With the gradual decline of Beijing opera culture, we hope to light up the traditional culture by using night-mode filming and attract the attention of the younger generation. Through the combination of advanced technology and traditional art, the brand makes Peking Opera shine in the dark.

The outstanding night-mode filming of Huawei’s Mate series smartphones captures details barely detected by the human eye, thanks to its cutting-edge technology and algorithm support, creating videos with exceptionally high image quality in low light settings.

Huawei looked to boost its brand premium by widening public awareness of this high-resolution night filming feature. In particular, Huawei aimed to build an emotional resonance among consumers, with a topic that could spark active discussions and win more eager users of this feature.

Nowadays, reproduction of traditional cultures readily gets public attention. Combining Beijing Opera with Huawei’s outstanding technology would infuse products with cultural meaning and activates public discussions simultaneously which facilitates emotion communication for the brand.

Using the Huawei Mate’s high-resolution night filming function, we shot a short documentary recording a difficult performance of the Beijing Opera San Cha Kou, held in a dimly lit setting. Our slogan “The devoted ones shine” was accompanied by the topic #ANightAtTheOpera on social media, aiming to build a public discussion around the theme of persistence.

San Cha Kou, one of the most highly-regarded pieces in the Beijing Opera repertoire, is known for a scene in which two heroes battle in the night. By capturing this scene in the real dim light, Huawei aimed to pay tribute to the actors and others who carry on this ancient artistic tradition and the spirit they embody.

Our communication focused on social media users with an interest in art and culture, providing a solid foundation for social discussions to expand to the general public as a trending topic.

We collaborated with China National Peking Opera Company (CNPOC) for our campaign. Weibo was chosen as the main communication channel, due to its large base of users interested in traditional culture. We spread the campaign across other social media platforms including Bilibili and Tiktok, with a focus on platforms with active culture channels to attract more traffic. Our focus here was on spreading our emotionally-charged and artistically-filmed video with social tags to generate greater exposure.

We chose the end of 2020 to launch our campaign, seeing this traditional period of end-of-the-year reminiscence would carry a special significance after the challenges of the pandemic, meaning that the public would be more receptive of a positive message and slogan.

We began by releasing our video on the official Weibo account of CNPOC, drawing attention from users with an interest in the arts. We next invited 14 KOLs across a range of fields, from entertainment to technology and motivational content, to repost and comment on the video to build up our hashtag, #ANightAtTheOpera. From there, we drove further discussions of the more general topic of persistence with the slogan “The devoted ones shine”.

We invited singers with a background in Beijing Opera to share personal stories from their pursuit of this traditional art form, bringing their fans into the discussion. Inspirational influencers with a wider young fanbase were also recruited to expand on the themes of persistence and dedication, tying these values of the dedicated actor to the struggles of university students currently preparing for their graduate exams, further expanding our reach among young consumers.

Total exposure of the campaign exceeded 100 million views on social media. The hashtag #ANightAtTheOpera gained nearly 46 million views and about 30,000 comments. With a live broadcast watched by 10 million people, the broadcast volume of this video finally reached 17 million.

The keywords“Mate” and “San Cha Kou”, both increased significantly in popularity. The Weibo index ranking of “Mate” reached its peak during the product launch period, and the "San Cha Kou" Weibo index ranking saw a 132-fold increase.

This campaign successfully sparked active discussions across the Internet, especially attracting the participation of more than 30 top-ranked Weibo Blue V and Gold V accounts, including @China Daily and @Wuhan University, etc. With celebrities recommending, this video has caused extensive discussion in the field of Quyi, Chinese culture, and even pop music. Netizens showed particular enthusiasm for the content, expressing more emotional attachment to Huawei.