To celebrate the launch of its new Porsche Design foldable phone, the Huawei spin-off Honor dropped a shocking advert on social media.
The advert shows a slick white car zooming under a giant foldable phone towering over the traffic on Shanghai’s Yangpu Bridge. The two long sides of the phone sit on either side of the bridge in a tent-like configuration, showcasing the phone’s foldable design. Adding more realism, the advert then cuts to onlookers stopping in their tracks to film the spectacle, although the giant phone was in fact added to the cityscape during post-production.
The advert performed well on social media, with the original post from Honor garnering an impressive 12,000 likes on China’s Twitter-like platform, Weibo. The accompanying campaign hashtag “Giant mobile phone appears on Shanghai’s Yangpu Bridge” (#上海杨浦大桥惊现巨人手机#) gained 28 million views and 10,000 discussions. The hyper-realistic visual effects even fooled some netizens, who wrote concerned comments about the structural integrity of the giant phone under high winds.
Honor’s giant foldable phone trick comes as giant installations are sweeping China’s marketing landscape. Louis Vuitton, whose giant handbags landed in Shanghai and Chengdu in December, is perhaps best known for this, but other brands like the North Face have also been hopping on the trend recently.
Honor was sold by Huawei in 2020 after the introduction of sanctions by the US on the company majorly shifted its outlook. Since becoming a separate company, it has ascended to the top of the country’s smartphone market, beating Oppo, Huawei and Apple to snatch the biggest market share in the third quarter of 2023.
