Mailman Journal: A.C. Milan China Tour

Earlier in July, our team re-launched A.C. Milan on Sina Weibo while also expanding the Milan brand onto WeChat (id:acmilanofficial) and YouKu. In essence, we were able to give the club the potential to reach over hundreds of millions of fans in China.

This perfectly set the stage for the epic Milan Derby in China! From July 22nd to 30th, A.C. Milan competed in the ICC Cup with two other world-class football clubs, Inter Milan and Real Madrid, putting on two entertaining games for fans in Shenzhen and Shanghai. The Mailman team was responsible for planning and executing digital content and media coverage during the entire tour for A.C. Milan.

The team arrived in Shanghai late in the night on July 22nd, even so, there were plenty of fans waiting in the airport and in the hotel to welcome their team.

Shenzhen

After a relaxing morning training session in Shanghai, the team headed to Shenzhen for their first ICC Cup game, which pitted them against Inter Milan.

On July 24th, we organized and coordinated with several local newspapers channels and online digital media for group and individual interviews of Milan players. We also conducted a series of short videos to create a player diary.

Later that afternoon, over sixty lucky fans who were selected from Weibo campaigns had the opportunity to attend the open training. Even though the weather was hot and humid, the fans still gave their best support for the team.

On match-day, there were around forty thousand fans cheering for their team. With an absolutely incredible long shot from the center back Mexes, Milan triumphed in Shenzhen. The crowd went nuts!

Shanghai

Back in Shanghai, Milan had more time to spend with the local fans.

On the 28th, ten Milan players joined the meet & greet at the Adidas fan base. They spent two hours playing video games, 2 vs. 2 soccer game, and even took a team selfie with the lucky fans! The next day, Milan announced their sponsorship with GKFX, an online trading company, and there was added media coverage in the form of player interviews. Alongside these performances, we also managed to take fun and China-related videos such as the chinese phrase tutorial, a China quiz, and jianzi (keep-up) game that were exclusively on our Milan YouKu channel.

On the game day with Real Madrid, the whole Shanghai Stadium was packed with fans. Our team members were able to take video and pictures right in front of the Milan fans and uploaded immediately to our social media accounts. It was definitely a great byproduct after spending a week trekking around China! The fans were rocking the house, and the casual observer wouldn’t have known that this was a friendly.

Results

Though the tour had come to an end, the digital presence of A.C. Milan is now more prevalent and active in China now. We re-launched Milan Sina Weibo on July 2nd, under our management, the Sina Weibo account has increased more than fifty thousand followers, a twenty-six percent growth in one month. Moreover, we transformed the Weibo account to become the third most engaged European football account.

We launched WeChat on the 14th of July, reaching 8,000 daily reads, among the top performing European clubs. We also launched the Milan YouKu Channel on July 10th, since then, we have gained more than forty thousand views on the China-tour videos.  

We can’t wait for them to come back. In the meantime, check out more photos from the tour!