OPPO and Sid Lee "Heroes": about athletes and their fans

A campaign Sid Lee created for phone manufacturer OPPO that ran at this year's Roland Garros and Wimbledon tournaments. A longtime partner of the championships, OPPO wanted to show that the relationship between athletes and fans goes both ways. While the pros impress us every year with their talent on the courts, fans help them up their game from the stands and online with their support.

To reinforce its tagline Inspiration Ahead, OPPO and Sid Lee created a film featuring Francesca Jones, a British professional player, born with Ectrodactyly Ectodermal Dysplasia, a condition which left her with 3 fingers and a thumb on each hand, and seven toes. Despite these limits, she has played in professional tournaments around the world serving as an inspiration to her fans and feeding off their motivation. To reinforce the message, Sid Lee also created an activation for Roland Garros using LightGraff light painting technology, taking fans' messages and creating stunning visuals that were amplified on the brand's social media along with messages fans created themselves with a special Instagram filter.

To activate its partnerships with Roland Garros and Wimbledon, OPPO, the leading global technology company, and creative agency Sid Lee, created a 360 global campaign.  

The brand wanted to celebrate its global tennis partnerships by highlighting the mutually inspirational player-fan relationship, a strategy echoing OPPO’s pursuit of technological advancements to meet and exceed its users’ needs, as well as OPPO’s new brand proposition: Inspiration Ahead.  

At the center of the Inspiration Ahead campaign is a film featuring WTA Professional Tennis player Francesca Jones who despite being born with ectrodactyly ectodermal dysplasia syndrome, a rare condition that causes developmental problems for hands and feet, has worked hard to overcome adversity and rise through the ranks in recent years. The film tells a story about how a tennis professional inspires a young promising player, transitioning between Francesca playing on clay (Roland Garros) and a young girl playing on grass (Wimbledon). The young girl watches footage of Francesca using her OPPO Find X5 Pro smartphone. She replicates the professional’s movements as she practices, highlighting moments of frustration, difficulty and success before the final scene, which zooms out to show the inspired young girl is in the crowd, filming with the 4K Ultra Night Video mode of her OPPO Find X5 smartphone.  

At the recent French Open, OPPO and Sid Lee created an activation championing the 4K Ultra Night Video technology and the 5-Axis Optical Image stabilization, which uses long exposure to create stunning visuals.  

Working with renowned light painting photographer LightGraff, fans’ messages for their favorite players were selected and used to create stunning light painting visuals that were amplified on OPPO’s social channels using the campaign hashtags #InspirationAhead and #PaintTheNight.  

Fans not in attendance could also participate thanks to a light painting Instagram filter, allowing users to create their very own light painting masterpieces.  

At Wimbledon, the mutually inspirational player/fan relationship will be brought to life through an AR activation celebrating 100 years of Centre Court. Featuring 40 Wimbledon Champions, from Billy Jean King to Roger Federer, users will be able to select four Champions from each decade with a video telling the story of that era. The short videos will share inspirational content of the Champions playing on Wimbledon’s much-celebrated Centre Court. Iconic Wimbledon objects including strawberries and cream and Rufus the Hawk will be animated in 3D to enrich the experience and users can take photos with the Champions to share on social media.  

Credits OPPO:  

Project Lead: Zhang Gaoxiang (Lang)/Zhi Shuang Shuang (Double) 
Creative Lead: Mats Hakansson/Yuyeon Cho-De Jong 
PR: Yan Su (Lucas) 
Digital: Zhang Qinglang/Chen Xinyi 

Credits Sid Lee:  

CCO, Europe: Sylvain Thirache 
President: Johan Delpuech 
Creative Lead: Sofia Lyu 
Business Directors: Eugénie Valletoux/Gareth Hall 
Senior Project Manager: Sam Bridgwater 
Copywriter: Jillian Young 
Social Media: Cassandre Geron 
Producers: Laetitia Neves/Aurelia Blatry