ARCHIVEOnePlus Never Settle Film Turns Fans Into Co-Creators
The Never Settle Film: Version 1 is a 2018 film campaign created by OnePlus and agency Above+Beyond for the United Kingdom market, structured as the first instalment in a planned six-part series in which audience feedback would directly shape each successive version of the advertisement.
OnePlus launched Version 1 in April 2018 as a deliberate opening statement rather than a finished creative product. The campaign invited viewers to submit suggestions for improvement through social media channels and the OnePlus community forum, with Above+Beyond planning to incorporate selected ideas into subsequent versions, culminating in a final film timed to the OnePlus 6 launch. The single-asset film stands as the seed of that iterative process, positioning the brand not as a broadcaster of messages but as a facilitator of ongoing creative conversation with its community.
In the United Kingdom, where smartphone consumers face a densely competitive retail environment, the campaign sought to differentiate OnePlus through participation rather than production spectacle. The Never Settle tagline had already served as the brand's north star across multiple product cycles, and Above+Beyond extended that ethos from product development into advertising itself. By making the audience a named collaborator, OnePlus reinforced a brand identity built on the idea that its most committed users are also its most valuable creative partners. The campaign carries a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100, reflecting a structurally inventive concept executed with restraint across a single media asset.
OnePlus built its entire go-to-market model on community participation. The Never Settle Film extends that model from product feedback into advertising production, asking the same forum members who historically shaped hardware decisions to now influence how the brand communicates on screen.
The strategic logic is rooted in OnePlus's lineage of participatory campaigns. As reported by scribd.com and The Drum, earlier initiatives such as the 2015 Smash the Past activation invited users to destroy existing smartphones for the chance to purchase a OnePlus One at a symbolic price, later reframed as Donate the Past to redirect the concept toward charitable giving. The Never Settle Film carries that tradition forward by treating the advertisement itself as a living document. Above+Beyond planned six versions of the film, each shaped by community input gathered between releases, according to thedrum.com, which covered the campaign as a notable example of participatory brand communication.
In the United Kingdom in 2018, OnePlus operated in a market dominated by established players. Samsung held approximately 20.8% of global smartphone market share in 2018, according to data cited by sammobile.com, while Apple and Huawei consolidated their own positions. The five largest smartphone vendors collectively held approximately 69% of global market share in 2018, up from 63% the prior year, according to fierce-network.com. Against that concentration, a challenger brand like OnePlus could not compete on media spend alone. A community co-creation strategy offered a credible alternative: convert existing advocates into amplifiers, generate organic discussion around each new version, and sustain campaign momentum across six releases on a fraction of the budget a platform brand would require. Competitors such as Samsung and Apple relied on high-production broadcast campaigns in the United Kingdom during this period, making OnePlus's open, iterative format a structurally distinctive position in the electronics category.
Director Carly Cussen helmed The Never Settle Film: Version 1, with sound design delivered by Scramble. The creative mandate was unusual: produce a film that functions as a provocation rather than a conclusion, one that communicates the Never Settle brand idea while visibly leaving room for the audience to improve it.
Above+Beyond's creative approach required a precise calibration of incompleteness. A film too polished would undermine the invitation for feedback, signalling that the work was already finished. A film too rough would erode brand credibility in a category where production quality is a proxy for product quality. The single media asset released in April 2018 in the United Kingdom threads that needle, presenting a coherent narrative arc while openly framing itself as Version 1 of a work in progress.
The participation mechanic was built into the campaign architecture from the outset. Above+Beyond structured the social and forum components so that viewer suggestions fed directly into the production pipeline for subsequent versions, according to thedrum.com. Sound design from Scramble contributed to the tonal identity of the piece, grounding the film's narrative ambition in a considered audio landscape. The campaign's restraint in deploying only one media asset is itself a creative decision: a single film concentrates community attention on one shared object, making the feedback loop cleaner and the editorial choices for Version 2 onward more legible. Production credits beyond director Carly Cussen and sound studio Scramble are not publicly documented in available sources.
ARCHIVENo verified performance data for The Never Settle Film: Version 1 is publicly available. No campaign-specific sales lift, market-share movement, brand-tracking data, or formal effectiveness results have been published, and the campaign has not been recognised at Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards.
Structural analysis offers a meaningful alternative lens. The campaign's iterative six-version architecture creates a built-in content calendar, generating at least six distinct moments of earned media and community engagement from a single creative platform. In the United Kingdom electronics market of 2018, where global smartphone shipments declined approximately 4.1% year over year according to fierce-network.com, sustaining consumer attention across multiple touchpoints without proportional media investment represented a genuine strategic advantage for a challenger brand.
The participatory mechanic also functions as a brand-health instrument in its own right. Each round of community suggestions produces a dataset of consumer priorities, language, and aspirations that Above+Beyond and OnePlus could draw on beyond the campaign itself. Whether that intelligence was formally captured and applied is not documented in publicly available sources. What is documentable is the conceptual ambition: a campaign that treats its own imperfection as a feature, aligning the advertising process with the Never Settle brand promise at the level of production philosophy rather than messaging alone. The Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100 reflects that ambition while acknowledging the limitations of a single-asset execution whose downstream versions remain incompletely documented.
The Never Settle Film: Version 1 is a 2018 UK film campaign by OnePlus and Above+Beyond. It launched in April 2018 as the first in a planned six-part series, inviting audiences to submit feedback through social media and the OnePlus community forum to shape each successive version of the advertisement.
Above+Beyond created The Never Settle Film: Version 1 for OnePlus. The London-based agency structured the campaign as an iterative series planned across six versions, with the final instalment timed to the OnePlus 6 launch, incorporating community-sourced ideas between each release.
Carly Cussen directed The Never Settle Film: Version 1. Sound design for the campaign was handled by Scramble. The film was released in the United Kingdom in April 2018 as a single media asset designed to invite audience participation and improvement across subsequent planned versions.
OnePlus invited viewers to submit improvement suggestions via social media and its community forum. Above+Beyond planned to incorporate selected ideas into each of six successive film versions, according to thedrum.com, extending the brand's existing community-led product development model directly into its advertising production process.
The Never Settle Film: Version 1 has not been recognised at Cannes Lions, D&AD, the Effies, The One Show, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards. The campaign holds a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100, reflecting its structurally inventive concept within a single-asset execution.
The Never Settle Film continues OnePlus's tradition of community-driven campaigns. Earlier initiatives including Smash the Past in 2015 also relied on audience participation as a core mechanic, according to thedrum.com and scribd.com. The 2018 film extended that model by making the advertisement itself the subject of ongoing collaborative refinement.
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