• The Wall Street Journal , Thursday, November 1, 2007 11:30 AM

A blend of drama and advertising called a "subopera" will help to introduce bottled Frappucchino drinks to the Chinese market. A venture between Starbucks and PepsiCo financed and helped to produce "A Sunny Day," which will play exclusively on thousands of flat screens on Shanghai's subway cars and station platforms.

The film features a girl who moves to the city to discover love, blogging and Starbucks. In some shots, the mermaid from the Starbucks logo gets as much face-time as the movie's big draw, Huang Xiao Ming, a pop star who is sometimes called China's Justin Timberlake. But "A Sunny Day" is no infomercial. Huang's character is a struggling musician who falls for big-hearted Sunny, who is trying to get over the death of a boyfriend.

Shanghai's 12-year-old underground has a network of 4,000 flat-screen monitors designed as an emergency broadcasting network. But mostly, the screens show information -- from train arrival times to short clips of soccer highlights, runway models and advertising.

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