People watch video platforms more than any other medium in China and OPPO wants people to think of Reno5 as a pioneer in terms of video portrait shooting camera phone. In 2020 December, OPPO launched the Reno5 smartphone with AI Highlight Video that senses different light levels during a video recording, then adjusts to make every moment looking glowing and vibrant. At the time, OPPO was losing market share and brand favourability amongst our target audience in China (university students & working class tier 2 - 5 cities), so we needed a new strategy to resonate deeply and connect to them for Reno5 launch.

Inspired by a true story, the film is features a deaf-mute young couple from two far away cities, who met each other from a video social site using their OPPO Reno5 smartphones. Over time, their love grows as they understand each other more by communicating via portrait video everyday until the day they finally decide to meet up in person because they are each others shinning star.

OPPO wanted to create an entertainment content to engage our audience with pure emotion to reflect our brand truly understand their feelings and not just a simple shallow connection. We wanted to touch on cultural background and everyday topics like online dating, long distance relationship, and their obstacle, in order to resonate deeply to the young Chinese audience.

The film was directed by one of the best storytelling and acclaimed directors Derek Tsang, who won best director in 39th Hong Kong Film Award. OPPO used two of China’s best actors Zhou Dongyu and Li Yifeng, and got them act vulnerable as the deaf-mute couple which is rare in Asian commercials. They even had to learn sign-language and this itself caused major online discussion and lifted their popularity in the process. The campaign ran on all the biggest social platforms in China including Weibo WeChat and TikTok. It was also launched as a TVC in some regions of China. It started to run on 10 Dec 2020 with all main media push in 2 months.

From marketing survey by GfK (Growth from Knowledge), the film successfully garnered 59 Million views, sparking organic ‘hot topic’ hashtags on China’s Weibo with over 250 Million combined readership views. The total media impression reached to 1.43 Billion times. And OPPO today is now the leading the market in sales and better brand favourability in Q1 2021.