F5 Shanghai has a unique proposition. “China’s most international local agency” is built for Chinese brands going global. For Midea air conditioning, for example, it has created a round-the-world collection of campaigns – Singing Window, a Broadway musical-style campaign in the US, another featuring Haaland that helped the PortaSplit product to sell out in Germany; Sad Mona Lisa, a humorous fictional prequel to the Mona Lisa in Italy and Spain (suggesting discomfort from a lack of air-con caused the intriguing smile); Iceland Hawaii, a tropical beach party set up in Iceland in mid-winter; and Love That Protects the brand’s antibacterial air-con, in which Midea’s polar bear mascot saved a child’s birthday party from disaster. In 2026, F5 also became an official Walmart advertising partner, Chinese brands access to US shoppers.

To enrich the local agency’s global perspective and understanding, F5 Shanghai has developed a partnership with Tim Delaney, founder of independent global agency, Leagas Delaney. Adams Fan, founder & chief creative officer, F5 Shanghai, took The Stable inside his agency, its work, and the Delaney partnership.

The Stable: How did your partnership with Tim Delaney come about, and how does it work?

Adams Fan: Tim and I have known each other for a decade. I joined Leagas Delaney in Shanghai in 2011, which gave me a close view of Tim’s standards – precision, simplicity and an unwillingness to accept work that is merely competent. When F5 began building a more international model, it was natural to reconnect. In 2021, we formalised a deeper collaboration between F5 and Leagas Delaney, focused on helping Chinese brands become genuinely global brands.

The relationship is deliberately lighter and more direct than a conventional agency network. F5 leads the client relationship, business diagnosis, strategy and creative development from Shanghai. Tim acts as a global creative consultant. He challenges the proposition, the writing, the brand codes and whether an idea can travel beyond China. We involve him selectively, where his perspective can materially raise the work.

That structure gives clients two things at once: F5’s proximity to Chinese businesses, consumers and decision-making speed, and Tim’s decades of experience building enduring international brands. It is not about importing a Western answer into China or exporting a Chinese execution unchanged. It is a working dialogue between contexts, designed to produce ideas that remain culturally precise, commercially useful and strong enough to compete anywhere.

The Stable: What sets F5 apart—and how does the agency work with AI and internationally?

Adams Fan: Chinese brands going global is F5’s sweet spot. What sets F5 apart is that we are probably China’s most international local agency. Around 80% of our Chinese staff have studied or worked overseas, mainly in the United States and Europe. That gives us a combination that is still unusual in the market – a genuinely local understanding of Chinese companies and consumers, together with direct experience of how brands, agencies and creative cultures operate internationally.

Most independent Chinese agencies concentrate on local communication for local brands. At the other end of the market, holding-company agencies have traditionally focused on helping international brands grow in China. F5 sits between those two models. We understand Chinese entrepreneurs, decision-making styles and market speed, but we also know how to translate a Chinese brand’s ambition for audiences outside China.

That position is becoming increasingly relevant because Chinese brands are now going global in a much more serious way. They are no longer looking only for export advertising. They need brand platforms, identities and creative ideas that can work across cultures while remaining true to where the company comes from. This is F5’s sweet spot.

Internationally, we do not try to maintain expensive offices everywhere. We build the right team around each assignment, combining our Shanghai leadership with strategists, creatives, directors, artists and production partners in the relevant markets. Collaborators such as Tim Delaney bring an additional global standard and challenge.

AI supports this model by making an internationally minded independent agency faster and more capable. We use it for research, visual exploration, prototyping, localisation and production experimentation. But AI is not a substitute for judgment. Its value is that it gives our people more ways to develop and test an idea before human taste, cultural understanding and craft determine the final work.

This is where our hybrid experience creates a practical competitive advantage.

The Stable: Show me how it works.

Adams Fan: The selection shows three dimensions of F5’s approach – turning scale into spectacle, using culture to explain technology, and transforming a functional brief into a brand-purpose platform.

1. The first is local, The Longest Queue, for China Mobile. The brief from China Mobile was functional – tell users they could claim free World Cup viewing rights with one tap in the app. The creative opportunity came from the company’s scale. We asked what would happen if more than one billion users had to collect that benefit offline. The answer was an impossible queue long enough to circle the Earth 12.5 times.

That thought turned a service message into entertainment. The line begins in a familiar city promotion, then stretches across China, the Great Wall and global landmarks before absorbing penguins, ants and astronauts. Finally, we return to a meeting room and reveal the obvious alternative: use the app.

AI mattered because the idea depended on making a visual universe believable. It let us escalate the joke beyond production limits while keeping the benefit clear. The technology was not the idea; it was the language that made it possible.

• Unmask the Deepfake, for Lenovo. Unmask the Deepfake began with a contradiction inside AI. The technology is useful and embedded in daily life, but the same capabilities can produce deepfake fraud that is difficult to recognise. For Lenovo, working with the National Anti-Fraud Center, we needed to make that risk understandable rather than deliver another warning.

The breakthrough was cultural. Sichuan face-changing opera creates an illusion: one identity disappears and another appears. Its resemblance to digital face-swapping formed a bridge between an ancient performance tradition and a contemporary threat. We collaborated with face-changing master Hu Yilin and a technical team to create a performance in which physical masks and AI-generated transformations became difficult to separate.

The experience demonstrated the danger before explaining it. Instead of asking audiences to memorise cybersecurity language, it made them feel how quickly trust can be manipulated. The message was direct: enjoy AI’s possibilities, but question the face presented as truth.

• Mozart 80, for Pfizer. Mozart 80 started as a Pfizer recruitment brief. Pfizer wanted to attract talent during the pandemic through a campus-recruitment film. Without media support, a standard television commercial would struggle to earn attention.

The strategic idea was that medicine does more than save a life; it preserves everything that person might still contribute. Mozart died at 35, so we asked what he could have composed at 40, 60 and 80 had science extended his life. AI learned from Mozart’s work and related music to generate three possible piano pieces, which musicians then developed into concert works.

The original execution was modest: an automated piano in a school auditorium. But the idea demanded ambition. It became a concert at the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra Concert Hall, performed by the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra with scientific imagery surrounding the music. A recruitment assignment became an expression of Pfizer’s purpose: protecting human possibility, not treating illness.

This year, Fan was one of the Asian industry legends in a round table discussion at Cannes Lions, How to Move at the Speed of Asia.

The Stable: What were the main take-outs from that discussion?

Adams Fan: “Moving at the speed of Asia” does not mean rushing every decision or asking people to work faster. The deeper advantage is connection. In markets such as China, platforms connect content, social interaction, search, shopping, payment, delivery and services inside integrated ecosystems. Commerce can begin while someone is watching, commenting, travelling or following a creator. Speed is designed into the system rather than imposed through longer hours.

The first Cannes takeaway is that brands and agencies can learn from this integration. Reducing the distance between inspiration, transaction and fulfilment creates faster feedback and allows teams to test, learn and adapt continuously. Agencies need decision-making structures that match that environment: fewer handovers, senior people closer to the work and prototypes that clients can react to, rather than long theoretical presentations.

The second takeaway is that speed must not erase identity. When a brand moves across Asian cultures, or from Asia into the world, it needs a clear, non-negotiable core but flexible local expression. Consistency should come from purpose and distinctive brand codes, not from repeating identical executions everywhere. Local teams need authority because cultural relevance cannot be approved entirely from headquarters.

The third takeaway concerns AI. It can accelerate research, prototyping, production and content variation, but acceleration without judgment produces efficient mediocrity. A brand still needs human taste, cultural understanding and a point of view. The question is not how much content AI can generate, but whether the work remains recognisable and meaningful.

Finally, we are moving from an economy of attention toward an economy of affection. Fast platforms capture attention instantly; lasting growth depends on connection, usefulness and emotional relevance. The practical model is integration plus distinction: connect data, commerce, creativity and delivery, while protecting the human idea that gives the brand value.

It creates speed without sacrificing enduring value.