Oppo’s Bollywood Strategy with Deepika Padukone and Ranbir Kapoor

Discover how Deepika Padukone and Ranbir Kapoor shaped Oppo’s Bollywood marketing strategy. Explore their brand endorsements, campaigns, and role in Oppo’s celebrity advertising.

Smartphone advertising in India rarely stays confined to specifications for long. A brand can talk about camera sensors and processor speeds, but somewhere in that conversation it also has to answer a quieter question: what kind of person uses this phone, and what does owning it say about them? That is where Bollywood has repeatedly stepped in for smartphone brands trying to build recognition quickly in a crowded market.

Few brands have leaned on this approach as consistently as Oppo India. Since entering the country in 2014, the company has built its marketing around a rotating cast of Bollywood faces, with Deepika Padukone fronting its F-series selfie phones from 2017 and Ranbir Kapoor taking on the Reno series from 2019 onward, an association that has continued through several product generations since. This is worth examining closely, not as a simple list of celebrity signings, but as a strategy: why did Oppo turn to these two specific actors, what did each of them actually bring to the brand, and what does their collaboration tell us about how a technology company builds an identity through Bollywood rather than through specifications alone?

Why Oppo Turned to Bollywood for Brand Building

Oppo's use of Bollywood celebrities was never incidental. Industry coverage from its early years in India describes the brand working with more than a dozen high-profile film and cricket personalities within its first six years in the country, spanning Hrithik Roshan and Sonam Kapoor as early South Asia region ambassadors, cricketer Yuvraj Singh as its first sport ambassador, and later Deepika Padukone, Sidharth Malhotra, Ranbir Kapoor, Katrina Kaif, Badshah, and others across different product lines. This pattern suggests a brand that treated celebrity partnerships as a core part of its go-to-market approach in India, not an occasional marketing flourish.

A few reasons explain why Bollywood specifically served this purpose so well:

• Instant recognition in a new market. Oppo entered India only in 2014, competing against brands with much longer histories in the country. A familiar Bollywood face gave new product lines an immediate point of recognition that the Oppo name alone did not yet carry.
• A direct route to emotional and cultural relevance. Oppo's own executives were explicit about this. When the company signed Deepika Padukone in 2017, Will Yang, then Brand Director of Oppo India, said the partnership was meant to bring the brand's selfie-camera positioning to "all corners of the country," citing her mass appeal with Indian audiences.
• A way to make camera-focused messaging feel aspirational. Because Oppo built much of its Indian identity around camera and selfie technology, pairing that message with photogenic, widely admired faces gave the brand's core claim, a better camera, a more immediate visual demonstration than a spec sheet could offer.
• Series-specific casting to reach different audiences. Oppo has consistently matched different types of celebrities to different product tiers, using major Bollywood stars for its premium Reno line while relying on younger stars and cricketers for its more affordable F and A series, a pattern that points to a deliberate segmentation strategy rather than simply attaching whichever celebrity was available to whichever phone needed promotion.

Why Deepika Padukone and Ranbir Kapoor Were Strong Choices for Oppo

Although both actors worked with the same parent brand, they were signed for different product lines, at different points, and their public personas served somewhat different purposes within Oppo's overall strategy.

Deepika Padukone came on board in March 2017 as the face of the Oppo F3 Plus and its dual selfie camera, at a time when she was already one of Bollywood's most bankable actresses following Om Shanti Om and a string of major commercial films. Her image by that point combined mainstream stardom with a reputation for sophistication and contemporary style, qualities that suited a campaign built around personal image-making, since a selfie camera is, in a sense, a tool for presenting yourself to the world. Oppo's own description of her as a "youth icon" with "mass appeal" points to a specific rationale: the brand needed someone whose face alone would make a new camera feature feel desirable, not simply functional.

Ranbir Kapoor joined Oppo in September 2019 as "Brand Icon" for the newly launched Reno series, alongside Katrina Kaif and musician Badshah, who were named "Brand Friends" for the same line. By 2019, Ranbir Kapoor had built a reputation as one of Hindi cinema's most consistently bankable younger leads, known for versatility across romantic, comedic, and dramatic roles, along with an easy, contemporary screen presence that had already made him a familiar face in Indian advertising through earlier work with brands like Panasonic. Sumit Walia, then Oppo India's marketing head, described the trio as bringing "a blend of talent, class and popularity" that matched Oppo's brand ethos, while Ranbir Kapoor himself said he related to Oppo's "quest for uniqueness," describing it as a brand that resonated with his personal style.

The distinction between Oppo's use of the two actors is instructive. Deepika Padukone was signed as a standalone face for a specific selfie-focused launch. Ranbir Kapoor was signed at the head of a small, tiered celebrity group for an entire product series, a role that gave him a more central, ongoing position in Oppo's marketing structure from the outset.

Deepika Padukone and Ranbir Kapoor's Oppo Ads: A Look at Their Collaboration

Deepika Padukone and the Oppo F3 Plus (2017)

Oppo announced Deepika Padukone as brand ambassador in March 2017, timed to the launch of the Oppo F3 Plus, which the brand marketed around its dual selfie camera, one of the first devices in India to offer a wide-angle group selfie option alongside a standard front camera. The campaign was framed around Oppo's "Selfie Expert" positioning, and Padukone fronted a teaser campaign ahead of the phone's March 23 launch that year.

The creative concept leaned on Padukone's own recognisability to demonstrate the phone's core feature in the most direct way available: showing her using it to take selfies. This is a fairly literal but effective use of a celebrity endorsement in a camera-phone campaign, since the ambassador's face doubles as both the spokesperson and the visible proof of what the camera is capable of capturing.

Deepika Padukone, Sidharth Malhotra, and the Oppo F9 Pro (2018)

By late 2018, Oppo paired Deepika Padukone with newly signed ambassador Sidharth Malhotra for a television commercial titled "5 Minute Charge, 2 Hour Talk," promoting the Oppo F9 Pro and its VOOC Flash Charge feature. The film follows a day in the life of two characters played by the pair, built around the everyday anxiety of a smartphone running low on battery at an inconvenient moment, and shows how a brief charge keeps them connected to people who matter to them.

This advertisement moved away from a pure feature demonstration toward a small narrative built on a genuinely common frustration, low battery at the wrong time, which let the product benefit, fast charging, sit inside a relatable emotional stakes rather than being presented as an abstract technical spec. Padukone and Malhotra's roles here were less about individual star power and more about making an ordinary, slightly stressful moment feel warmer and more resolved once the product entered the story.

Ranbir Kapoor, Katrina Kaif, and Badshah for the Oppo Reno2 (2019)

The Reno series launch in September 2019 brought Ranbir Kapoor on as Brand Icon, with Katrina Kaif and Badshah as Brand Friends, for a campaign built around the Reno2's 20x hybrid zoom capability. The advertisement placed all three in separate situations where the phone's zoom function let them notice or examine something from a distance, a device used less for self-portraiture and more for observing the world more closely, a different narrative angle from the F-series selfie campaigns that had defined Oppo's earlier Deepika Padukone-led advertising.

This shift in creative direction is worth noting. Where the F-series campaigns turned the camera inward, toward self-presentation, the Reno campaign turned it outward, positioning the phone as a tool for exploring and examining the wider world. Casting Ranbir Kapoor at the centre of that idea, rather than reusing the F-series formula, suggests Oppo was using the change in ambassador to signal a genuine shift in product positioning, not simply refreshing the cast for a new launch.

Ranbir Kapoor and the Oppo Reno12 Series (2024)

Ranbir Kapoor's association with the Reno line continued well beyond its 2019 launch, and by 2024 he was still described in Oppo's own materials as the Reno series brand ambassador, fronting a content series for the Reno12 Series built around the phone's AI features, developed by creative agency Famous Innovations. The campaign introduced a custom CGI character, described by Oppo as the "Oppo AI Avatar," designed to feel futuristic while remaining approachable, and used Ranbir Kapoor's screen presence to help humanise what could otherwise have been a fairly abstract, technical AI feature set.

This later campaign shows how a long-running ambassador relationship can evolve alongside a brand's product roadmap. Rather than repeating the zoom-focused concept from 2019, Oppo used Ranbir Kapoor's established familiarity with the Reno name to introduce an entirely new kind of feature, generative AI tools, giving the brand a recognisable face to anchor a genuinely unfamiliar technology for most consumers.

What Deepika Padukone Brought to Oppo

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Deepika Padukone's specific contribution to Oppo's strategy was tied closely to a particular moment in the brand's product story: its push to establish itself as, in its own words, the "Selfie Expert." Her value was not simply that she was famous, but that her public image, contemporary, photogenic, and closely associated with personal style, matched a feature that was itself about self-presentation.

Her campaigns kept the smartphone's camera capability visually demonstrable rather than abstract. Whether showcasing the F3 Plus's dual selfie camera directly or appearing in the more narrative-driven F9 Pro battery campaign alongside Sidharth Malhotra, her role consistently connected Oppo's technical claims to something audiences could immediately picture themselves doing, taking a better selfie, staying connected during a busy day, without needing the advertising to explain the underlying technology in detail.

What Ranbir Kapoor Brought to Oppo

Ranbir Kapoor's role within Oppo's strategy differs in scale and duration from Padukone's. Where her association was tied to a specific launch and a specific feature set, his relationship with the Reno series has run continuously since 2019, spanning multiple phone generations and a shift from a zoom-focused camera story to an AI-driven one by 2024. That kind of longevity is unusual in smartphone marketing, where ambassador relationships often reset with each major product cycle.

His contribution appears to rest on a slightly different quality than Padukone's: less about demonstrating a single feature directly, and more about giving an entire product line a consistent, familiar face across several years of change. As Oppo's Reno series evolved from a zoom-camera flagship into an AI-focused line, Ranbir Kapoor's continued presence gave returning customers a sense of continuity even as the underlying technology shifted considerably.

Two Celebrities, One Oppo Brand Strategy

Read together, Deepika Padukone and Ranbir Kapoor's separate work for Oppo illustrates a brand willing to use different celebrities for different jobs rather than building its entire Indian identity around a single face. Padukone's association was concentrated and feature-specific, tied directly to the F-series selfie positioning during 2017 and 2018. Kapoor's association has been broader and more sustained, anchoring the more premium Reno line across several years and multiple technology shifts.

This is a meaningfully different use of celebrity marketing than simply collecting well-known names. Oppo's series-specific casting pattern, premium Reno launches paired with major, longer-term Bollywood stars, more affordable F and A series lines paired with younger or more specialised talent, suggests the company treated each celebrity relationship as tied to a specific part of its product portfolio rather than as interchangeable brand ambassadors representing Oppo as a whole.

How Oppo Used Bollywood to Make Technology More Relatable

Camera specifications, charging wattages, and AI processing capabilities are all things a brand can list, but few consumers evaluate a new phone purely on those terms before buying it. What tends to move a purchase decision faster is a sense of familiarity, does this brand feel relevant to people like me, and an emotional hook, what would this feature actually let me do that matters to my daily life.

Oppo's campaigns with both actors consistently paired a specific technical claim with an everyday, recognisable situation: a selfie camera demonstrated through an actual selfie, a fast charger demonstrated through the stress of a dying phone before an important moment, a zoom lens demonstrated through characters noticing something from a distance, an AI feature humanised through a familiar face guiding viewers through something new. In each case, the celebrity did not replace the product information. They gave that information a context ordinary viewers could immediately relate to.

The Role of Celebrity Brand Ambassadors in Smartphone Marketing

It is worth being precise about what these two relationships actually were, since the terms brands use for these roles vary and matter to an accurate account of the partnership. Deepika Padukone was formally announced as Oppo's brand ambassador in 2017, a title Oppo's own press materials used consistently through her F9 Pro campaign in 2018. Ranbir Kapoor's original 2019 signing used a more specific title, "Brand Icon" for the Reno series, distinct from Katrina Kaif and Badshah's "Brand Friend" designation, though later Oppo communications, including the 2024 Reno12 campaign, referred to him simply as the Reno series brand ambassador.

This distinction matters for understanding the structure of Oppo's celebrity strategy. Rather than a single, universal Oppo India ambassador, the brand has run several parallel, series-specific relationships at once, with different celebrities holding different formal titles tied to different parts of its product lineup, a structure that becomes clearer once each individual's actual role and timeline is laid out rather than treating every Oppo-linked celebrity as interchangeable.

What Brands Can Learn from Oppo's Bollywood Strategy

The clearest lesson from Oppo's approach is that a strong celebrity strategy is not built by simply accumulating famous names. It comes from matching a specific celebrity's public image to a specific product story, and being willing to change that pairing as the product itself changes.

A few takeaways stand out from how Oppo structured this over time:

• Tie the celebrity to a specific feature or product line, not the brand in the abstract. Deepika Padukone's association with the selfie-focused F-series and Ranbir Kapoor's with the camera-and-AI-focused Reno series each had a clear internal logic rather than being generic brand appearances.
• Let the campaign's creative concept follow the celebrity-product logic, not just insert a celebrity into a generic ad. The shift from selfie-focused F-series storytelling to outward-facing zoom storytelling for the Reno launch shows the creative concept changing meaningfully alongside the change in ambassador and product focus.
• Long-term association can carry a brand through significant product change. Ranbir Kapoor's continued presence across the Reno series' shift from zoom photography to AI features suggests sustained familiarity can help audiences follow a brand through a genuine technological pivot.
• Different tiers of a product portfolio can use different tiers of celebrity. Oppo's premium Reno line consistently used major, established stars, while its more affordable lines used younger or more specialised personalities, a distinction that let the company calibrate its celebrity spend to each segment's audience.
• Be precise about each celebrity's actual role. Oppo's own use of distinct titles, brand ambassador for Padukone, Brand Icon for Kapoor, Brand Friends for Kaif and Badshah, shows a company being deliberate about the specific position each celebrity occupies rather than treating every partnership identically.

What Oppo's Use of Deepika Padukone and Ranbir Kapoor Actually Shows

Oppo's Bollywood strategy worked, to the extent the available evidence allows that conclusion, not because Deepika Padukone and Ranbir Kapoor were simply famous, but because each was matched to a specific part of Oppo's product story at a specific moment. Padukone's association gave the F-series selfie push an immediate, visually literal demonstration of what the camera could do. Kapoor's much longer-running relationship with the Reno series gave that premium line a consistent face across a genuine shift from camera-zoom marketing to AI-driven marketing, something a single short campaign could never have accomplished on its own.

Taken together, the two partnerships point to a broader lesson about celebrity marketing in the smartphone category. A brand does not need one permanent face to build a recognisable identity. It needs, for each part of its portfolio, a celebrity whose public image genuinely overlaps with what that specific product is trying to say, and Oppo's parallel use of Padukone and Kapoor shows how two very different kinds of association, one concentrated and feature-specific, one sustained and portfolio-defining, can both serve the same underlying goal of making unfamiliar technology feel familiar to a mainstream Indian audience.