Inside Entropia and Nippon Paint's award winning 'Paint New Happiness' campaign

After multiple brainstorming sessions, the agency came up with the idea to create a movement for all Malaysians to use Nippon Paint and put a fresh coat of love in their relationship to bring new happiness for every significant life stage or occasion. That was how the ‘Paint New Happiness’ campaign was born, Jane Chong, principal of integration at Entropia, tells The Drum.

“The bulk of the painting occasions in Malaysia came from highly functional occasions such as renovation, dirty walls, chipped surfaces etc,” explains Chong. “Even on key emotional occasions, such as getting married or having a newborn, painting was seen as a necessary nuisance. Painting was a big hassle, and people avoided it for as long as they could.”

“The only way to grow is to get more people to paint more frequently and on more occasions and this was only possible if people look at painting differently – beyond functional association. We had to make the hassle and price worth it, by raising our relevance in people’s lives and happiness.”

Malaysians loved the campaign, as well as judges of The Drum Digital Trading Awards APAC (DTA APAC) 2017, as they awarded the grand prix, best video campaign, best cross platform and best branding campaign prizes to Entropia.

With the agency also winning the chairman’s award, best use of creativity and best high impact campaign for another client, KFC Malaysia (QSR Stores Sdn. Bhd.), it made them the most awarded agency on the night.

Explaining why Entropia won so many awards for ‘Paint New Happiness’ after the awards ceremony in October 2017, DTA APAC judge Dan Robins, head of programmatic and data at Spotify said: “In a super difficult category, which has previously not seen a great deal of digital innovation, and under challenging market conditions Entropia were able to put data at the core to drive real business growth.

"Not only that, the approach taken touched all parts of the Nippon Paint business, both on- and off-line, engaging users in multiple ways, and continuously using the data signals to update the campaign. A great blueprint for using data to drive outcomes."

According to Chong, the campaign was a success because Nippon was ready to embark on a different approach and take on the challenge. “The continually evolving consumer journey is no longer a clear-cut funnel, but more of a maze which ultimately ends at conversion on the website. Each consumer path however is unique and uncertain,” she explains.

“We delved deep into each possible user journey and we engineered a robust digital ecosystem encompassing innovative moment-centric content and platform solutions.”

Planning and executing the campaign was not without challenges, says Chong, as consumer involvement in the paint category has always been very low, coupled with the fact that TV and newspaper consumption in Malaysia has been facing a steady decline over the last few years.

This posed a threat to paint brands that have always been heavily reliant on these mediums as their main channels for communication and the entire marketing ecosystem had to be reinvented in perfect synergy at data, tech, strategy and creative.

“We embarked on a movement to disrupt the category, transforming Nippon Paint into a digital-first brand fortified with traditional media emphasizing personalization and engagement beyond mere brand awareness,” explains Chong.

With the courage to be different and creative planning, it is no surprise that both agency and client successfully achieved the goals they had set at the beginning of the campaign.

Award submission for The Drum Digital Trading Awards APAC has been extended to September. You can submit them here.