The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2025
Lenovo turns an AI PC into warm '2025 opening lines' for the journey home
For CNY 2025, Lenovo sent streamer Da Bing into real streets with an AI PC, handing practical 'opening lines' to everyone heading home.
Lenovo
What it had to solve
Lenovo was pushing its 'human-centered intelligence' (人本智能) idea, but Spring Festival marketing was crowded with formulaic stories of going home. The challenge was to show AI PCs as genuinely helpful rather than as a spec sheet, at the moment the whole country starts traveling for the holiday.
How it works
Every Chinese New Year, brands release films about going home, and by 2025 the genre had become predictable: sentimental, polished and interchangeable. Lenovo's difficulty was different — it needed to make its 'human-centered intelligence' claim believable, showing what an AI PC actually does for an ordinary person at the most emotionally loaded moment of the year.
The answer was to borrow credibility instead of buying it. Da Bing, the livestreamer whose late-night calls with strangers had made him 2024's most trusted voice, took the AI PC out of the studio and onto real streets during the travel rush. With the machine's help he generated practical opening lines for the new year: reminders to turn off the power before leaving, wishes for those going home alone, gratitude for workers who cannot leave. The film let the AI stay in the background, doing what it does — summarizing, remembering, suggesting — while the people stayed in the foreground.
The campaign's closing gesture made the mechanism visible: every scene was gathered onto the PC screen, demonstrating the AI summary feature without ever lecturing about it. It won a Gold at the 2025 金瞳 Awards for social video and gave Lenovo a template for marketing AI as a companion rather than a spectacle.
Why it lands
- Borrowing a trusted listener like Da Bing gave the AI a human context it could not create for itself.
- Genuine micro-advice — breaker switches, red packets, video calls — proved the AI's utility better than any spec claim.
- Shooting on real streets kept the film inside the travel-rush reality instead of an ad-world fantasy.
- The end frame let the AI demonstrate its summarizing skill without a single line of product narration.
What it did
The film earned a Gold at the 2025 金瞳 Awards in the social-media video category for 极昼广告, and its 数英奖 entry scored eight out of ten. Beyond awards, it became the reference point for tech brands showing AI as a quiet helper rather than the hero of the story.
What you can take
To make technology feel human, show it solving small real problems — the warmth comes from the advice, not from the gadget.
Since then
The 2025 opening-lines campaign was produced by Shanghai agency 极昼广告 and entered in the 数英奖 awards platform, where it drew a professional score of eight. At the 2025 金瞳 Awards it took a Gold in the social-media video category, and industry commentary repeatedly cited it as the year's example of demystifying AI for a general audience.
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