Background

Selling warmth in the Nordics is not a product challenge. It is a cultural one. For consumers in Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Iceland, warmth is already part of everyday life—hygge, family, comfort, connection. For heating brands, temperature and efficiency are no longer enough. Midea had long built its winter platform around “Share the Warmth.” For its latest Nordic campaign, it asked a new question: how can warmth become something people experience, remember and share, rather than simply receive?

Idea

The answer was to turn an invisible product benefit into a playful family experience. The campaign created the Heatball—a visual manifestation of the warmth generated by Midea’s heating products. It can be held, passed between family members and used as the starting point for a magical game. The film “Heatball Fight” begins when a snowstorm cancels two children’s outdoor snowball fight. Their father discovers a glowing Heatball coming from the Midea heating system and turns the bad weather into a new indoor game. Soon the whole family joins in, collecting Heatballs from different Midea products around the home. As they move through the house, a plant becomes a tropical garden, an aquarium becomes an underwater world, Christmas lights become fireflies, and the sun escapes from a painting.

Execution

Created by F5 Shanghai, directed by Kevork Aslanyan, edited by Lyubo Kirov, with music by Simon Lundsgaard, sound design by John Green and color grading by Viktor Malygin, the film premiered at IFA Berlin 2026 as part of Midea’s global brand communication. Its storytelling draws on Nordic fairy tales, where the ordinary can suddenly become imaginative. But it avoids exaggerated fantasy. The family never reacts as if something impossible has happened; they simply keep playing. That balance—magical but grounded, imaginative but emotionally believable—gives the film its tone. “The challenge was creating something magical while keeping the family completely authentic,” says Adams Fan, Chief Creative Officer of F5 Shanghai. “The fantasy works because the emotions remain real, and the relationship between the family members is always at the center.”