With the expansion of the gaming industry, non-gaming brands, including Yili, were invited to attend the ChinaJoy digital entertainment expo and conference in Shanghai.
Yili's Byebye Jun, a brand designed for the new internet generation of young consumers, participated in the event.
Targeting youth
The Chinese dairy company said it expects to continue developing a proprietary brand with high potential in terms of recognition and visibility across multiple channels while exploring every aspect of what it takes to run a successful pan-entertainment enterprise.
The company said as a proprietary cartoon character with strong branding designed mainly for e-commerce sales, the target customer is the youth segment.
The brand has been active over the past year with music, animation and other platforms, and Yili said it has accumulated a wide following online and among game-playing groups.
“As a result, we decided to participate in ChinaJoy. We hope to communicate with young people through various online and social channels while Byebye Jun could become a bridge between the dairy product and the game industry," Yili said.
Online and offline
At ChinaJoy, visitors were able to interact with Byebye Jun at the booth and get a glimpse of the character's animation, music video and peripheral products.
E-sports game players and visitors had a chance to sample the brand's milk and cold milk ice cream.
Online, Byebye Jun invited beauty anchor He Yuwei to perform a live magic show.
The first day of the live show was viewed, on Tmall alone, by more than 200,000 people, who engaged in excess of 13m interactions.
In the subsequent two days across all channels, more than 7m tuned in.
Increased sales
In addition, sales of Byebye Jun series products during ChinaJoy surpassed 1m yuan ($150,000).
Yili said statistics show that the viewing audience of the League of Legends Pro League, the top level League of Legends league in China, exceeded the 5bn mark in 2016.
Total viewing time exceeded 840m hours, with daily page views exceeding 50m, which the company said represents huge market potential.
Yili said it plans to expand on its partnerships in the e-sports sector.