The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2022
Midea's 90 Minutes of Air Conditioning packs a cold Manhattan cinema with heat-escapers
Midea screened a feature-length film of its U air conditioner blowing for 90 minutes in a cold Manhattan theater — New Yorkers flocked to it.
Midea
What it had to solve
Every summer, New Yorkers are notorious for going to any movie just for the air conditioning. Midea, bringing its U window air conditioner to the city, had to turn that running joke into attention for an invisible benefit: cool air.
How it works
Every summer, New Yorkers are notorious for going to any movie just for the air conditioning — the film is secondary, the escape from the heat is the point. Midea, launching its U window air conditioner in the city, faced the problem of advertising a product whose benefit cannot be seen: cool air.
The creative answer was to make the product itself the movie. Midea produced a feature-length film that showed one epic shot of the Midea U AC blowing for 90 minutes and played it in an ice-cold Manhattan movie theatre. It was promoted like any other summer film, taking over the marquee outside the cinema, so the event read as a real release rather than an advertisement.
New Yorkers flocked to the screenings, and the premiere and audience reactions were captured and spread to millions of New Yorkers on social media. The stunt transferred because it took the audience's existing behavior — going to the movies to cool down — and gave it a film that delivered exactly that, with the product visibly working the whole time.
Why it lands
- The film made the benefit literal: 90 uninterrupted minutes of cool air, shown in the one place New Yorkers already go to escape the heat.
- Promoting an ad like a real summer film inverted expectations, so the joke itself carried the campaign.
- The cold cinema made the audience the proof — reactions filmed at the premiere spread to millions on social media.
- No demo was needed beyond the unit simply working, the most credible claim an air-conditioning brand can make.
What it did
New Yorkers flocked to the screenings, and the premiere and audience reactions were captured and spread to millions of New Yorkers on social media; the stunt survives in D&AD's awards archive.
What you can take
When the benefit is invisible, show the product doing its job for the whole runtime: making the claim literal turns an ad into an event people pay to attend.
Since then
The work is preserved in D&AD's awards archive as an example of product demonstration pushed to its literal, shareable extreme.
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