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Popular Tencent Game Snags Branded Content Partnership With Peking University
In education obsessed China, consumer brands—namely blue-chip ones—are beginning to collaborate on content deals with tertiary institutions.
The emerging trend has seen the likes of MAC Cosmetics, Burberry and even Tencent’s Honor of Kings riding on this bandwagon.
For example, Tencent’s Honor of Kings partnership with the history faculty of the elite Peking University has attracted our attention in the branded content landscape.
The partnership involves the creators of the popular gaming title working with two professors to jointly produce content for Honor of Kings’ “Chang’An Competition Year,” named after the capital city for much of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), which is widely viewed in China as the peak of ancient civilisation.
Besides providing historical authenticity on the game’s landscape, the academics also appear in a series of short videos as guides to the culture of the period.
As part of the campaign, Tencent has also released an immersive mobile VR tour of the game’s Chang’an scenery and launched a co-creation competition open to the general public in partnership with video streaming platform Bilibili, fan fiction site Lofter, and cosplay app Banciyuan covering the categories of art, design, video, and dance.
This is a shrewd play by Honor of Kings to engage its fans which tend to be predominantly Gen Z, a target audience for Peking University.
