Huawei P9 Route Turned Peru's Hidden Landscapes Into a Photography Campaign
Huawei's P9 Route is a 2017 digital campaign created by Peruvian agency Ingenia in collaboration with PromPerú, in which five public personalities traveled through the Peruvian regions of Junín, Puno, and Áncash over six days to photograph little-known destinations using the Huawei P9 smartphone.
The campaign operated at the intersection of two objectives: positioning the Huawei P9 as a premium, photography-capable device in the Peruvian electronics market, and amplifying international awareness of underexposed Peruvian destinations through compelling imagery. As documented by Clapboard, the collaboration between Huawei, Ingenia, and PromPerú was designed to generate striking photographic content that could circulate globally, using the device itself as both the creative tool and the product being demonstrated. The route gave the campaign its identity — a literal journey through majestic but unfamiliar terrain, executed entirely through the lens of a single electronic device.
Published in Peru in May 2017, the campaign appeared in the digital medium and sits within the electronics and technology category. Contemporary coverage reported by Mercadonegro Pe indicates the initiative had roots in 2016, with the hashtag #RutaP9 appearing as early as June 2016 in connection with the broader Huawei P9 launch. That lineage places the May 2017 publication as the culmination of a sustained effort rather than a standalone activation. In the Peruvian market, where smartphone adoption was accelerating alongside growing digital media consumption, the campaign's digital-first format aligned with the channels its target audience actively used. The five personalities selected — Alessandra Denegri, Franco Cabrera, Luciano Mazzetti, Maud Gurunlian, and Rafo Iparraguirre — brought distinct creative and public profiles to the journey, ensuring the resulting content reached varied audience segments across Peru and beyond.
Huawei entered the P9 Route initiative from a strategic position of deliberate premium repositioning. As noted by Clapboard, the 2016 to 2017 period represented a concerted effort by Huawei to reframe its smartphones as photography-led, aspirational products rather than value-tier alternatives. In Peru, that repositioning required creative proof points rather than specification claims alone, which is precisely the role the route campaign was built to fulfill.
The broader context for this strategy sits within a competitive global smartphone market. According to IDC, global smartphone shipments reached approximately 1.47 billion units in 2017, with Huawei reporting growth that strengthened its standing among the world's top three manufacturers. In Latin American markets including Peru, Huawei was competing directly against Samsung, which held dominant regional market share, and Apple, which anchored the upper premium tier. To occupy meaningful space between those two competitors, Huawei needed campaigns that demonstrated photographic capability through authentic use rather than staged studio output.
The decision to partner with PromPerú — Peru's national export and tourism promotion agency — gave the campaign institutional credibility and a co-interest in reach. PromPerú's mandate to promote lesser-known Peruvian destinations aligned naturally with Huawei's need for visually compelling subject matter. The regions of Junín, Puno, and Áncash offered landscapes with genuine photographic drama, ensuring the resulting imagery could stand on its own merit. According to mercadonegro.pe, the influencer selection was deliberate, pairing personalities whose existing audiences spanned travel, culture, and lifestyle — categories with strong organic resonance in Peru's digital media environment at the time. The strategy reflected a broader industry shift, documented by warc.com in its analysis of Huawei P9 launch executions globally, toward branded content and influencer partnerships as the primary vehicle for communicating photographic hardware capability.
The creative execution of P9 Route placed the Huawei P9 smartphone at the center of every content decision. The device was not featured as a prop or tagged in post-production — it was the sole capture instrument for the entire six-day journey, meaning every photograph produced during the campaign constituted direct product demonstration.
Five personalities — Alessandra Denegri, Franco Cabrera, Luciano Mazzetti, Maud Gurunlian, and Rafo Iparraguirre — each brought individual visual perspectives to the route, as reported by mercadonegro.pe. Traveling through Junín, Puno, and Áncash, they photographed landscapes, communities, and geographic features that receive comparatively little attention in mainstream Peruvian tourism imagery. That editorial choice reinforced the campaign's dual purpose: the images needed to feel genuinely exploratory rather than polished and familiar, because discovery was the campaign's core emotional proposition. A viewer encountering the content was meant to discover both an unknown corner of Peru and the capability of the device simultaneously.
The digital medium format allowed the campaign to unfold in real time through the #RutaP9 hashtag, giving audiences a sense of journey rather than a post-produced reveal. This structural choice is consistent with influencer travel campaigns of the period, where serialised, platform-native content outperformed single-moment launches. The campaign contains one primary media asset as documented by Clapboard, suggesting the journey's output was consolidated into a single flagship piece alongside the organic social content generated along the route. Production credits for the P9 Route campaign beyond the agency attribution to Ingenia are not publicly documented in available trade sources. The creative direction reflects Ingenia's documented approach to the Huawei account in Peru, which the agency continued with the follow-up P10 Family campaign in October 2017, also built around smartphone photography according to Clapboard.
Ruta P9 reached finalist status at the LATAM Digital Media Awards 2016, as documented by Clapboard, representing independent industry recognition of the campaign's structural ambition within the Latin American digital advertising landscape. No award category or win status has been identified in available records. No independent editorial reviews of the P9 Route campaign from trade publications including Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious are publicly available, and no verified social media engagement figures for the 2017 execution have been documented in accessible sources.
No additional verified performance data for the P9 Route campaign is publicly available in trade or academic sources. In the absence of declared metrics, the campaign's structural effectiveness can be assessed through its design. The partnership with PromPerú provided distribution infrastructure beyond Huawei's own channels. The influencer selection across multiple content verticals increased the probability of organic amplification. The use of the Huawei P9 as the exclusive capture device removed the need for a separate demonstration layer — the content was the proof.
The Clapboard Score for P9 Route is 54 out of 100. That rating reflects a campaign with genuine strategic coherence and a meaningful institutional partnership, held back by limited documented output — one primary media asset — and an absence of measurable results data in the public record. The score positions P9 Route as a competent market-level execution that served its repositioning objectives in Peru without generating the scale of creative or commercial impact that would place it among the benchmark campaigns of the 2017 electronics category.
P9 Route was a digital campaign created by Ingenia for Huawei in Peru in 2017. Five personalities traveled through Junín, Puno, and Áncash over six days, photographing lesser-known Peruvian destinations exclusively using the Huawei P9 smartphone, in collaboration with national tourism body PromPerú.
Ingenia created the P9 Route campaign for Huawei in Peru. The Lima-based agency also produced the follow-up Huawei P10 Family campaign in Peru in October 2017, establishing Ingenia as Huawei's primary creative partner for smartphone photography campaigns in the Peruvian market during this period.
The five personalities were Alessandra Denegri, Franco Cabrera, Luciano Mazzetti, Maud Gurunlian, and Rafo Iparraguirre. Each brought a distinct public profile spanning travel, culture, and lifestyle, as reported by mercadonegro.pe, ensuring the campaign's photographic content reached varied audience segments across Peru.
Ruta P9 reached finalist status at the LATAM Digital Media Awards 2016, according to Clapboard. No award category, win status, or independent trade press reviews from publications including Campaign, Ad Age, or Adweek have been identified in publicly available records for this campaign.
The Clapboard Score for P9 Route is 54 out of 100. The rating reflects the campaign's strategic coherence and its PromPerú partnership, while noting limitations including a single documented media asset and an absence of verified performance data in the public record for this 2017 Peru campaign.
Huawei partnered with PromPerú because the national tourism body's mandate to promote lesser-known Peruvian destinations aligned directly with Huawei's need for visually dramatic subject matter. The partnership gave the campaign institutional credibility and extended its distribution beyond Huawei's own channels across the Peruvian and international digital media landscape.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
