Metersbonwe Fell for *U Can U BB*. How Did the Two Sides Strike a Deal?

U Can U BB nearly went on air "naked," without a single sponsor, yet it won over Metersbonwe. Here is how the partnership came together.

Metersbonwe has renewed its title sponsorship for the second season of U Can U BB (《奇葩说》, Qipashuo), even though other brands offered more money.

Officially billed as China's first talk-show contest for gifted speakers, the program is best summed up by one Douban user: "a screen full of lunatics." It scores 9 on Douban. Its first season, 26 episodes including the audition outtakes, has so far drawn more than 250 million views on iQiyi, which streams it exclusively. For iQiyi's first big-budget self-produced variety show, that is a good start.

Still, "U Can U BB almost ran 'naked.'"

So says Zhou Long, half joking. Zhou returned as Metersbonwe's chief marketing officer in April last year. He led the campaigns that once made the brand a hot topic, including its product placement in Transformers and the "I Am the New National Brand" campaign. Less than a month before filming began, U Can U BB had not landed a single commercial sponsor. That is what he means by "naked."

"At first we had a hard time finding sponsors, and we set the price high, because our production costs are steep even by the standards of internet shows. A lot of brands thought the show might not take off," Mou Di, the show's producer and chief director, told QDaily in an earlier interview.

"In that period we were pitching the project to brands almost every day, explaining what kind of show U Can U BB was. Before Metersbonwe we met more than 10 companies, in consumer goods, cars and other sectors. We were really anxious," Xu Jiamei, one of the show's directors, told QDaily yesterday at Shanghai's Kerry Centre. The team is now busy shooting season two and closing talks with interested sponsors. Plenty have come forward; some have signed, and the rest are only a contract away.

This season, finding sponsors has been easy by comparison. "But we're still grateful to Metersbonwe," Xu said. "Of course the first season wouldn't have been cancelled for lack of advertisers. But we wanted the first internet show we made to win commercial recognition."

The U Can U BB team is, in effect, a group that walked out of China Central Television (CCTV). Mou Di was once CCTV's youngest director and made the variety show Happy Street (《喜乐街》). Host Ma Dong left CCTV to become iQiyi's chief content officer; the Ma Dong Studio, a unit he runs, makes some of iQiyi's in-house shows, U Can U BB among them. Most of the other members also come from CCTV. So when Xu calls it "the first show," she also means something else: it is the first thing the team has produced since leaving the state system, and that matters a great deal to them.

Zhou Long came across U Can U BB by pure chance. Last October he met a friend at Beijing airport. The friend had also worked at CCTV and, being close to Ma Dong, knew about the project. It came up in conversation, and the friend casually asked Zhou what he thought. "We talked for about 20 minutes. I told my friend I found it interesting and it might become a hit."

That night, back in Shanghai, Zhou asked his friend to send him all the material on the show. He also learned that it still had no advertisers, and the friend became the go-between for Zhou and the U Can U BB team. "Actually, at first he didn't think we would become the title sponsor. It takes a large sum, and most companies need approval at every level, so there wouldn't be time."

According to Xu Jiamei, that problem became even clearer once the show was on air. "Later many brands wanted to come on board. It wasn't about which brands we wanted. In the end it came down to how fast a brand could decide, whether it could sign off on the spot." That is how Bright Dairy's Mosliyan and the Jeep Freelight ended up in later episodes.

With the early sponsor hunt going badly, Mou Di quickly set up a meeting with Zhou Long. The day before she flew to Shanghai, Xu and the rest of the team went over with her what to cover, though they already knew most of it by heart. "I felt she was quite nervous. This was iQiyi's first big investment in an original variety show," Zhou said. The meeting dealt mostly with the show's positioning, its audience, the team and how much iQiyi was putting in. Both sides came away impressed, so they arranged further talks on the details of a deal, a pitch in the more formal sense.

A few days later Mou Di and iQiyi's chief marketing officer, Wang Xiangjun, came to Zhou Long's office. The first slide of their deck read: "Let's be together, okay?" "They had even put the Metersbonwe and iQiyi logos side by side, as if we had already agreed," Zhou said. "But I found it very sincere. The director herself took part in the pitch, not just the sales people, as in a traditional pitch."

"U Can U BB is, after all, a brand-new product. There's nothing like it on the market, and it's iQiyi's most important show of 2014. But we have to give advertisers confidence, and naturally it's the production team that has to convey that confidence to clients," Xu Jiamei said. "And what clients want to know is how to show off their brand better, and that has to come through the content." Beyond that, a team fresh out of the state system wanted to start dealing with the market and thinking about commercial matters it had never had to consider.

After about a week of talks, Metersbonwe agreed to pay 50 million yuan to be the title sponsor of U Can U BB, a record for an internet variety show. According to Zhou Long, that was roughly one-third of Metersbonwe's annual marketing budget.

Metersbonwe, quiet on the marketing front for two years, needed its own chance to be the center of conversation again, and to push aside two years of bad news about store closures driven by falling sales. According to its fiscal 2014 report, total operating revenue fell 16% year on year, and operating profit was about 180 million yuan, down as much as 65%.

Zhou Long, chief marketing officer of Metersbonwe

Before sponsoring U Can U BB, Zhou Long had already set a few rules for Metersbonwe's marketing. "First, we wanted to sponsor a show, not buy publicity appearances. Second, we wanted internet video. Television is too expensive, often 200 or 300 million yuan, and there's no room left there. Internet video, I felt, was still undervalued." Before he found U Can U BB, Zhou said, he had watched dozens of internet shows and met many production teams to hear what they planned to make next. Some had even drawn up proposals. He liked none of them.

"I told the boss (Zhou Chengjian, Metersbonwe's chairman and founder) this show was worth a gamble," Zhou said. "I thought it would be a hit, but I also worried: what if it wasn't? Hundreds of shows go up on the internet every year. With our earlier campaigns I felt fully in control. I knew what level they could reach. But U Can U BB was a completely new show, and that I couldn't control."

Of all the campaigns Zhou had run, this one put him under the most pressure. Fifty million yuan is no small sum; the placement in the first Transformers film cost only a few million. Still, he thought the risk worth taking. What he liked most was that U Can U BB wanted to win over the post-90s generation, the same consumers Metersbonwe was after. On this point the two sides shared a goal.

"We court the post-90s even harder than we court sponsors. For us, the god isn't whoever pays, it's the post-90s viewer," Mou Di said. The first episode mentioned Metersbonwe only twice, but repeated many times that "adults must watch accompanied by a post-90s viewer." The show's promotion likewise went to the places where the post-90s gather: Douban, Baidu Tieba, assorted forums, Weibo and WeChat official accounts.

"While everyone else talked about polished segments, polished stories, polished stand-up, we went the other way: authenticity and improvisation." Mou Di said this was the key point that convinced both the team and Zhou Long. Zhou, for his part, also believed the post-90s "like things that are real, fun and unpretentious."

Zhou also valued how seriously iQiyi took the show. "They invested heavily and put a lot of their own resources behind it. For a while, the first thing you saw when you opened the iQiyi home page was an ad for U Can U BB." The three hosts, Ma Dong, Gao Xiaosong and Cai Kangyong, could draw a crowd on their own. Many contestants came with buzz of their own: Ma Weiwei, the eventual champion, had been named best debater at the International Varsity Debate, and Liu Sida was the campus beauty of the Communication University of China. Debate topics such as "Is it wrong not to have children?" and "Is the male best friend a lie?" hit young viewers where they live. To find topics, the show's writers and directors combed Weibo, Douban and Zhihu for what the post-90s cared about. In one month they settled on 380 topics, then kept debating and whittling them down.

The U Can U BB team

Apart from Ma Dong, the core team averages just 23 years old, a typical post-90s crew, and that was another reason Zhou Long was willing to place his bet. "This team really knows how to play," was his verdict. The sponsor line "This program is brought to you by the fashionable, fashionable, most fashionable Metersbonwe," a joke built into an ad, was the team's idea.

"The normal voice-over would have been 'This program is brought to you by Metersbonwe, the great national brand that doesn't follow the usual path.' The production team asked us: do you want to have more fun with it? I asked what they had in mind, and they said, 'You could be a bit cocky and say "fashionable, fashionable, most fashionable."'" The line echoed Pang Mailang's song Skateboard Shoes, which was going viral at the time, and Zhou thought it worth a try. Two episodes in, the response was huge. Many viewers found it hilarious and very of the moment, and hearing Ma Dong read it in his solemn, upright voice made it twice as funny.

"Zhou Long is a post-80s guy who loves to play, and he likes the feeling of the show and the brand getting high together. That matters a lot," Xu Jiamei said. But after the first broadcasts, "Zhou Long told us some people at the company disagreed. They still wanted to convey the brand's 'doesn't follow the usual path' image, so for a while we read the normal version. In the end we found the post-90s still prefer things that are blunt. Metersbonwe sensed it too, so we talked and switched back." What everyone remembers is that playful "fashionable, fashionable, most fashionable" line, and in season two many sponsors opened talks by asking, "Can we have a fun voice-over slogan?"

Season one also gave the team its own ideas about how to present a brand in a fun way: "Put the commercial message at the very bottom and deliver it through witty content," Xu said. She gave another example. In a short segment, the show asked the three mentors what each would take to a desert island. Ma Dong said, "I'd take Mosliyan, because then I could live to 99." And "Bright Mosliyan milk, drink it and live to 99" became Bright Dairy's voice-over slogan. As long as sponsors agree, this kind of self-mockery, an ad line with a joke built in, has become a hallmark of U Can U BB.

"Consumers all know a show needs sponsors. They don't resent sponsors. What they resent is us putting on airs. What matters most to them is a good show. In a way, as Ma Dong said on the show, we're very grateful to sponsors: without sponsors, where would all these people get to tear into each other? Consumers know that. What matters is whether there's a good show to watch. I told the team, don't hold back. If you think something's fun, use it. It doesn't have to go through me. Use it first, that's fine. We give you that right, and I trust you won't mess us up on purpose," Zhou Long said. It is mutual trust, he said, and you could also call it a new way for the two sides to work together.

Because time was short, many details of the deal were worked out on the fly. Besides Zhou Long, who handled the on-screen appearances, four people from Metersbonwe's marketing department attended every taping to take photos and prepare materials, and to grab any standout moment that could go straight into later promotion. Metersbonwe's official WeChat account also posted highlights from the tapings as they happened.

The "Qipa" streetwear line Metersbonwe designed for the show

Products and stores kept pace. Once the sponsorship was settled, Metersbonwe turned the show's slogan, "U Can U BB," into a "Qipa streetwear" line. Lines contestants said on air, such as "I'm not a ladyboy, I'm a demon," quickly became Metersbonwe products too. In the end the Qipa line Metersbonwe designed for the show ran to 70 styles.

The show became a hot topic after its sixth episode and peaked in the final month after the semifinals. Meanwhile Metersbonwe refreshed its stores. It trained "Qipa styling experts," sales staff who help shoppers put outfits together, and encouraged customers to have fun in the store. Quite a few customers chatted with staff about the show.

Contestants from U Can U BB at an in-store event at Metersbonwe

With U Can U BB pulling solid traffic and views, the somewhat "over-the-top" Qipa line sold 50,000 pieces, for more than 20 million yuan in sales. But Zhou Long said what they care about more is that these products raise the appeal of the whole brand's range and lift sales of other products. Third-party tracking data also showed Metersbonwe's brand favorability up 20%, which Zhou had not expected.

Taping of the first episode of season two starts on May 11, and this year the show will focus on promotion in third- and fourth-tier cities. Its viewers are concentrated between ages 18 and 35. In season one, first- and second-tier cities watched more than third- and fourth-tier ones, with Beijing at the top, followed by Zhejiang, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Chongqing and others. "We'll go to more cities and more campuses for offline promotional events," Xu Jiamei said. "Our pressure now is how to win new viewers while keeping the ones we have." Beyond the show's direction, character and tone, the celebrity lineup, the competition format, the contestants and the debate topics will all change. "Viewers' tastes keep shifting, and we have to give them something fresh."

Metersbonwe, still the title sponsor, hopes to get more out of the deal than that memorable "fashionable, fashionable, most fashionable." And off screen, it has more work to do: a good product is always the best marketing.

(Reporter Lu Yunfei and intern reporter Deng Tao also contributed to this article.)