Chinese smartphone maker Oppo facing backlash after a Mother’s Day campaign tipped from playful to provocative, and right into backlash. The campaign, created with magazine Sanlian Lifeweek (三联生活周刊), set out to spotlight mothers as individuals with lives beyond the family unit.
- Oppo的广告 (Oppo’s advertising) hit 15 on Weibo’s Society search rankings.
The problem? One slogan. ‘My mum has two ‘husbands’.’ A reference to fan culture slang – where idols are jokingly dubbed romantic partners – but one that didn’t land as intended. Instead, it read as a step too far, trivialising marriage for the sake of a punchline.
Chinese social media didn’t hold back. Criticism spread fast. Oppo pulled the campaign just as quickly. An apology followed and so did consequences. The company confirmed internal penalties for senior executives, including China market lead Duan Yaohui, alongside a promise to tighten its content review process. In corporate terms: lessons have been learned.
Others weighed in. The China Advertising Association issued a pointed reminder that controversy is not creativity. And Duan Yongping, Oppo’s founder and early backer, kept it blunt: ‘If something is wrong, you fix it.’
The marketing fumble also made ranking on Weibo, climbing to number 15 in the platform’s Society search list. Chat around the topic Oppo的广告 (Oppo’s advertising) had produced 315,572 engagements in a matter of days.
The Dao view: The Oppo backlash was an in-joke gone wrong
The majority of Oppo’s userbase is women. We don’t have data on how much of these are also concertgoers, but the two demographics certainly have overlap. In that respect the ad copy was on point: it was supposed to be a subculture in-joke.
What probably wasn’t considered enough is that the in-joke would also be heard by a wider audience. That audience includes the fiercely online, sensitively conservative sphere of Chinese people to whom jokes on the sanctity of marriage are no laughing matter.
