Motorola is so confident of wireless application protocol (WAP) technology being a blockbuster hit in Asia it has splashed out on one of the biggest names in Hollywood to shoot a string of television advertisements to promote its new WAP-enabled mobile phones.
Oscar-winning film director Oliver Stone has just wrapped up three weeks of location shooting in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Langkawi and San Francisco for an Asia-wide advertising campaign to be launched in the first week next month.
'Wireless handheld devices are going to be big. It is important for us to be seen to be big. So we needed someone big to tell a big story,' said Rick Timmons, Motorola's Asia-Pacific marketing director.
Mr Timmons said this advertising campaign was 'significantly more than anything we have previously spent on any campaign in Asia'. He is hopeful it is money well spent. 'Oliver Stone adds a tremendous amount of value in story-telling,' he said.
Advertising agency McCann-Erickson developed the initial script. The scenes shot in the SAR included a tram ride and a view of the Hong Kong skyline, shot from Kowloon on a not-too-polluted day.
This is the second commercial made by Stone, better known for rolling out such Hollywood hits as Platoon and Natural Born Killers. His first TV commercial, recently shot in California for the Hong Kong market for brewers Heineken, raised controversy because it barely showed a Chinese face.
