Lux: Catherine-Zeta Jones endorsement

Unilever’s shampoo and soap brand Lux (力士 – Lìshì) has rolled out another campaign featuring the famous actress Catherine Zeta-Jones. The ad above shows the Welsh star promoting the new Lux beauty range in China.

The new commercial is based around Lux’s Chinese slogan of 让您光彩照人每一天! (ràng nín guāngcǎizhàorén měi yītiān!) which roughly translates to ‘Allowing you to shine everyday!‘.

However, this is not the first time Catherine Zeta-Jones has featured in a Chinese commercial for Lux. Last year she featured in a short film entitled The Alchemist (shown below) and has since become the main brand ambassador for the Lux brand in China and Japan respectively.

Unilever will be hoping this new campaign will bolster Lux’s market position against Procter and Gamble’s product ranges such as Head & Shoulders, Rejoice and Pantene Pro-V which together account for around 40% of shampoo sales in China.

Credit to: JWT (Shanghai Branch)

Lipton Tea: Milk Tea campaign with Takeshi Kaneshiro

Lipton Tea or as the Chinese say Lì dùn (立顿), has become one of the most succesful Western brands in China. Unilever introduced the brand to the Chinese market in 2004 and it has since gone from strength to strength.

This month Lipton has announced three new TV commmercials / print campaign starring their brand ambassador and housewife favourite Takeshi Kaneshiro (Chinese name: Jīnchéng Wǔ – 金城武). Takeshi is a famous actor and singer of Taiwanese and Japanese descent but is a famous celebrity in China.

The ads themselves look to promote Lipton Tea as the ‘World’s tea expert’ and demonstrate how drinking the product gives you ‘vigour’ (朝气 – Zhāo qì) and ‘vitality’ (蓬勃的心情 –  Péngbó de xīnqíng).

Credit to: DDB (Shanghai Branch)

7-Up: Chinese viral by ‘Hugo’

This is the latest spoof advertisement from the notorious ‘Hugo‘ (胡戈):

It’s a rather amusing take of 7-Up’s Chinese current promotion where Hugo demonstrates the downside of findng a winning 7-Up bottlecap. The video is already very popular in China.

Within 24 hours of being uploaded to Hugo’s official Youku page it had already been viewed over 150,000 times and has even been awarded honours for its immediate popularity.

Who is Hugo?
Hugo is known as 网络恶搞第一人 (Wǎngluò ègǎo dì yīrén) aka the first man to spoof the network.

He is from Wuhan (Hubei Province) and has previously produced a number of other spoof videos that can be viewed on Hugo’s Sina page. If you like his videos Hugo would like to let you know that he is available for work.

I will be following his latest spoof over the next few weeks to see how it progresses.

Sprite: Cool for Summer

Recent blogposts have been relatively lengthy of late. So here’s a quick post for you.

The advertisement below is one of three created for Sprite’s 透心凉一夏 (Tòu xīn liáng yī xià) or in English ‘Cool for Summer‘ campaign:

Sprite has created a branded site on renren.com. Renren.com is essentially China’s answer to Facebook known in English as ‘The Everyone Network‘). As part of the Cool for Summer promotion tickets to see popstar JJ Lin in concert are up for grabs, and in order to enter the contest Sprite drinkers must participate in various activities on the renren site such as video sharing.

It’s another great example of big brands trying to create online communities in the Chinese market.

Midea Control: CCTV Ads

Midea is a Chinese manufacturing company with its Head Office in Guangdong province. The organisation itself is over 40 years old.

The print ads below are promoting Midea’s impressive range of 视频监控 (Shìpín jiānkòng) i.e. CCTV cameras. I find the idea behind these ads is simple and effective.

Credit to: Ogilvy & Mather (Shanghai Branch)