees—including Zimo and Zhizun Yu, now key writers—were talked into joining them.

Once Unexpected took off and the company began growing quickly, that approach could no longer meet its hiring needs. Job listings on recruitment sites brought disappointing results, too. “We receive more than 300 résumés on an average day, but few applicants really fit what we need,” said Wanhe Tianyi marketing director Zhang Chengrui.

Asked what he looks for in a recruit, Yi Xiaoxing named “enthusiasm for the work” and “a feel for the internet.” “That feel matters a lot to me,” he said. “It means understanding the internet—knowing what’s popular and what people find funny. They need to be enthusiastic about the work, but they can’t be too rigid.”

Recent graduates may be the best fit. Many watch Unexpected and attend the fan events, so they already like the company and may be more willing to throw themselves into the work. People born in the 1990s are also the internet’s largest consumer group. No one knows better what is happening online, what is popular now, or an important point that is often missed: what young people dislike.

Wanhe Tianyi has no time to put these recruits through months of formal training. Many are assigned to project teams on their first day. “Follow along for a while and you’ll learn” has become a familiar refrain among both old hands and newcomers.

While continuing the second season of Unexpected, Wanhe Tianyi launched more projects this year: Report to the Boss! with Youku, High-Tech Girl Meow with iQiyi, and Senior Sister Knows with LeTV. These web series have longer episodes and cover more genres. High-Tech Girl Meow is a romantic comedy with science-fiction elements; Senior Sister Knows is billed as an “encyclopedia comedy.”

(Compared with Unexpected, High-Tech Girl Meow has a more sustained plot and central story)

Fan wants Wanhe Tianyi to become a “company that builds and runs content brands,” rather than simply a “production company.” That means continually launching new brands, producing shows at scale and turning audiences of more than 100 million views into steady revenue. It is a crucial step toward the company’s ambitions.

Wanhe Tianyi had planned to launch 10 new projects this year. Even counting the New Year special of Report to the Boss! due at year’s end, it will have reached only half that target.

Fan is more cautious now about giving a number for next year. “This time I won’t say how many we’ll launch. We have more than 20 in development, and we’ll say more at our year-end event,” he said. He did reveal that the new projects span more genres, including idol dramas, period dramas and crime stories. On October 31, the company reached an agreement with Golden Shield Pictures, which is affiliated with the Ministry of Public Security, to develop a criminal investigation drama together. A period drama centered on Di Renjie is also due online next year. More than 100 of Wanhe Tianyi’s 180-plus employees are already working on these projects.

In different corners of Wanhe Tianyi’s newly renovated office, Zhizun Yu and Zimo gather their project teams for animated discussions. The familiar face of Wang Dachui is rarely there. “Bai Ke is so busy now, both with our own projects and outside work, that he hardly comes into the office,” Zhang told QDaily.

In the first half of the year, Bai Ke appeared in Report to the Boss! and played the villainous younger brother of Wang Luodan’s character in Han Han’s film The Continent. More recently, he shot an ad for Philips electric shavers, attended the premiere of the Hollywood film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, joined Zhejiang Satellite TV’s new outdoor celebrity reality show This Is Life, and made a cameo as an obnoxious boyfriend in the forthcoming romantic comedy Meet Miss Anxiety, starring Zhou Xun and Tong Dawei. “Wang Dachui,” the character everyone picked on, has become an actor everyone wants to work with.

(The Continent was Bai Ke’s big-screen debut)

“Bai Ke was mainly an internet star before,” Fan said. “We do want him to appear in more ads and television shows so more people will know him.” Wanhe Tianyi’s talent management department handles these outside engagements, choosing from the many offers for commercial appearances and ads those that “fit an actor’s development, benefit the actor and help the company.”

When Wanhe Tianyi thinks a director, writer or actor could help the company grow, the talent department discusses a contract with them.

The company currently works with around 30 writers and directors. Key writers and directors such as Zhizun Yu, Zimo and Laoshi have signed exclusive contracts, generally for fairly long terms, to keep them developing work with the company. The department has also begun signing new actors, often unfamiliar faces without formal acting training.

Television stations, too, need fresh faces such as Bai Ke to draw attention to variety shows. As broadcasters increasingly recruit celebrities to raise ratings, Zhejiang Satellite TV hopes Bai Ke’s online fame and the Wanhe Tianyi brand will bring viewers to This Is Life.

Wanhe Tianyi has plans of its own. Look closely and you will see that Bai Ke keeps wearing a white T-shirt with a cartoon design on the show. It is Report to the Boss! merchandise; the picture on the front shows the series’ four main characters.

The range of Unexpected merchandise is broader: three phone cases already on sale, several sets of themed postcards, a Dachui USB flash drive and watches. “We worked with outside teams to make some fun little products,” said Yuan Yumei, Youku’s producer of Unexpected. “It’s a way to interact with fans and also to extend the Wanwan brand into other products.”

In August, Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House released the novel Unexpected: Life Is a Comedy. Built around the theme of dreams, its protagonists are modeled on several Wanhe Tianyi creators. They struggle to scrape together money to shoot a film and, in the end, realize their dream.

It is the first Wanwan spin-off product distributed on a large scale. To promote the book, the creators held signings in 14 cities. Fan attended the second, at the Shanghai Book Fair, and the fans’ enthusiasm stayed with him. “About 3,000 people are willing to buy the book and line up for a signature,” he said. “They really like these creators and Wanwan, and they’re willing to spend money on them.”

(At a signing for Unexpected: Life Is a Comedy, Bai Ke and Kong Lianshun wear T-shirts made as Report to the Boss! merchandise)

The book has sold more than 100,000 copies and is so far Wanhe Tianyi’s only profitable spin-off product. But Youku and Wanhe Tianyi see the next releases—a game and a feature film—as the real test of the Wanwan brand’s reach and value.

A game based on the story and characters of Unexpected could go on sale as early as November. Yuan said the first would be a card game. Compared with the parkour game originally planned, cards can better incorporate the show’s distinctive elements, such as characters’ abilities and memorable lines. Multiplayer play may also be more effective at keeping players engaged.

An Unexpected feature film has been approved and is planned for release next year. It is one of the first five web-based intellectual property projects being developed by Heyi Pictures, which Youku established in late August, and it will be Wanhe Tianyi’s most important project next year.

“We’ll work with outside screenwriters and make it as we would any other film—a film worthy of the name, with a complete story, not a collection of short pieces,” Fan said. What he least wants is to “damage” the Wanwan brand just to make a movie. He would rather take more time to get the script right.

There will be a gap of more than half a year between the end of season two and the feature film’s release. Youku and Wanhe Tianyi plan to release a 15- to 20-minute Unexpected short film first, in January.

“There’s one thing to remember about Wanwan: we can’t make fans wait too long,” Yuan said. The short film will have a fuller plot than the web series and feature guest stars, giving fans something to enjoy while testing the waters for the feature.

Fan believes Wanhe Tianyi has benefited from good timing. Advertisers are looking for young consumers, video sites are looking for strong original shows, and the booming film industry has made investors hungry for films. Together, these trends have given the company room to pursue its ambitions.

“There are two or three thousand film and television production companies in Beijing,” Fan said. “We don’t want to be just one of them.” The partnership with Oriental DreamWorks could be an important step toward his goal of building a company that creates and runs content brands.