08. May 2023

Omega watches have a close to 130-year long history in China and since the Roaring Twenties have relied heavily on Chinese celebrity endorsements. For this week’s post about an artifact from our collection we are asking you for help identifying all the glamorous icons featured in this all-star ad. But first a quick background on the famous luxury watch brand. In 1848 a young watchmaker named Luis Brandt opened a workshop called “La Generale Watch Co” in the small Swiss village of La...

07. November 2022

In November 2022 the Chinese government issued new regulations for celebrity related advertising. Among others the updated rules prohibit celebrity endorsements of medicines, off-campus education and – finally - tobacco. What sounds fairly reasonable for today’s standards actually took the authorities over a century to crack down on: the practice of Chinese singers and movie stars unscrupulously peddling cigarettes goes back to the early 20th century and, as we will see, sometimes even with...

08. March 2022

The 1930s marked the first “Golden Period” of Chinese cinema and catapulted its key performers to superstardom. In 1933, the newspaper Star Daily conducted China's first public poll for the most popular movie stars with Hu Die “Butterfly” Wu (胡蝶) as the runaway winner with 21,334 votes, more than twice as many as the first runner-up Chen Yumei, and almost three times the votes her friend Ruan Lingyu (阮玲玉) received. Hu Die was crowned China's first "Movie Queen", but Ruan...

15. November 2019

Celebrity endorsements and Key Opinion Leaders are all the rage in China's modern advertising and e-commerce market. Yet few consumers and marketers actually know who almost 100 years ago came up with the idea of using stars to promote a specific brand. LUX soap was founded by the firm Lever Brothers, now known as Unilever, in 1899. Marketed as a laundry product for over 20 years, only in 1924, the company conducted a contest that led them to a very interesting finding: women were using LUX as...