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Huawei Marks the Year of the Loong With a Fire Dragon Dance Film
Huawei's "Year of the Loong" is a 2024 digital film campaign created by Insight Group and published in China in February 2024, using the traditional Fire Dragon Dance to express the brand's core proposition that collaboration sparks connection during Chinese New Year.
The campaign arrives at the intersection of cultural ritual and brand storytelling. In China, the Year of the Dragon — rendered as "Loong" to honour the distinct character of the Chinese mythological creature — carries deep associations with power, auspiciousness, and collective energy. Huawei and Insight Group anchor the film to the Fire Dragon Dance, a communal practice that requires precise coordination among its participants, making it a natural metaphor for the brand's emphasis on togetherness. The campaign hashtags #BetterTogether and #StayConnectedStayTogether crystallise this intent, positioning Huawei not merely as a device manufacturer but as an enabler of meaningful human interaction at one of the most socially significant moments in the Chinese calendar.
The campaign carries a single media asset — a film — distributed on digital platforms including YouTube, extending its reach beyond the domestic Chinese market to Chinese-speaking audiences globally. Its messaging delivers a seasonal greeting of health, wealth, and happiness through the lens of Lunar New Year tradition, while its strategic architecture serves Huawei's longer-term brand ambition of being associated with a better-connected world. According to Clapboard's editorial assessment, the campaign earns a Clapboard Score of 67 out of 100, reflecting competent cultural execution within a competitive field of Chinese New Year advertising. The film recorded approximately 1,374,025 views and 405 likes on the platforms where engagement data is publicly documented, according to Clapboard.
Huawei targets one of the most commercially and emotionally charged advertising windows in China with this campaign. Chinese New Year, and specifically the Lunar New Year period, concentrates consumer spending, brand attention, and emotional receptivity in ways that few other calendar events can match in the Chinese market. By centring on the Year of the Dragon — a zodiac year regarded as particularly auspicious in Chinese tradition — Huawei selects a cultural moment that amplifies the resonance of connection-themed messaging.
The strategic rationale sits within a fiercely contested smartphone landscape. In China, Huawei competes directly with Apple and Xiaomi for premium and mid-range market share. According to IDC, the Chinese smartphone market experienced renewed competitive pressure in 2024 as domestic brands accelerated their recovery following supply chain disruptions in prior years. Huawei's domestic positioning has historically rested on premium hardware and national brand pride, factors that make cultural storytelling during CNY a logical strategic lever rather than an opportunistic one.
The campaign continues a trajectory identified by Campaign Asia, which has documented Huawei's shift from product-specification-led advertising toward emotionally resonant brand narratives. Rather than leading with camera benchmarks or chipset capabilities — approaches that characterised earlier Huawei advertising, as noted by marketing analysts at IIDE — "Year of the Loong" invests entirely in cultural meaning. The Fire Dragon Dance metaphor allows Huawei to communicate the value of its ecosystem without naming a single product, a confident creative choice that signals brand maturity. This positioning reflects what Otto Brand Lab describes as Huawei's sustained effort to present itself as an enabler of human connection rather than a pure technology vendor.
The Fire Dragon Dance drives the entire creative architecture of Huawei's "Year of the Loong." The dance is a centuries-old communal performance requiring dozens of participants to move a single illuminated dragon in coordinated unison — the visual embodiment of the campaign's central argument that collaboration creates connection. Insight Group's decision to build the film around this specific ritual rather than a generic CNY tableau demonstrates a commitment to cultural specificity over seasonal convenience.
The film format allows Insight Group to work with motion, light, and rhythm in ways that static formats cannot. The Fire Dragon Dance is inherently cinematic: the interplay of fire, darkness, and collective human movement offers compositional drama that serves both emotional and aesthetic storytelling. The choice of a single media asset concentrates creative effort, ensuring that the film carries the full weight of the campaign's message without diffusion across multiple formats.
Production credits for "Year of the Loong" are not publicly documented beyond the confirmed agency attribution to Insight Group. What the available film demonstrates is an understanding of how to let cultural material carry narrative weight. The campaign does not impose Huawei's brand identity onto the Fire Dragon Dance; instead, it allows the dance to illustrate the brand's values organically, with the hashtags #BetterTogether and #StayConnectedStayTogether functioning as the interpretive frame rather than a hard sell. According to Clapboard's editorial assessment, this restraint is one of the campaign's distinguishing creative qualities, allowing the cultural content to remain primary while brand messaging operates at a secondary register that feels earned rather than appended.
Huawei's "Year of the Loong" generated approximately 1,374,025 views, 405 likes, and 80 comments on the platforms where its performance data is publicly recorded, according to Clapboard. These figures represent a meaningful organic reach for a brand film without confirmed paid amplification data attached to the public record. The view count signals genuine audience appetite for culturally grounded CNY content from a major technology brand.
No verified awards for "Year of the Loong" are recorded in the databases of Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, according to Clapboard's archive research. The absence of award recognition does not diminish the campaign's strategic coherence; Chinese New Year advertising is an intensely crowded category, and Huawei's film competes with significant creative output from across the consumer electronics, food, and lifestyle sectors during the same period.
Structurally, the campaign's decision to anchor on a single, high-quality film asset rather than a multi-format content burst reflects a focused deployment of creative capital. The Fire Dragon Dance metaphor travels across cultural and linguistic contexts, extending the film's utility beyond mainland China to Lunar New Year audiences across the Chinese diaspora. Clapboard rates the campaign at 67 out of 100, an assessment that recognises the cultural competency and brand alignment of the work while acknowledging that broader measurable impact data remains outside the public record.
Huawei's "Year of the Loong" is a digital film created by Insight Group and published in China in February 2024. The campaign uses the traditional Fire Dragon Dance to celebrate the Chinese New Year of the Dragon, communicating Huawei's brand message that collaboration sparks connection during the Lunar New Year season.
Insight Group created the "Year of the Loong" campaign for Huawei. The agency produced the film for the Chinese market, publishing it in February 2024 as a Chinese New Year campaign centred on the Fire Dragon Dance and the brand's #BetterTogether messaging, according to Clapboard's archive records.
The Fire Dragon Dance is a centuries-old communal performance in which participants coordinate to carry an illuminated dragon in unison. Huawei used it as a metaphor for collaboration and connection, the brand's core proposition, allowing the cultural ritual to visually embody the campaign's message during Chinese New Year 2024.
Huawei's "Year of the Loong" recorded approximately 1,374,025 views, 405 likes, and 80 comments on platforms where its data is publicly available, according to Clapboard. No verified award recognition from Cannes Lions, Effie Awards, or other major industry bodies is recorded in Clapboard's archive for this campaign.
Clapboard rates Huawei's "Year of the Loong" at 67 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's competent cultural execution and strong brand alignment around the Chinese New Year of the Dragon theme, while noting that broader verified performance data beyond view counts remains outside the public record.
"Year of the Loong" continues Huawei's documented shift toward emotionally resonant brand narratives during culturally significant moments, as noted by Campaign Asia. Rather than foregrounding product specifications, the 2024 CNY film positions Huawei as an enabler of human connection, reinforcing its established brand proposition of building a better-connected world.
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