How OPPO and Sid Lee Turned Tennis Partnerships Into a Global Brand Moment
OPPO's Inspiration Ahead is a 360-degree integrated and experiential campaign created with Sid Lee in 2022 that activates the brand's partnerships with Roland Garros and Wimbledon by placing the inspirational relationship between professional tennis players and young fans at the centre of its storytelling, anchored to the OPPO Find X5 Pro and Find X5 smartphones and published in the United Kingdom in July 2022.
The campaign centres on a film featuring WTA professional Francesca Jones, who was born with ectrodactyly ectodermal dysplasia syndrome — a rare condition causing developmental challenges for hands and feet — and who has risen through professional tennis ranks despite that adversity. The film transitions between Francesca competing on clay at Roland Garros and a young girl practising on grass, evoking the Wimbledon environment. The young girl watches footage of Francesca on an OPPO Find X5 Pro, replicating her movements through moments of frustration, effort, and eventual triumph. The final scene pulls back to reveal the young girl is in the crowd, filming the professional with the 4K Ultra Night Video mode of her OPPO Find X5 smartphone.
The campaign's emotional architecture is deliberately parallel. The athlete–fan relationship mirrors OPPO's stated brand proposition — Inspiration Ahead — which frames the brand's pursuit of technological advancement as a commitment to meeting and exceeding user needs. In the United Kingdom, where the campaign was formally published on 11 July 2022 according to Clapboard's archive, the work arrived as a fully integrated media effort spanning film, experiential activations, and in-tournament presence across two of the sport's most prestigious events. The campaign type spans 360-degree, experiential, and integrated media channels, making it one of OPPO's most structurally ambitious brand-platform executions to date.
OPPO entered the Inspiration Ahead campaign with a dual strategic objective. The brand sought to transition from product-led communication toward a values-driven brand proposition while simultaneously converting two major tennis sponsorships — Roland Garros and Wimbledon — into meaningful storytelling vehicles rather than logo placements. Sid Lee built the campaign around the athlete–fan relationship as its central insight, recognising that the emotional dynamic between a professional and an aspiring player carries universal resonance that transcends tournament geography and product specification.
The strategic context in the United Kingdom was shaped by a contracting global smartphone market. According to IDC, global smartphone shipments totalled approximately 1.2 billion units in 2022, representing an decline of more than eleven percent from the prior year. Within that environment, OPPO ranked fourth globally by shipments with approximately 103 million units and a market share of around eight and a half percent in 2022, according to IDC — a position that placed it behind Samsung, Apple, and Xiaomi but ahead of a crowded field of challengers. Samsung led global shipments with approximately 261 million units, also according to IDC, underlining the scale of the competitive distance OPPO needed brand-building work to address. Xiaomi, operating aggressively across European markets including the United Kingdom, represented a further direct competitive pressure on OPPO's positioning among younger, camera-focused consumers.
OPPO's decision to ground Inspiration Ahead in authentic human stories rather than specification comparisons reflects a considered response to this landscape. The brand's pre-2022 communications lineage leaned heavily on sports sponsorships, camera-led product claims, and celebrity associations, according to En Wikipedia. Inspiration Ahead represented a deliberate brand-platform transition, not an isolated product advertisement, positioning OPPO's imaging technology as the instrument through which inspiration is captured and shared rather than as a feature to be benchmarked.
The film at the heart of Inspiration Ahead carries its creative weight through structural contrast. Sid Lee built the narrative across two surfaces — Roland Garros's red clay and Wimbledon's grass — allowing the geography of professional tennis to do expressive work without requiring exposition. The transitions between Francesca Jones competing at the highest level and a young girl practising alone are edited to rhyme emotionally: a moment of struggle in one world finds its echo in the other, and the sense of shared aspiration accumulates across the intercutting without sentimentality.
The choice of Francesca Jones as the campaign's central figure is strategically and creatively precise. Jones was born with ectrodactyly ectodermal dysplasia syndrome, a condition that causes developmental challenges for hands and feet, and her presence in a campaign built around overcoming adversity carries biographical weight that avoids the performance of inspiration. She is not cast as a symbolic figure but as a working professional whose documented journey earns the campaign's emotional argument. The final reveal — that the young girl has been in the crowd all along, filming Jones with the 4K Ultra Night Video mode of her OPPO Find X5 — closes the narrative loop while placing the product inside the story's most affecting moment rather than appending it as a demonstration.
Beyond the film, Sid Lee created an experiential activation at the French Open championing the 4K Ultra Night Video technology and 5-Axis Optical Image Stabilisation, which uses long exposure to produce visually striking imagery. A separate activation described by oppo.com as Inspirational Light projected fan messages onto Roland Garros's clay court, transforming the tournament surface into a medium for the campaign's central idea. Production credits for Inspiration Ahead beyond the agency's involvement with Sid Lee are not publicly documented in trade sources.
No independently verified performance data for the Inspiration Ahead campaign has been published in trade sources including Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious. No verifiable social media reaction data from platforms including Twitter/X, Reddit, or LinkedIn has been identified for the campaign. The archive entry on Clapboard recorded approximately 2,382 video views at the time of documentation, a figure that reflects indexed archive engagement rather than total campaign reach across paid and owned channels.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates considerable effectiveness across several dimensions. The dual-tournament activation model — running creative work across both Roland Garros and Wimbledon — maximises the return on OPPO's sponsorship investment by creating a narrative that requires both events to function, rather than treating each as a separate media placement. The athlete selection grounds the campaign's emotional claims in verifiable biography, reducing the risk of aspirational rhetoric reading as hollow. The product integration at the film's closing moment is earned by the narrative rather than imposed upon it, which gives the Find X5 and Find X5 Pro a storytelling role that specification advertising cannot replicate.
In the United Kingdom, where the campaign was formally published and where OPPO competes against Samsung and Xiaomi for camera-focused consumers, the Inspiration Ahead campaign represents a structurally coherent attempt to shift brand perception at a category level. Clapboard assigns Inspiration Ahead a score of 63 out of 100, reflecting strong creative ambition and effective use of sports partnership assets alongside limited independently verifiable performance data and a relatively contained documented media footprint.
Inspiration Ahead is a 360-degree integrated and experiential campaign created by OPPO and Sid Lee in 2022. It activates OPPO's partnerships with Roland Garros and Wimbledon by telling the story of how WTA professional Francesca Jones inspires a young fan who films her using an OPPO Find X5 smartphone, anchoring the brand's new proposition of Inspiration Ahead.
Sid Lee created the Inspiration Ahead campaign for OPPO. The campaign was published in the United Kingdom in July 2022 as a 360-degree, experiential, and integrated media effort built around OPPO's dual tennis partnerships with Roland Garros and Wimbledon, featuring the OPPO Find X5 Pro and Find X5 smartphones.
OPPO featured Francesca Jones because her personal story carries the campaign's emotional argument with biographical credibility. Jones was born with ectrodactyly ectodermal dysplasia syndrome, a rare condition affecting hands and feet, and has overcome that adversity to compete as a WTA professional, making her an authentic embodiment of the Inspiration Ahead brand proposition.
The campaign features the OPPO Find X5 Pro and OPPO Find X5 smartphones. Specifically highlighted are the 4K Ultra Night Video mode and 5-Axis Optical Image Stabilisation technologies. Both products appear within the film's narrative, with the Find X5 used by the young fan to film Francesca Jones at the campaign's closing moment.
At Roland Garros 2022, OPPO and Sid Lee created the Inspirational Light activation, which projected fan messages onto the tournament's red clay court, according to oppo.com. A separate activation championed the Find X5 Pro's 4K Ultra Night Video and 5-Axis Optical Image Stabilisation technology using long exposure to generate striking visual imagery.
Clapboard assigns the OPPO Inspiration Ahead campaign a score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong creative structure and effective use of tennis partnership assets, alongside limited independently verifiable performance data and a relatively contained documented media footprint in publicly available trade sources.
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