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Chinese chopsticks ad resurfaces amid D&G fallout
2018-11-29 
The five-minute ad promotes the values of Chinese families. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Chopsticks was a five-minute, noncommercial advertisement produced by a Shanghai-based creative agency and aired on China Central Television (CCTV) during Spring Festival in 2014.

Over the past week, the ad, which shows chopsticks as symbols of love within modern Chinese families, has resurfaced online and gone viral after fashion house Dolce & Gabbana posted a video featuring an Asian-looking model struggling to eat Italian food with chopsticks-infuriating one of the brand's largest markets.

Since being shared by the official Sina Weibo account of CCTV news on Nov 21, the video has been viewed more than 53 million times, and reposted for more than 2.29 million times in less than a week. It shows the interaction between grandparents and parents with their offspring, neighbors, as well as the living and the deceased during Spring Festival in eight cities across China and in San Francisco's famous Chinatown.

"I think anyone can use any element for creative purposes," says Sun Tao, creative director of the CCTV ad, referring to the ad's somewhat unexpected return to popularity amid the recent D&G scandal, four years after its debut. "It's more a matter of how the element has been employed and whether the feelings of the target audience have been taken into consideration."

The audience was at the front of the production team's mind when they set out to create the ad for CCTV, says Sun, a veteran advertiser who worked for the American advertising agency, McCann, in Shanghai for a decade, before becoming the co-founder of a new studio, Match.

He notes when his team outbid more than 300 candidates to produce a non-commercial ad for the annual Spring Festival gala, there was barely any theme assigned by CCTV, which commissioned the project.

"All we got is a rough guideline: to demonstrate the values of Chinese families and family reunion without being over-preachy," says Sun to China Daily in Shanghai.

Then, as the team gathered over drinks, the idea of using chopsticks as a vehicle to express feelings and carry memories struck, Sun recalls.

"The weird thing is that the first memory of family that popped into my mind after some beer, is a little violent," says Sun.

Sun Tao (second from right) and his production team at the filming set of Chopsticks. [Photo provided to China Daily]

He explains at a family gathering during childhood, when he was the first at the table to reach out to grab some food with his chopsticks, he got a slap on the hand from his mother-a rebuke for attempting to take food before the elders at the table.

The scene is reproduced in the ad and became one of its most heartfelt moments.

"One of the biggest challenges we had during the production was with the characters, as 90 percent of them are not professional actors, but real people playing themselves. However as a result, what we have on screen is natural, vital and real," says Sun.

With a budget of 2 million yuan ($288,000), and produced over the course of three months, the five-minute ad was edited from around 500 hours of footage.

"Basically, we have tried to use the chopsticks as a needle to stitch together all the fond memories of love and family," says Sun.

Comments under the ad on Sina Weibo have tagged it as "healing" and "an accurate interpretation of Chinese culture".

The D&G video, which was supposed to promote the brand's big fashion show in Shanghai on Nov 21, sparked a huge backlash on Chinese social media for being offensive. Things got worse for the fashion label after the brand's co-founder, Stefano Gabbana, allegedly made disparaging remarks about the country and people while supposedly defending the advert on Instagram, further escalating tension between the brand and its Chinese customers.

The fallout saw the brand's offerings pulled from the listings of a number of Chinese e-commerce platforms, including Tmall and JD, while a galaxy of A-list Chinese stars, including Li Bingbing and Chen Kun, who were expected to attend the Shanghai show announced their absence from the event.

As a result, the show, titled The Great Show, and which promised the exhibition of hundreds of outfits and the attendance of 1,500 guests, was canceled hours before it was scheduled.

In a video shared on the brand's official Sina Weibo account shortly afterward, the two founders and designers personally apologized to "Chinese people around the world" in Mandarin.

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