This campaign was designed to be part of a wider effort that made Midea, a Chinese appliance company, go from an unknown brand in the US to the #1 AC brand in the country. Midea realized they had a killer product—the Midea U Air Conditioner, a model perfectly suited for big cities with older buildings. Midea focused on that unit and the New York market. Focus was one-third of the battle. Another third was to spread the message. Our “I Heart U” (Midea U) campaign covered a lot of ground while keeping the product in the center. The last part was to find a creative idea that made the claim believable, in a way that made New Yorkers feel like the brand belonged and understood the city. And so we did the stunt 90 MINUTES OF AIR CONDITIONING and distributed a social video about it to millions in NYC.

Every summer, New Yorkers are notorious for going to ANY movie just for the complimentary air conditioning in the theater. So Midea made a movie designed to lure New Yorkers into the theater to escape the heat: 90 MINUTES OF AIR CONDITIONING, a feature film consisting of just one epic shot of the Midea U AC blowing for 90 minutes, playing in an ice-cold Manhattan movie theater. Nothing more. We took over the Village East Cinema in Manhattan, NY. We promoted it like any other summer film, holding the public premiere on a hot summer day. New Yorkers flocked to it. We captured both the premiere and audience reactions to the film and spread it to millions of New Yorkers on social media, earning 440 million impressions.

This work propelled a little known air conditioner from a brand with no awareness in the US to the height of its category. In New Yorkers’ desperation to escape the city’s heat, we identified a sharp insight that emphasized just how well-suited Midea’s AC unit is to city-living. As a fresh innovation in a stale category, the Midea U also credibly solved a problem that most New Yorkers had grown to accept—hot, sticky, uncomfortable summers. The work fit together like a puzzle. It cast the Midea U as the right product, for the right audience, to solve the right problem.

During summer, New Yorkers are notorious for going to ANY movie just for the air conditioned theater. They don’t care about the film itself. They will watch anything for 90 minutes of cold air. This practice has a long-standing tradition, stretching back to the debut of modern AC in a New York City theater in 1925. Back then, AC was advertised on theater marquees on the same line as the movie titles. Movie theaters and AC have been forever linked since then, and they provide a basis for an unending stream of jokes every year when the heat starts to rise in NYC. They’re also included in the city’s official directory of cooling centers.

The 90 MINUTES OF AIR CONDITIONING campaign was spread to millions of New Yorkers on social media, earning 440 million impressions. Critics dubbed the movie “the coolest film of the summer,” “the longest product placement ever,” and “the sequel to Andy Warhol’s Empire film.

More impressively, sales in NYC and the tri-state area *grew so much that by the end of the summer, Midea had become the #1 AC brand in the country (in both sales and units sold). And just like that, this foreign brand became a real New Yorker.

*US Midea sales grew 51% in that period, mostly influenced by a 127% growth in the tri-state market, the region that includes NY.