The reason why BQ mobiles continue to appear in Netflix and HBO series even two years after their commercial death

It is possible that you, astute reader with a technological eye, have warned watching a Spanish series that BQ mobile phones appear frequently. Perhaps more often than expected. And definitely, with surprising frequency in series released two years after the company was sold to the Vietnamese Vingroup and the latter liquidated its trademark. BQ is history … except in Spanish fiction.

One of the last series to show a phone of this brand was’30 coins‘(HBO Max), although it was recorded during 2019, with BQ already off the map. Other series that have also shown models from the old Las Rozas manufacturer on the screen were ‘The Money Heist‘(Netflix), or more recently,’Missing‘(Prime Video),’Midas favorites‘ (Netflix) o ‘The mess you leave‘ (Netflix). It’s not by chance.

Relations with production companies and telephones without a return ticket

The history of BQ mobiles having a presence in Spanish series began in 2014, after the launch of the Aquaris E line. “We work a lot in contact with production companies”, tells us a former employee of the company who asks to remain anonymous. “It was always a collaboration with no money involved. We had a close relationship with some of the biggest and we were getting series proposals.” The production companies got mobiles to use on the screen, and BQ got some publicity, all without any financial transaction involved.

Another former employee contacted independently corroborates this version and the origin of this relationship with production companies. “There was a group of people with a lot of talent and a lot of desire who were in charge of raising the BQ brand from scratch, practically. BQ was a rebrand of Chinese mobile phones that it sold at Fnac without its own brand, and outside of Fnac with its own brand but which were not yet something very remarkable. And without many resources, it was necessary to start making the perception change. They achieved it by putting in many hours and kicking events, making contacts … And from there they managed to talk with producers and cultivate the relationship with them without the need to spend money on marketing campaigns beyond the famous ad of the ‘fuckin’ spaniards‘“.

Something that the former employee points out as a factor that several production companies liked a lot to use their mobile phones on the screen was that their terminals either did not have their logo silk-screened on the front, unlike the vast majority of their competition, or they did, but very discreetEven more so in the case of the five-point logo without any letter introduced in 2015.

In the assignments of terminals to production companies, electronics brands usually include clauses that limit the actions that can be carried out with the phone being displayed on the screen to avoid, for example, scenes that may associate the brand with negative values. This is not the case with BQ, something that the former employee believes was also decisive for the good relationship between BQ and production companies to be maintained over time. “No crazy clauses about what can be done with them or if at the end there is a character who carries another brand because they have paid for it. We even gave covers.”

The reason why BQ phones continue to appear today in several recently released series is that they did not ask for the phone numbers backSo they were left in a closet waiting to be needed again in a later series.

Even after the sale to Vingroup, which led to the early abandonment of BQ-branded phone launches to make way for Vsmart-branded ones in early 2019, some production companies continued to contact the company to continue the same dynamic. The result of this is, for example, the Vsmart mobile with the visible logo that Luis Tosar exhibited in the series ‘The Midas favorites’.

So We can expect that we will continue to see new series in the coming months, even years, and BQ or Vsmart phones will continue to appear. in them. A casual way of paying homage to the brand that for years came to put much bigger manufacturers in trouble with its good sales figures in Spain, despite its bitter end.