Welcome to the 35th edition of my newsletter or as a bingo caller would say ‘jump-and-jive’. The phrase feels like an anachronism. It likely came from 1930s and 1940s African American culture. A portmanteau of ‘jump blues’ music and high-energy ‘jive’ dance style of the era. Jive was also used to describe related slang. All of which was popularised by the likes of Cab Calloway.
This month’s soundtrack is by Dimitri from Paris, recorded at Defected Records. It’s sublime.
While 35, is considered neutral in Chinese culture; there are aspects of it which bear thinking about. Depending how you read it, it can sound similar to ‘life without’ or ‘life not’. All of which seem appropriate when one thinks about the 35-Year-Old Crisis. Employers in China unofficially have 35 as a cut-off age for hiring.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Brands can’t wait for sovereign cloud but have to work with what they have.
The argument over UPF (ultra processed food) is a blunt instrument that ignores the benefits of functional foods, focusing on how things are made, rather than nutrition and what they do.
The need for determination, taste and deciding what matters is as important as AI in advertising planning
Havas research on desirable brands revolving around attraction, attachment and affinity.
Books that I have read
Murder on Mt Fuji by Shizuko Natsuki is the story of the Wada family. A multi-generation family tied to a pharmaceutical business. The family patriarch Yohei Wada is killed and the story unravels the mystery of who really killed him and why. The Japanese title of the book references a play by a 1930s detective story author. The mystery plays out as an Agatha Christie novel with Japanese characteristics.
Things I have been inspired by.
AI transformation progress
Stanford HAI have built an online dashboard to track AI-related transformation through economics. At the moment there is still little evidence for a rapid wave of automation in the macroeconomic data, but its definitely worthwhile keeping an eye on for evidence-based analysis as an antidote to hype and speculation.
Chart of the month.
Going back over the IPA’s research into influencer campaign effectiveness, this chart buried in the report caused me to pause. It implies that there isn’t an effective formula for repeatable influencer marketing success.
Reading around the chart further, the data is artificially skewed by the removal of campaign data for which no RoI was received at all. That would lower the curve further than it is already.
Things I have watched.
I have been enjoying season two of The Agency, Paramount’s adaption the French series The Bureau about modern-day spies and the dangers of emotional attachment. I can highly recommend both of them. The Agency has a really strong cast with Michael Fassbender playing the protagonist, with Jeffrey Wright and Richard Gere as supporting characters.
Seeing Richard Gere in the film reminded me to rewatch Red Corner which is a classic murder mystery from 1997, with the plot twist being that it occurs in the go-go era of an opening up China.
Bai Ling appears as his court-appointed lawyer. Parts of it reminded me of the late 1990s media gold rush into China by Rupert Murdoch looking to expand his then booming satellite TV business, but once the murder trial gets under way it stays into the land of fantasy with an American court room drama projected into a Chinese setting. Ling manages to turn out a great performance given the material that she was working with.
Useful tools.
I have been working on a number of qualitative interviews and found MumbleNote an invaluable part of the process. Its key benefit is not having bot join the calls that I have been doing. Instead it works of your Mac’s audio system.
The sales pitch.
I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.
With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors from narratives, creative platforms and new business pitches to sports partnerships.
My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.
The Strategic Toolkit:
Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Arm Holdings), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Personal Care, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.
Ok this is the end of this newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other, stay cool and enjoy the sun when you can.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.
I am not a football fan, but I recognise the power that the 2026 World Cup has to move hearts and minds. This year it’s being hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States. The 2026 World Cup fan experience is shrouded in uncertainty.
I found it interesting that both adidas with the launch of its match ball and Panini with the launch of its sticker book both marked the start of the countdown to the 2026 World Cup season.
Chinese countryside’s quieter strains – by Yuxuan JIA – Decades of son preference have left villages full of unmarried men, driving bride prices higher and sustaining a shadow market for “Vietnamese brides” that can slide into fraud, coercion, and trafficking. Young people, especially young women, are drifting away from rural patriarchy and the obligation-heavy world of kinship and “face”, while the influencer economy and short-video apps offer fantasies of easy money to teenagers with weak school prospects.
Why Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men | Washington Post – “I don’t want to be too disparaging about them because they’re our Christian brothers and sisters, but worshiping in a big former supermarket with dry ice machines and a pop band, it’s not really traditional Christianity,” Father Longenecker said. His new parishioners are attracted to “very traditional worship with lots of incense and altar boys and sacred music in the traditional style.”
More NatSec | Big Lychee, Various Sectors – From the government’s press release… Safeguarding national security is a continuous endeavour with no end point. At its core this sounds like the Stalin derived Maoist principle of struggle. National security ‘enemies’ like Jimmy Lai, Chow Hang-tung, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho serve the same purpose as George Orwell’s character Emmanuel Goldstein in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The ever-tightening system is allegedly concerned with leaderless lone wolves, small cells and external actors – but the reality is just control in Orwell’s novel.
Revising Hong Kong’s Past – Lingua Sinica – Among the changes noted was a complete erasure of references to the Tiananmen Massacre, which was recast as “political turmoil in the late spring and early summer of 1989.” Gone from the exhibit entirely, the Ming Pao reported, is a previous image that showed one million Hong Kongers taking to the streets in 1989 in support of the demonstrators in China.
I am skeptical about ‘gurus’. However, I found this Tony Robbins video good for getting out of a period of ‘stuckness’ in my thinking. Robbin’s ideas about priming, in particular they way he links physical activity to mental exercises works and has a good deal of neuroscience behind it.
Japan loses its thirst for vending machines | FT – Tens of thousands of vending machines are vanishing from Japan, as machines that once symbolised the nation’s love of innovation are shunned in a climate of rising inflation and deepening labour shortages.
The nation’s stock of 2.2mn drinks vending machines is down 23 per cent from its bubble-era peak in 1985, according to the Japan Vending System Manufacturers Association.
The faltering economics of running a national vending machine empire were exposed when DyDo, Japan’s third biggest operator, this month said it would scrap almost 7.5 per cent of its network of 270,000 units after posting its largest ever annual loss. – what surprised me was that the vending machines weren’t digitised.
Why do men love Stone Island | FT – “Football in the late 1980s and 1990s was a heavily policed environment under surveillance, where visibility carried risk,” says Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster. “On the terraces, clothing wasn’t decoration, it was risk management. Stone Island mattered because its garments were already structured around concealment, modulation and elective visibility. The detachable badge, reversible constructions, modular hoods and certain fabric treatments enabled wearers to calibrate how legible they were, depending on context. Football casuals were not simply performing taste; they were managing recognition.”
Apple rolls out UK age checks for iPhone users | FT – interesting move, I did notice that it assumed my account was adult due to the length it had been held. It reminded me of friends who registered email addresses, domain names and even social media handles for their newly born children – and did just enough to keep the accounts alive.
The 49MB Web Page | thatshubham – Beyond the sheer weight of the programmatic auction, the frequency of behavioral surveillance was surprising. There is user monitoring running in parallel with a relentless barrage of POST beacons firing to first-party tracking endpoints (a.et.nytimes.com/track). The background invisible pixel drops and redirects to doubleclick.net and casalemedia help stitch the user’s cross-site identity together across different ad networks.
When you open a website on your phone, it’s like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.
Ironically, this surveillance apparatus initializes alongside requests fetching purr.nytimes.com/tcf which I can only assume is Europe’s IAB transparency and consent framework. They named the consent framework endpoint purr. A cat purring while it rifles through your pockets.
So therein lies the paradox of modern news UX. The mandatory cookie banners you are forced to click are merely legal shields deployed to protect the publisher while they happily mine your data in the background
The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterised by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.
Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”.
A glimpse into cyber-security’s AI-driven future | The Economist – A few years ago a participant used the conference network to hack a water-treatment facility in America (Messrs Wyler and Stump are cagey about the details). Another hid behind the din of legitimate hacker traffic to attack government websites and payment systems. The noc team traced him, sent him a message reminding him that doing illegal things from Black Hat was still illegal, then watched him close his laptop and walk away. Hackers on the other side of the world try their luck too. When the registration server was switched on, attacks began at once, including traffic that appeared to originate in Romania….
Mr Stump says the noc has seen a pattern across multiple Black Hat conferences in which Taiwanese participants show up with hacked devices. “Most of [the traffic] goes back to China,” he says. ai-powered attacks by nation-states or cybercriminals are likely to intensify… The team thinks the ai race is only beginning. For Mr Wyler, the vulnerabilities discovered by Mythos, including some that have gone undetected for decades, are to be welcomed rather than feared. “We now know they’re there.”
All the same, cautions Mr Stump, the next two years will be turbulent, as more flaws will be uncovered; more breaches will occur as firms feed sensitive data into ai systems; and more insecure code will be written.
OpenAI acquires popular tech talk show for ‘low hundreds of millions’ | FT – ChatGPT-maker moves into broadcasting with deal for TBPN after it had pledged to abandon ‘side-quests’ – I think that this is trying to balance the narrative with Anthropic which is ripping ahead. In past decades you would have dumped a lot of money into a campaign run by a PR agency, but time moves on
New Internet of Things Plan Targets Global Infrastructure – Jamestown – A new action plan for the Internet of Things (IoT) increases the possibility that Chinese-built connected infrastructure in the United States could become a platform for data access, cyber pre-positioning, and attacks on U.S. cyber-physical systems in a prolonged crisis or confrontation. The plan, launched jointly by nine ministries, defines IoT as a total cyber-physical environment that links “people, machines, and things” across sensing, networks, platforms, applications, and security, and sets targets for 10 billion terminal connections, more than 50 standards, and deployment across production, consumption, and governance. The plan indicates Beijing is moving from connected devices to connected backbone systems. It reinforces the new Five-Year Plan, suggesting that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to supply not only endpoints like sensors, appliances, and vehicles but also the next generation of AI, computing, and space-ground communications infrastructure that will underpin them.
This inspiration post is a mix of things that caught my eye from Pilot Parker to HyperCard.
Pilot Parker
Pilot Parker is Malaysia Airlines mascot. I was familiar with him from the inflight duty-free catalogue. The inspiration for the film came from a moment shared by a young passenger who had flown with Malaysia Airlines. After her trip, she sent the airline a hand-drawn illustration of Pilot Parker along with a letter describing how the mascot brought her comfort during the journey. So the brand moved Pilot Parker from souvenir to fluent object.
Lemon – lime facetime call.
Apple had a week of things including more affordable devices (iPhone 17e and MacBook Neo) in a green-yellow colour. The company deleted all their TikTok account contents and then posted this video.
20-somethings in the ad industry lost their minds, feeling seen and considering it revolutionary that large brands have humour and can navigate culture. They then filled LinkedIn with insightful posts to let all the oldster millennials know.
Just leaving this one here, in case anyone notices. The lesson of the story is that everything old is new, especially the heuristic about being part of culture.
Retrospective on HyperCard
HyperCard was a powerful idea that didn’t have its time. I used it to run lab experiments during a brief time with Corning prior to my going to college. This video goes into real depth about what we missed.
Voice recognition is older than you think
I found this 1958 film of Victor Scheinman, at the time a high school student. He invented a solution that provided speech to text via a typewriter. It isn’t that far away from the speech recognition that I had on mobile phones from my Ericsson T39 through to my current iPhone.
In his adult life Scheinman worked with AI pioneer Marvin Minsky and worked in the field of robotics in academia and the private sector. Scheinman went on to work with General Motors and Yaskawa Electric Corporation. Right up to his death Scheinman was an associate professor who still consulted at Stanford University.
Scheinman’s high school experiment shows both how far we’ve come and yet how little we’ve progressed in comparison to the hype.
Think with Google & Sir Martin Sorrell
Think with Google interviewed Sir Martin Sorrell who was entertaining and consistent on themes he has been talking for the past few years. I found it interesting that he suspects marketing science is ‘over’. I don’t agree with him in this respect because software changes faster than wetware, but Sorrell instead has the CFO view within clients.
Yet the favourite campaigns that he worked on were his work at Saatchi & Saatchi before he built WPP.
Here’s the British Airways ‘Manhattan Landing‘ campaign from 1983 that Sir Martin named as the favourite campaign that he worked on.
Brand building for B2B PRs is a write up of an interview that I did with Miles Clayton of Agility PR. We talked about the importance of brand building, client challenges and techniques.
Participants:
Miles: Host (Agility PR)
Ged Carroll
Miles: I’d like to welcome Ged Carroll, a guru on brand building and advertising working with major tech and consumer brands. He offers insight into the world of proper advertising: campaigns we know and love, and, where the industry is leading today.
Welcome, Ged. Could you talk through what you’re doing at the moment and your current challenges?
Ged Carroll: Thank you, Miles. I am currently wrapping up an engagement with Google Cloud, working with their internal creative agency as a temporary vendor contractor.
My work focuses on brand building: out-of-home advertising, video advertising, and events. We look at how those creative experiences come to life through major trade shows and Google-hosted events. There is also sports sponsorship; for instance, the Formula E activation. Even though it’s a B2B brand, many tactics are exposed to a broader audience than just direct customers.
Miles: That’s fascinating. Regarding brand building, something many brands under-invest in, could you explain why it is important and how it differs from brand activation or performance marketing? I’d argue performance marketing is the obsession in B2B, but why should brand building weigh higher?
Ged Carroll: I’ll first address why brands focus on performance marketing, then explain brand building’s importance. Brands focus on performance marketing because they are measured on 90-day periods. They can simply say, “Here’s the money spent, here’s the result.” Measures include customer acquisition cost or engagement metrics along a marketing funnel. These seem like concrete measures.
Why do brand building? Smaller B2B brands often hesitate because of what Professor Byron Sharp calls “Double Jeopardy”: smaller brands have less market penetration and less loyal customers. Consequently, small enterprise software companies have a harder time moving the needle than larger ones. The bigger you are, the better you do; it has a flywheel effect.
What helps sell product is “mental availability.” If I think B2B PR, you want me to think “Miles.” For chocolate, you think Cadbury. For B2B software, most developers now think AWS. Fifteen years ago, that would have been Microsoft.
Miles: I sympathise. I’ve worked with brands famous in particular markets that struggled to break into adjacent markets because they hadn’t built the brand there.
Ged Carroll: That creates a ‘chicken-and-egg’ situation: do you invest, or, try a “cargo cult” approach replicating past success? Past success was likely a confluence of luck, timing, and good practice. Many overnight successes are decades in the making.
Huawei seemed to spring from nowhere but is four decades old. Breaking one customer, BT, made them famous. That fame cracked the market.
Miles: Brand building is critical. You mentioned that in a typical SaaS subscription business, you should invest about 70% in brand building?
Ged Carroll: Heuristically, for a subscription business, about 70% should go into brand building and 30% into brand activation.
Brand building includes PR. I ask: how can we make this idea work for earned media as well? Does the campaign scale to generate “talkability”? People discussing it at the water cooler, in trade magazines, or on social media? Paid media works harder if you have talkability around it.
Miles: Is that what is now called integrated campaigns?
Ged Carroll: Integrated campaigns have been around for over 30 years. People used to discuss “media neutral” strategies. The core idea is that your paid media works significantly harder if the campaign generates conversation.
Miles: That starts with great advertising principles. The book Look Out focuses on “right brain” thinking. Can we discuss the right versus left brain tussle in advertising and how to address it?
Ged Carroll: Marketing has changed, but our thinking is hardwired by evolution. Analytical procrastination creates cognitive load. If our ancestors sat thinking, “Do I want this or this?”, a predator would have eaten them before they decided.
Miles: By the time you selected the next iPhone, you’re dead.
Ged Carroll: Exactly. Logical “System 2” thinking is a difficult construct, yet B2B marketers often communicate rational benefits this way. However, we evolved instantaneous “System 1” thinking, which emotions tap into. If I feel something sharp, I instantly move. That is why we don’t remember a commute unless something significant happens.
Current advertising often treats us as rational decision-makers, but feelings have a longer-term impact. If I feel sharp stones, I build longer-term thinking to wear sandals next time. Traditionally, advertising tapped into this. Brands like Accenture or Google Cloud attach themselves to emotional events like sports, or consumer ads use storytelling to build memory structures and automatic association.
Miles: Absolutely.
Ged Carroll: Procurement processes try to force a rational view, but organisational load often short-circuits this. Do you care where you buy paper clips? No, you go to the fastest place. Brand building gets you onto that procurement shortlist. Furthermore, people aren’t in the mood to buy 95% of the time. Unless you build memory structures while they are inactive, you won’t be considered when they are in the market.
Miles: Smaller companies can’t afford TV or billboards. What do you advise? I offer thought leadership and education. Tech businesses often say, “You aren’t buying now, but do you want to learn about prompts?” Is that brand building?
Ged Carroll: It could be. But whose brand is it building? It might just build the LLM model’s brand. My mum asks me to “Ask Google” about crochet patterns. She blames the specific websites for bad patterns, not Google. She associates Google with getting what she wants.
With thought leadership, are you building the person’s personal brand, or the company brand?
Miles: That’s an interesting question. I often do personal brand building for the CEO or CTO to express the business vision. But below the C-suite, say a VP of Sales, is it their brand you’re building rather than the company’s? Especially given high turnover.
Ged Carroll: Exactly. Founder-managers are different; they stay longer. Professional CEOs shipped in by VCs might only stay a few years. B2B marketers face dilemmas, not just choices. It’s about making the best choice within those dilemmas.
Miles: There are parallels between advertising and B2B marketing, but also budget challenges. Media has changed; 15 years ago, clients bought display ads to build brand. Now, the digital tendency is toward content and performance marketing. Is business stuck in short-term goal-orientated thinking?
Ged Carroll: It’s not strictly a B2B or B2C problem. We measure what can be coded. Ad-tech stacks are based on interactivity, not marketing science. We assume if someone does X, Y will happen—the sales funnel concept. The sales funnel is an interesting mental model, but it comes from century-old door-to-door sales construct and assumes rational decision-making and perfect memory through the process.
Miles: You’re saying consistent brand building short-circuits the funnel, leading straight to the sale.
Ged Carroll: Yes. When you want a beer, you choose Heineken because it’s in your mind. The consideration process shrinks. Brand building gets you into that consideration process much faster. Regularity is vital to reach people the 95% of the time they aren’t ready to buy.
Miles:Look Out discusses the narrowing and fragmentation of attention. Are there ways through that?
Ged Carroll: We have more media opportunities now, but fragmentation occurs because we have smaller gaps of consumption time to fill—like checking a smartphone on the tube. Unless you have repetition within those small gaps, you won’t build memory structures. It’s hard to make a six-second spot emotional.
You need an integrated approach: emotion and storytelling in long-form content (like a documentary), supported by short content that directs people to it. In B2C, this is easier using brand cues: music, mascots, fonts, colors. Build those cues and stick with them. Marketers often get bored of a campaign and change it, but the audience hasn’t seen it enough. Stick with it.
Miles: Stick with it.
Ged Carroll: Many consumer adverts run for years. My dad’s favorite Twix advert is from 2022. Flash has used the same dog and music for five years. Great brand-building campaigns “burn in” rather than “burn out.” Performance marketing might focus on a new feature, but it relies on the brand association already built.
Miles: It’s been a fascinating discussion crossing advertising, brand building, and B2B marketing. My big takeaway is to encourage more right-brain thinking. Thank you for your time, Ged.
Ged Carroll: Thank you, Miles. I look forward to chatting again.
Chinese new year CNY 2026 also known as lunar new year, spring festival or Tết festival. 2026 marks the year of the fire horse. In the same way that the Super Bowl and Christmas are the stand out times of the year for advertising in the US and Europe, CNY 2026 will be the same for much of east Asia and Southeast Asia.
There has a large amount of tradition and rituals around celebrating the festival, which are rich seams of inspiration for strategists and marketing moments.
I featured an advert from Brunei for the first time.
As with previous years, Malaysia had a lot of campaigns running, many of which were partnerships with local musicians to collaborate on a seasonal song. One of the advantages of partnering with local musicians is their ability to cross post on their own channels broadening the videos reach.
In the Malaysian adverts that were storyteller driven, coping with aging relatives suffering with dementia came through as a common social theme.
Social video has been a great leveller. I have a featured a few videos from small businesses this year which were nicely executed despite operating with minimal budgets.
Coca-Cola in China was notable in that it showed strategic thinking closer to what we now see in the west with social-first ‘Instagrammable’ tactics.
Australia
Godiva
Anywhere up to 8 percent of Australia’s population have some connection to China, which explains why Godiva have done a Chinese new year themed range of chocolates.
Brunei
Flower Journal
Flower Journal is a florist shop based in Brunei, yet they have created a cinematic advert with great storytelling. The craft is arguably better than a number of the big brands featured this year. The work by local agency Cinekota really impressed me.
China
Adidas
Adidas made a film about a school football team and focuses on how the team is a ‘football family’. Reuniting with family is an important part of lunar new year. It’s also about looking forward to the future, hence the children’s wishes.
Apple
TBWA\ Media Arts, Shanghai teamed up with film director Bai Xue for Apple’s CNY 2026 advertisement. The film joins Apple’s series of ‘shot on an iPhone‘ mini movies.
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola China took a social and experiential approach focused around togetherness. A drone show in Chongqing paired with fireworks that are considered part of China’s intangible cultural heritage was supported by social video clips of a famous father and daughter.
All of this was to address young adults dual sense of togetherness during spring festival as mainland Chinese call CNY 2026. Being together with friends a la Friends and This Life, as well as more traditional family connections.
Valentino
Valentino put relatively subtle lunar new year symbols into a Chinese take on an American diner. The galloping horse zoetrope and red accents throughout the restaurant from neon signs to red floor tiles. As for the film itself, it’s basically a video lookbook.
Hong Kong
Hang Seng Bank
Hang Seng Bank ties into the the importance of welcoming good fortune into your life at Chinese New Year. Celebrities dress as the god of good fortune giving wishes for flourishing prosperity to different neighbourhoods across Hong Kong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqYWpeDrtZ8
Malaysia
AEON
Japanese supermarket chain AEON did a Malaysian market specific film featuring a mix of well known entertainers. The giddy up line telegraphing its horse related theme and the cultural impact of K-pop is evident in the whole video.
Affin Bank
Affin Bank is consistent in their lunar new year campaigns. Each year they tell of how a famous business customer battled adversity to succeed. This time it was Malaysian book retailer BookXcess.
Affinity
Affinity is a Malaysian estate agent. The video creative is a pretty run of the mill reenactment of Chinese new year with the horse head mask hinting at the CNY 2026 theme. The song itself is a bit an ear worm.
Air Selangor
Air Selangor hits you with a gut punch of an emotional Chinese New Year story that felt like it came straight of the Thai advertising agencies rather than Malaysia. (Thai agencies are famous for wringing you through an emotional shredder leaving you drained after an insurance ad).
Alpro
Malaysia’s largest prescription pharmacy chain put together a humorous new year film based around the mechanic of three wishes.
AmBank
The film melds together traditions around fabric sharing and lion dance to tell a Chinese new year story of a community coming together.
Astro
Astro is a Malaysian holding company that has a mix of linear TV, connected TV and radio assets. Think the reach of the BBC, but a private enterprise.
Bamboo Green Florist
Bamboo Green Florist is a single shop business based in Penang. For a small business their Chinese new year advert punches above its weight.
Coca-Cola
The first of two appearances in this list by Malaysian group 3P.
GVRide
GVRide is a Malaysian ride hailing app, they sponsored a new year song music video by Namewee alongside other brands.
IJM Land
IJM Land is a Malaysian property developer (part of a larger conglomerate). They position themselves as “one of Malaysia’s property development”. The film sits at the tension between the love of heritage, accumulating wealth and the non-monetary aspects of CNY 2026 – coming together, family, building memories and legacy.
JinYeYe
JinYeYe sell seasonal hampers, so lunar new year is their peak sales time. Their advert is targeted at the global Chinese diaspora and they partnered with Tourism Malaysia alongside local musicians. A bee is considered to a symbol of blessings and represents sweetness, hope and companionship.
https://youtu.be/0YvLVF4TJAE?si=sn4nMWPwykr7WzjM
Lee Kum Kee
Hong Kong’s Lee Kum Lee were the inventors of oyster sauce and have a place in every Asian kitchen cupboard. But their advert is weak sauce (pun intended) that could have been knocked out on PowerPoint.
Listerine
Listerine just straight up sponsored the video of Malaysian producers 1119 for this new year themed music video.
Loong Kee
Loong Kee is a Malaysian food company who makes everything from processed meats to baked goods. This is at least the third year that they have partnered with local musicians who are internet-famous to collaborate on a new year themed song.
Lotus
Lotus supermarket was formerly part of Tesco’s international footprint before the UK brand divested itself of its international stores to Thai conglomerate Charoen Pokphand (CP) Group. This advert taps into family friction and a couple of nice wushu cinema referencing touches. It reminded me a lot of SingTel’s films from previous years.
It handles the diversity of Malaysia well, without the awkward approach that Malaysian Airlines went for.
Malaysian Airlines
Malaysian Airlines focuses on Malaysians coming home. Given that the airline is a government company. While ethically Chinese, and speaking Chinese at home – the woman is a devote muslim.
In reality that’s about 1-2% of the ethnic Chinese population – for ethno-political, social and cultural reasons that I don’t want to get into on this post. The video is as much about a government approved theme as it is about the airline.
Marrybrown
Marrybrown is a Malaysian quick service restaurant. It is really nice how the story moves through time with relatively small but important cues on screen.
Maxis
Malaysian broadband provider took an unusual angle bringing together two erstwhile business rivals in a spirit of shared community.
McDonalds Malaysia
Great storytelling but with a serious topic as middle-aged siblings deal with an aging parent with signs of dementia.
Nescafé Gold
Instant coffee brand Nescafé Gold goes down the sponsored music video route. But with a few noticeable differences:
Better product placement that articulates the customer moment.
A more diverse cast than most of the other adverts.
The video title Gongxi Kemeriahan – is a mix of mandarin and malay – gongxi meaning best wishes or congratulations and kemeriahan means excitement.
All of which are likely to because of Nestlé being a western multinational and the marketers are looking to target all Malaysians rather than just ethnic Chinese.
PMG Healthcare
PMG Healthcare is a regional provider of pharmacies, medical and dental clinics to private health insurance customers.
Mr Potato
Mr Potato is a local potato chip brand in Malaysia. Their CNY 2026 advert is a spoof of the Jackie Chan kung fu film Drunken Master.
Public Bank
Public Bank is a Malaysian headquartered bank. This year they have done an AR-based activation. Each Chinese new year you can go into your bank and get a pack of red envelopes and crisp new bills to give out to family, friends and junior colleagues. So this execution makes sense.
RHB
Malaysian bank RHB continued its theme of inspiring stories told in previous Chinese New Year campaigns through to its CNY 2026 campaign. This year tells the story of Komuniti Tukang Jahit, a small tailors shop that empowers women through sewing skills and fair income opportunities.
Setia
Malaysian house builder Setia takes a lighter comedic approach telling the story of a family’s new year celebration through the eyes of its youngest member. Its lightness of tone is in contrast to other adverts this year which are more of an emotional rollercoaster.
Shopee
Singaporean e-commerce platform Shopee partnered with local act 3P to a Chinese New Year song for its Malaysian ad campaign. Thoughout Asia lunar new year songs and playlists are all over TV, films, Spotify and YouTube playlists. This leans right into that trend.
SPD Racing
SPD Racing is a small workshop that service motorcycles and sell after market parts. This short video is really nicely executed, replacing parts on the motorcycle with red fittings in the same way that people would wear new red outfits on Chinese new year for good luck.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1x7RpOLHcTA
Tenaga
Tenaga is a Malaysian electrical utility. There is a nice bit of storytelling about a lion dance troupe. This could be rerun in future years given its lack of specificity to CNY 2026.
U Mobile
U Mobile is a Malaysian wireless operator. Their advert focuses on on the travel use case over lunar new year as more people travel rather than staying at home.
UCSI University
USCI is part of Malaysia’s private education system that sprang out of the positive discrimination of successive Malaysian governments towards Malays in comparison to Chinese and South Asian Malaysians. This was enshrined in article 153 of the Malaysian constitution, New Economic Policy, National Development Policy, National Vision Policy and the concept of Ketuanan Melayu which continues to be a pillar of government decision-making.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILuFokNxHck
In common with several other films here this year it focuses on the treasure of memories built over the festival and also has a dementia plot line.
Vida C
Vida C is kind of like an energy drink, in a number of Asian countries high vitamin C content is used in the same way that taurine and caffeine are in western energy drinks. They did a relatively subtle product placement in this comedic music video. It’s much less PC than western multinationals would allow.
Watsons
Watson’s is the Boots of Asia. Like previous years it tells a story of family coming together with the joy and chaos that usually ensues. It features Maria Cordero – a Macau born entertainer, radio and TV personality with a famous cooking show based in Hong Kong – but known throughout the region.
Singapore
Carlsberg
Carlsberg launched a pan-Asian campaign with a mix of horse themed packaging design and having it promoted by SKAI ISYOURGOD – a popular Malaysian rapper with appeal across Asia.
FairPrice
Singapore supermarket chain FairPrice focused on the small family moments of the new year celebrations and their ability to build lasting memories. The advert was created by TBWA\ Singapore.
Grab
At first I thought that this ad was aimed at the Malaysian market, but I think it’s aimed at both Singapore and Malaysia. It would work in either, even though some of the brands are Malaysia only like JayaGrocer. It’s unusual because of the amount of brand collabs in it, count them:
Vinda tissues
7Up
GXBank
Jasmine SunWhite Rice
JayaGrocer
Kyochon Chicken
Oriental Kopi
Subway
Secondly, there was the filming of an ad within the ad concept that Orson Welles would have enjoyed.
LVMH
LVMH’s drinks portfolio has been suffering from declining sales. Family get togethers are an ideal consumption moment, so it makes sense that Hennessy leant in with special packaging and a Singapore family reunion ‘kit’.
SIMBA
Australian owned mobile network SIMBA did a very simple sales promotion which is very much in keeping with its value proposition , but the horses are nicely done.
Singapore government
A comedic short film with relatively light social engineering aiming at harmonious relationships and community during CNY 2026. The family were framed as being salt-of-the-earth Singaporean Chinese living in old HDB flat. The universal food photography was very on point.
Taiwan
Coca-Cola
Coke did a really simple sales promotion with a giveaway competition attached to each purchase.
United States
Panda Express
Panda Express is an American fast food chain that specialises in American Chinese food. It kind of sits outside usual lunar new year traditions becoming a Roald Dahl style fantasy.
Vietnam
Coca-Cola
Really simple creative by Coca-Cola. They missed a trick by not creating something as iconic as the US Coca-Cola truck adverts. Instead they phoned in the creative with this spot.
Ensure Gold
Abbott Health’s Ensure Gold is a Complan-type drink designed to fortify health and restore strength. The film uses family union traditions to focus on the past, recover during the Tết festival and look to the future with a shared sense of resilience. The theme is even reflected when the family does traditional ancestor worship and we hear the wishes of their departed family.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdSib8exz6I
Home Credit
Home Credit are an online financial services company. They provide credit cards, vehicle loans, pre-payment accounts and instalment payments for consumer products. The advert focuses on everyday people and how they prepare for Tết, including decorating the home, getting new clothes and a new karaoke machine for the family gathering.
Mirinda
Mirinda is a Vietnamese soft drinks brand similar to Tango. Their adverts were noticeable for their shortness. They were running 3 five-second spots and two 15-second spots. No real story, but there is energy, brand colours feature heavily and it gives off a joyous vibe.
MyKingdom
MyKingdom is a Vietnamese toy retailer similar to Toys R Us. Their mobile first content focuses on the challenges of parents looking to buy toys that will last longer than the spring festival.
Sunhouse is a home electronics brand. Everything from kitchen appliances to to cookware.
In the advert, they focus on starting the new year healthy, there is a belief in starting the new year as you would like it to go on.
Viettel
Wireless carrier Viettel subverts the idea of a family reunion storyline during Tết. Instead when the family can’t come home, an uncle visits his family members around the country.
As I find more CNY 2026 campaigns I will add them here.
