The Nine China builds an incredible earth museum in a human head for Alibaba auction day

“520”, known as a non-official Valentine’s Day in China, with the same pronunciation of “I love you” in Chinese, has been redefined by Alibaba as the “Auction Day”, since last year. This year, Alibaba decided to enhance the awareness of “520 Auction Day”. And “Love the Incredibility” is the theme of this year. They would release 100 incredible auction items on their site.

VIEW THE FILM

The Nine created a “wonderland” in “outer space”. Jack M （implying Jack Ma, Founder of Alibaba Group), Governor of the Galaxy saved humans from being exterminated by some huge ancient animals, and secretly transferred all the treasures of mankind into the space, and built “the Incredible Earth Museum” to preserve the human civilization. Among the treasures, there are some famous artwork, such as The winged Victory of Samothrace and the “Fountain” of Marcel Du Champ. There are also some “Incredible” auction items, such as the crystal scepter of Charles IV, a diary of a girl who has taken over 100 plastic surgeries and meteorites that looks like human’s faces in the “museum”. All the auction items are introduced by humorous copy writing in the video. In the beginning and the end of the video, it shows that the “Incredible Earth Museum” is built in a human’s head, and it is revealed by the falling of the auctioneer’s hammer, referring that “incredibility” can be found in an open mind. At the end of the video, there is a QR code of the site of the client. Users can scan the code and really bid for those incredible items.

The video filled with computer graphics was released on an HTML 5 page and meanwhile, on big screens in subway stations. Without promotion, the page view of the video reached 1,500,000 within three days. The video became viral on Chinese Social Network, making many people share and talk about it.

Then The Nine brought the crazy idea from online to offline. They designed a 3-meter-high head-shaped interactive installation in the one of the biggest subway stations in Shanghai. The video was played by 3D Holographic projection inside of the “Head”. When people curiously put their head into the big head, they would feel themselves traveling through the “wonderland”. There are about 500,000 people through the station everyday.

After that The Nine adapted the incredibility into different forms of media. A series of posters were released into newspapers, metro light boxex, taxis, and a 6000 square-meter-sized screen on the body of a Building. Each one of them shows a big headline that is related with the environment and a finger pointing at the subjects in the content. For example, on one of the newspapers that “interacts” with the readers, it says “Bid for the mosquito on this newspaper.” with a figure of mosquito print on the newspaper. In some posters in the subway say “Bid for the sounds of your steps” or “Bid for the impulsion to know you”. 5200 screens on the rear windows of taxis release some other posters, which are related with the locations the taxi pass by. One of them says “Bid for the gentle wind at the Bund of Shanghai”, and another says, “Bid for the memory of the old street.” On the huge screen on a building, one of the headlines says, “Bid for the Moon in the Sky.”

Credits –

Photographers: Nicholas Siau, Iron Wu, Kevin Yuan