Xiaomi seems kinda desperate for you to get excited about its big new phone

Xiaomi does a pretty good job at preventing leaks. Blurry backroom photos of phones will occasionally make the rounds online, but the company generally keeps a tight lid on its upcoming products.

Until now.

The Mi Max is set to be “unveiled” tomorrow, but images and videos of the device are all over the internet – and Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun has been one of the biggest leakers. Lei has been posting photos of the giant phone on his Weibo account since late April.

Over the past week, Xiaomi has released several teaser trailers for tomorrow’s launch event, which feature full views of the Mi Max. They also feature, um, ancient Chinese court intrigue, armor-clad warriors, and a romantic river cruise.

Without translating all of it, the video is a mother-and-son inspiration talk that quickly escalates into a rundown on the features of Xiaomi’s new phone. It’s followed by a clip of sweaty dudes who are told that it’s much cooler in the shade of a large-screened phone. The company also released two other videos, available here and here.

lol wut

This marks a new direction for Xiaomi’s attitude towards advertising and product releases. In the past, the company opted for Apple-like secrecy in the build-up to its product announcements. Now, it’s going for full disclosure bids at viral video fame, and it seems to have taken a fair bit of stylistic inspiration from 2014’s “Small Apple” music video.

Xiaomi also released some video trailers for its Mi 5 phone back in February, but they were lower-budget affairs and didn’t include a single glimpse of the actual device.

The shift towards openness with the Mi Max could just be a new philosophy towards advertising, but it’s hard to shake off a sense that these adverts are shouting PLEASE look at me! The company is no longer alone in cooking up fast, good looking phones in the US$300-400 range, so it needs to do something to stand out from the crowd. Large-screen phones from the likes of Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo are threatening to derail Xiaomi’s years of growth.

Xiaomi certainly isn’t the only company that’s trying to get attention – Huawei’s partnership with Leica on its two-camera’d smartphone comes to mind. But the defining feature of the Mi Max seems to be that its screen is big, and getting people frothing at the mouth in excitement over that is a toughie.

The videos have done alright online, but are hardly breaking any viral records. On Chinese video site Miaopai, one of the videos has around 47,000 views, while its blocked-in-China Youtube version has about 33,000. By comparison, a Mi 5 pre-release video that didn’t show the phone got close to 100,000 views on Youtube alone.

It’ll be interesting to see how Xiaomi navigates its way through a crowded marketplace. Mixing it up on the advert front seems to be one method, but there are other approaches it could take as well – for example, by changing its flash-sales model, which has become increasingly frustrating for some would-be users who struggle to buy the company’s latest devices.