Today’s hottest Sina Weibo microblog post has so far been reposted [“retweeted” or “re-weibo’d”] over 230k times, over 5x the next hottest microblog post on China’s popular Twitter-like microblogging service.
The weibo comes from the verified account of Jason Cao (曹杰, Cao Jie), Nokia’s Greater China Marketing Manager and is a “micro-film” titled “Unfollow” featuring popular Chinese female star Fan Bingbing. The micro-film is actually a stylistic advertisement part of the China marketing campaign for the new Nokia (诺基亚) N9 mobile smartphone.
Below is a version of the same micro-film on YouTube, with English subtitles:
While the YouTube version understandably only has a few hundred views, the Youku version ambiguously titled “Fan Bingbing’s first micro-film“ currently has nearly 900k views after only being uploaded 2 days ago, making it one of the most viewed videos for the day and week on China’s most popular video sharing website.
Chinese netizen reactions and comments to the video include the usual complaints of being mislead into watching a commercial, praise and criticism for Nokia (both suspicious and genuine), and many exclamations of how handsome, “manly”, and “cool” Fan Bingbing appears in the video.
What do you think? Do you think this advertisement will help sell the Nokia N9?
