How do you follow a meme-tastic campaign like Yili’s Paris Olympics collab with Lu Yu? The answer is, according to Yili, always more memes. Many netizens pointed out how the high-contrast purple tracks on the Stade de France, combined with the green grass field, looked oddly familiar: it is the colour scheme of Sha Wujing, the Sand Monk, or Sandy’s costume from the beloved TV adaptation Journey to the West (1986 – 2000).
The Paris Olympics is often called the most luxurious Olympic Games with its many luxury sponsorships. Netizens on Weibo quickly noticed that the “fashionable” purple tracks resembled Sha’s costume and started calling Sha, a fashion icon and memes started to circulate, titled “时尚巴沙沙师弟”, which loosely translates to “Harper’s Basha Sha Monk”.
Journey to the West is not all about the Monkey King, his master Tang Sanzang and the (literal) pig-headed sidekick Zhu Bajie. The third disciple of Tang, who usually carries the luggage but also fights from time to time, is Sha Wujing. In the TV show he was portrayed by Yan Huaili in Season 1 and Liu Dagang in Season 2. A quiet and sweet man/ogre, albeit a little slow, Sha is also a beloved and iconic character.
Yili asked the season 2 star Liu to don the green and purple livery again for the photo shoot. Different from Lu Yu’s title ‘Ambassador for Games Watching’, Liu is the Ambassador of Fashion. With the Stade de France projected behind him, he carries prop luggage and a monk’s spade, Sha’s weapon of choice. A fictional magazine title Basha Man was also shown in the promotional video. It’s also interesting to see that the photoshoot was marked as co-created with AI, suggesting some of the Photoshop work, likely the background and the flag Liu carries, might have been generated with AI.
Different from the Lu Yu campaign, the Sha Wujing shoot is rather small scale with AI to cut costs. It is a quick response to a smaller meme (3.70 million views on Weibo). But it is a similar concept of leveraging UGC from netizens and having the original celebrity join in the fun. In the fleeting world of social media, smaller and quicker creative campaigns that stay current with internet trends might be just as important as blockbusting campaigns that try to create trends.
