DiCaprio and the surprising stars of Chinese adverts

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With Spring Festival and the Winter Olympics enticing Chinese families to sit together around their televisions, a surprising advertising campaign featuring Leonardo DiCaprio promoting a used car platform has potentially been seen by hundreds of millions of people.

DiCaprio, the world’s highest-paid actor and Best Actor winner at the 2016 Oscars, has a non-speaking role in the advert for Uxin Second-Hand Car Online Marketplace.

Broadcast on China Central Television’s sports and movie channels as well as some of the most popular regional broadcasters, the costly ad campaign has also seen an unspecified sum spent on billboard adverts across China.

Image courtesy of Uxin Second Hand Car Marketplace

While the financial clout of Uxin, which raised 500 million US dollars in funding last January, speaks volumes about the growing second-hand car sector in China, it also underlines the scale of the country’s advertising industry and the use of star power to sell products.

A report by GroupM – a marketing research company – suggests that Internet adverts took up 56 percent of all ad spending last year, with the entire advertising industry estimated to be worth 84.4 billion US dollars. For TV adverts, companies had an estimated spend of around 26.5 billion US dollars.

A lot of that money goes on getting celebrity endorsements, with some surprising faces appearing on Chinese screens to help promote a huge range of products. Take a look below at some of the more unusual ad campaigns from recent years.

Dicaprio a veteran of Chinese advertising

Known as “Xiao Li” to his Chinese fans, DiCaprio has a huge following in the country, and that could partly be down to his frequent appearances in advertising.

Back in 2011, the star of The Revenant was reportedly paid five million US dollars by smartphone maker Oppo for a series of high-budget adverts that saw Leo running across Paris, using an Oppo phone to track down a mysterious woman.

Image courtesy of Oppo

Since then, DiCaprio has been named as the brand representative of BYD, one of China’s biggest electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers. A keen environmentalist and a UN Messenger of Peace, DiCaprio backed a team at the first-ever Formula E EV supercar race in Beijing in 2014.

One of his more surprising appearances was for what has been called the most expensive advert of all time. Reportedly costing 70 million US dollars, the 15-minute corporate video for Studio City – a 3.2 billion US dollar entertainment and retail complex in Macao Special Administrative Region – was directed by Martin Scorsese and featured not only DiCaprio but also Robert De Niro and Brad Pitt.

Messi goes mobile as Kaka fronts cough drop campaign

Western sports stars are a common sight in Chinese adverts for sports clothing and footwear. However, some recognizable faces branch out further afield.

Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi are fierce rivals on the pitch, as well as fronting ad campaigns for rival smartphones in China.

Lionel Messi smiles for the camera during a Huawei product launch in 2016. /China Daily Photo

For a fee of as much as 6.6 million US dollars, Messi has appeared in ads for Huawei, while Cristiano Ronaldo represents Nubia for 4.4 million US dollars per year, according to China Daily.

You don’t have to be a young and handsome face to get a role in advertising either – in the early 2000s, Bora Milutinovic coached the Chinese national football team to qualify for their first ever World Cup appearance.

The fame that brought him was enough to convince a range of companies, including Jin Liufu, an alcohol brand that placed the Serbian manager in its TV ads despite the fact that he was practically teetotal.

Named FIFA World Player of the Year and recipient of the Ballon d’Or in 2007, Kaka is still a fairly common sight in China as the face of Golden Throat lozenges, a brand of medicinal throat sweets.

A Golden Throat lozenge advert featuring Kaka in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, 2012. /VCG Photo

David Beckham’s unwitting role as Viagra ambassador

Kaka, however, is not the first Brazilian football star to appear in ads for Golden Throat. Striker Ronaldo threatened the Chinese company with legal action in 2007 for using his image in an advert without permission.

More infamously, however, was David Beckham’s surprise appearance in an ad campaign for USA Selikon, a Chinese product used to treat impotence.

Old footage of the star was dubbed over in Chinese with memorable lines like “it's also the secret weapon with which I can satisfy Victoria,” referring to his wife, Victoria Beckham.

According to The Telegraph, Beckham was unhappy at the use of his image in the advert, which also featured Keanu Reeves and Sean Connery without their permission.

Chinese ad industry lures Mr Bean out of retirement

After appearing at the opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympic Games, comedian Rowan Atkinson told British media he was retiring the Mr Bean character.

Image courtesy of Snickers

The lure of Chinese advertising was however too enticing.

Two years later, Bean – whose rubber-like face is recognized across the world after his show was broadcast in more than 200 countries and regions – suddenly appeared in ancient China, tumbling through a roof and trying his hand at kung fu as part of a global campaign for Snickers.