Sawadee krub – this category features any blog posts that relate to the country of Thailand, the Thai people, the Thai culture or language.
After the second world war, the country was best known for the quality of its rice and its silk. It played a major role during the cold war and is now the second largest economy in southeast Asia.
Thailand’s tourism industry started when the country was an R&R (rest and recreation) destination for soldiers during the Vietnam conflict. A decline in crop prices from 1982 – 1986 drove a migration of rural workers to the city. This provided a ready workforce for both tourism and manufacturing.
Thailand has become a hub for Japanese manufacturing companies. The Toyota Hilux pick up is made there. As are electronic components and consumer electronics.
There are pharmaceuticals manufacturing plants in the country. It also has a building products sector to support the large amount of property development in the country supporting economic development and rural to urban migration. Thailand has a financial sector that belies its developing world status.
All of this has meant that Thailand has developed a uniquely creative advertising industry to support these businesses.
It is likely the post will also in other categories too for example an advert developed for Thailand may appear in marketing and Thailand categories. If there is Thai subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.
I am fortunate to be an awards juror for the second time. This is for the Adforum PHNX advertising awards which attracts entries from around the world.
As part of the process I responded to some interview questions. I hope that my old gaffer Tony Gresty appreciated my quoting of him decades later and was surprised that there wasn’t pushback about my assertion of a ‘post-social’ marketing era.
What motivates you to be part of the PHNX Jury, and what do you hope to bring to the judging process?
Before I worked in advertising, I served an apprenticeship in plant process engineering. My old gaffer who was responsible for me had a few sayings. One of which was practice sharpens skill. By being a judge, I hope that I am helping people within the industry around the world to sharpen their skill. Seeing great challenging work and asking myself how it fits the customer and client needs in turn, helps further sharpen my skill as a strategist. TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) altruist generosity?
PHNX has always been about celebrating creativity in all its forms. What new perspectives or disciplines do you think deserve more recognition in award shows today?
Strategy has the Effies, BUT its focus is larger than creativity with a major focus on efficiency and effectiveness rather the creative process. Strategy always provides the ‘assist’ with single-minded insight and creative JOTBD (job to be done), but is never the ‘goal scorer’ to use an American sports stats metaphor. I think that creativity is not only about the creative, but also the context where the creative is placed – which brings in the disciplines of project management’s orchestration, production’s craft and media planning. I think this is going to become far more important as we go towards a post-social era.
Which countries or regions do you think are leading the creative field right now? And which emerging markets should we look out for?
A really interesting question. Leading is probably the wrong phrase to use, but there are markets that are under-estimated. Thailand and the Philippines have well-deserved reputations for emotional storytelling. Year-after-year when I look at lunar new year adverts Malaysia hits well above its weight given the size of the market.
Japan has been consistently delighting advertising folk for the past five decades.
Probably a better question to ask me after I have been through this year’s award entries.
What trends or cultural shifts do you think will define the most impactful creative work this year?
With everything that’s going on, I think we’ll need more humour. Trends within the advertising industry are also leaning towards a better mix of formats. As an industry we over-index on social vs. attention, efficiency and effectiveness for large brands. So we’ve seen a renaissance in OOH amongst other formats.
There is also a return to basics: creative consistency, fluent objects, the power of storytelling and humour. Finally consumers are more interested in consuming more longer form audio and video content, so what a creative execution might look like I hope is very different.
If you could give one piece of advice to agencies and creatives submitting their work, what would it be?
Be single-minded in terms of category consideration. My biggest criticism of last year’s PHNX award entries was not about the quality of the work per se. Many of the entries had a given creative was put in for consideration for the wrong category. And it was the same entries doing it over-and-over again. If it isn’t relevant it’s just going to get ignored or get under the skin of the judges. In the same way that a poorly-placed ad that is slapped all over the place without consideration would have a similar effect in the real world.
Rant over: I wish everyone the best of luck, finally don’t be disheartened. All of the work was of a high standard, choosing winners is hard.
Which creative minds are inspiring you the most right now?
In the widest creative sense I am working my way through veteran Hong Kong film director Johnnie To‘s back catalogue; some of his works like Breaking News feel like exceptionally contemporary given our media environment. A couple of creatives using AI in a really smart way are Omar Karim aka @arthur_chance on instagram and the Dor Brothers. Agency work-wise VCCP’s immersive installation for Transport for London and a small Malaysian shop called Days Studios (whose bread-and-butter work is usually weddings!), yet, did a fantastic job producing a Chinese New Year ad for a cosmetic treatment clinic Aglow Studio – not what you’d call a big client yet it felt like a bigger production than many large brands. Go Google the ad ‘hiss of prosperity’ and watch it on YouTube.
Welcome to my January 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 18th issue. As a child 18 represented experiences denied. 18 and R18 in the UK and Ireland is broadly equivalent to Hong Kong’s ‘category III’ or the US R and NC-17 ratings. This was prior to the Marvel universe infantilising adult cinema.
18 is considered lucky in both Chinese culture and numerology. Talking of lucky, January 29th sees the lunar new year, which will be the year of the snake. According to Chinese horoscope, so 2025 should be a good year for my Chinese horoscope sign in terms of professional and financial areas. Here’s hoping.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
Japan Re-Emerges + more things – if nothing else visit this post for Ulrike Schaede’s talk on Japan’s reinvention over the past four decades.
Foreign workers + more stuff – a mix of stuff from around the web including a documentary on how Filipino, Indonesian and Burmese domestic workers in Singapore have banded together to found a mutual support community around a shared love of roller-skating.
CNY 2025 – a round-up of ads and observations in the run up to the year of the snake. I haven’t written this as an article on LinkedIn this year, as LinkedIn’s video embed function no longer seems to work properly in articles.
Books that I have read.
I managed to finish The Peacock and the Sparrow – IS Berry drew on real-world events such as the Arab Spring political movements and the Fat Leonard scandal to provide a story that moves between Bahrain to Cambodia and back. There was also a universality to the book, for instance it captured that worst excesses of the expat experience that resonated with my own experience and was something I sought to studiously avoid when living in Hong Kong. I was surprised that the book implies that the post-petroleum phase of Bahrain’s development, seemed to happen so abruptly. This was at odds with the gradual decline in petroleum production that we’ve seen in North Sea oil production and mid-west oil fields prior to fracking. Bahrain is a former petro-state that has now pivoted to Gulf area tourism and related services industries.
Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway. I am skeptical of works that look to fill in the universe created by a deceased writer. Christopher Tolkien’s efforts were as much an academic study of JRR Tolkien’s archive curated for the completist reader. Ian Fleming’s James Bond franchise was overrated when he was still alive. It didn’t merit the ten authors that have worked on expanding the book canon to date. John Gardner’s own enjoyable character Boysie Oaks, (similar to Len Deighton’s protagonist in The IPCRESS File) was overshadowed by Gardner’s stint writing Bond books. Nick Harkaway’s book pleasantly surprised me. Harkaway’s real name is Nicholas Cornwell and he was the son of David Cornwell aka John Le Carré. He literally and figuratively grew up as his father wrote the great George Smiley trilogy (Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People) and the BBC adaptations. Karla’s Choice feels and reads ‘right’ and slots neatly into the Le Carré lore. I can highly recommend it as a read. Despite it being a period piece, Russia’s resurgence gives it a strong sense of zeitgeist.
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris. Harris’ book is curate’s egg. On one hand it’s is a politically left polemic by the author on how the world is based on slavery, genocide and other forms of exploitation – which manifested in the authors trauma of a privileged upbringing in Palo Alto. Amongst all this Harris manages to write a Bay Area history that surfaced nuggets that I didnt know from the range of previous books on the area that I had read. Included in them is quotes from Silicon Valley pioneer Wilf Corrigan on offshoring chip manufacturing and packaging. It’s an oddity. If you like left leaning political theory, or a history of technology buff who is prepared to wade through the editorialising it might be worth your while.
Things I have been inspired by.
The Sun Also Rises, But Not on Magazines
There are times when you reach a personal tipping point in your view on something. It can feel shocking, nauseous in a visceral way. I have only been there a few times.
With the dot com boom it was talking with financier at an incubator fund sometime in April 2000. Pegasus Research’s iconic quantitative research on ‘burn rates’ had been published a month earlier and had started to become more known if one read around enough. So I asked him how they thought that they would be making money and his response was:
Ged, I am really surprised that you asked me that. Don’t you realise, we’re trying to move at ‘internet’ time. We’ll think about monetising it later on.
With some notable exceptions like Monocle magazine, print media has been struggling.
Over the Christmas period I was reading the January / February 2025 edition of Wired magazine (published by Condé Nast). Right from unwrapping the magazine from its postage packaging something felt wrong. The magazine felt light; very light. Thankfully the print stock and graphic design was up to its usual standards. So I did a quick page count and noted the number of advertisements in the magazine.
88 pages
5 adverts from paying advertisers
3 adverts from Condé Nast
1 advert for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). The advertising space might have been donated by Condé Nast
I was alarmed at the decline. Seeing declining magazine media spend on slide ware is different to feeling it happen on a publication that you loyally subscribe to. Thankfully my other usual print magazines Monocle and Japanese style magazine HailMary don’t seem to have had a similar exodus of advertisers yet. But it put me on alert about the precarious health of magazine print adverts as a medium. Creative magazine print done right can provide experiences that TikTok can’t.
Think about the size of visual real estate
The tactile experience of the page which helps with memory formation
Being able to smell a product fragrance on the page
Sampling opportunities
The ambient reach of re-reading or being left in a shared environment
For the right brands it offers targeted upper funnel experiences that can then be reinforced digitally.
Which brought me to Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises as I groped around in my head trying to find the words to explain what was happening to magazines as a advertising medium:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
The value chains driving the creator economy.
I spent some time during Christmas reading Influencer marketing unlocked: Understanding the value chains the paper was written by 15 academics following the 12th Triennial Invitational Choice Symposium held at INSEAD’s Fontainebleau site. Having worked on influencer campaigns on and off for the past two decades I was curious to see what progress had been made in the thinking underpinning influencer marketing.
Measuring ROI is still complex, as are the challenges that influencers face balancing ‘editorial’ integrity with promotional content.
Brands continue to struggle with measuring ROI beyond short term metrics and puts a focus on engagement. Metrics on long term impact (if any), sales and profitability are insufficient. The authors recognised that there were gaps in proving causation between engagement and sales or long term brand equity.
There is still work to be done understanding the marketing impact of influencer marketing on both influencer and brands including:
Customer acquisition, retention and lifetime value
How can authenticity be maintained in paid promotions
There is still the tension between brands need to qcquire and develop customers vs. influencers own need to cultivate ‘follower equity’. Influencers also depend on their relationship with the platforms they exist on, which can snuff them out if they no longer fit the ad revenue created vs. the revenue the influencer gets through promotions. Platforms boost influencers until a certain point and then limit their reach to maintain control.
China’s ‘closed loop’ ecosystem was considered to be more effective. This is platforms such as Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese market twin) and Pinduoduo aka ‘together, more savings’ seem to do better due to tight integration between content and commerce. Then there is the live-streaming business which is basically QVC on social media. TikTok and Instagram Commerce are still playing catch-up. Chinese influencers are thought to have a lifecycle of up to five years, which is why MCNs use an ‘idol’ development model.
Creative consistency
Creative consistency was one of 2024’s marketing efficiency tenets thanks to research conducted by System1. System1 studied how consistency affects creative quality, stronger brands and greater profits.
When comparing the most to the least consistent brands, analysis found that a higher proportion of consistent brands reported larger sales value gain, market share gain and profit gain.
Chart of the month: decline in digital health investment
The FT published an article just prior to JP Morgan’s annual Healthcare conference. The article put some sober perspective on the current state of investment in digital health innovation.
Things I have watched.
E.T. – The Extra Terrestrial – I hadn’t seen ET since I watched it as a child in the cinema. Watching it again as an adult was like watching a different film. From the atmospheric introduction prior to the stars cape onwards, it felt emotionally heightened, with more of a direct line back to Spielberg’s earlier Close Encounters of The Third Kind in terms of look-and-feel. There were references that I didn’t get at the time (for instance takeaway pizza and Reese’s Pieces weren’t really a thing in the UK). I got to appreciate Spielberg’s use of distraction, light and colour grading as an adjunct to storytelling. Finally, the shameless product placement surprised me. 1980s America was a very consumerist society with ultra-processed food that would cause convulsions in The Guardian newsroom – but the product placement was far less subtle than modern Korean dramas. I could see why Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces got an apparent sales uplift from the film.
Bangkok Dangerous – A Thai take on Hong Kong’s ‘heroic bloodshed’ genre emblematic of John Woo films. The directors Danny and Oxide Pang are better known for horror film The Eye. Bangkok Dangerous feels more alive than its Hong Kong peers thanks to Danny Pangs editing and Oxide Pang’s over-saturated colour grading. The brothers careful use of cinematography, inventive storytelling and sparse dialogue make this debut film film feel so polished. Finally, the brothers manage to make city the star, in a similar way to Wong Ka-wai’s films in Hong Kong.
Persepolis – A film adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel published in two volumes Persepolis and Persepolis 2. Persepolis tells the story of Marjane’s life from childhood in Paris and pre-revolutionary Iran, how she experienced the revolution. She was sent away by her upper middle class family to Vienna for secondary school. Afterwards she went to university in Iran, was treated for depression and attempted suicide. The story ends as it began with Marjane returning to Paris. The film is true to the graphic novel in terms of style – think a modern-day Tin Tin. Like the book, the story is an emotional rollercoaster ride. It’s subject matter feels equally relevant now, as is did when Satrapi originally wrote her story.
Useful tools.
Advertising awards list
Probably not that useful for me at the moment, but The Thought Partnership have put together a list of awards listed by entry deadline covering the whole of 2025, which should be handy for advertising, marketing and public relations agency marketers.
Adobe Acrobat Pro alternative
Adobe Acrobat Pro is a useful piece of software, but it’s not worth almost £20 / month. PDF Reader Pro gives you a lifetime licence for the same functions for a one off payment of $25.
Long term tracking
Use Apple AirTags but have battery charge anxiety because you forget when you put the battery in? I know I did for the one in my travelling IT kit bag. And I found a solution. Elevaton Lab’s TimeCapsule 10-year battery case. its a two-piece black plastic slap held together by screws. Inside a couple of Duracell AA batteries will give a decade of operation for your AirTag. Sparingly use a little bit of gasket maker on the two halves seams and LocTite Threadlocker on the screws gives you a nigh indestructible tracking module.
The sales pitch.
I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my January 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into the year, and for those of you celebrating the lunar new year on January 29th 恭喜發財 (Gong Kei Faat Choy).
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.
Get in touch if there is anything that you’d like to recommend for the newsletter.
CNY 2025 or Chinese new year 2025 is shorthand often used as a hashtag on social media to circulate songs, sales promotions and advertisements from across China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. I started off this post into gathering some of the best examples of CNY 2025 advertising just after Christmas and there was a poor range of adverts just a month out from CNY 2025. Imagine if there were no Christmas adverts appearing by the third week in November?
Small businesses like the Davely Bakery Café in Malaysia had started promoting organic social content on their Facebook page by November 19. (In markets such as the Philippines, Hong Kong and Malaysia, Facebook is still big business.)
But where were the large company promotions this close to the festival? Brand campaigns only really started to appear from the second week in January onwards.
CNY 2025 themes that I took away from researching this post:
Increased emphasis on demand generation and sales promotions.
Less big brands advertising than previous years.
Campaigns were run over a shorter period. Roughly half the six weeks I would have expected for successful brand building campaigns.
Less of a focus on storytelling and deep emotional cues than previous years.
Lower production values as a whole than previous years.
A move towards bus wraps in Singapore for CNY 2025 campaigns. These were replicated in ‘bus simulator’ games popular amongst transport fans in Hong Kong and Singapore. This replication was less about a ‘brand gaming strategy’ and more about fan curated bus skins for absolute fidelity to their favourite bus routes.
Less emphasis on creative consistency than in previous years.
Shorter ads, each with a lot of 15-second edits.
Increased use of humour.
Increased use of songs, presumably to gain earned and shared media support – very hard to do successfully as a strategy when there are so many songs to choose from.
Lazy use of celebrities – I hadn’t see this in previous years doing this.
As a marketer, I saw things in CNY 2025 that I thought was good and things that I worried about in these changes between CNY 2025 and previous years:
Smarter memory structure building: fluent objects such as Kevin the First Pride nugget, the use of jingles and ear worm songs, the use of humour
Red flags for brand mental availablility: a lack of creative consistency, shorter ads and lazy use of celebrities. Shorter ads can, if done right be used to build brand, BUT, there are a number of factors to consider when doing it successfully. These include variety of formats, reach / marketing penetration, repetition, single-minded creative execution and the thumb-stopping factor.
Reading the ‘tea leaves’ I suspect that marketing budgets have been cut, and brands might not be expecting as much of an uplift this year as China’s poor economic performance affects its neighbours.
China
Apple
Apple continued its shot on an iPhone series. The Chinese New Year film is run in lots of markets but primarily made for China. I am surprised that this got past the censors. Time travel is usually a a no-no. It also reminds China’s currency economically challenged consumers of the 1990s go-go years of year-on-year double digit growth. The core aspect of the creative is the direct questions that younger family members receive.
CNY 2025 is the first time that Apple didn’t have a Chinese film maker shot its film. Finally, Apple’s film comes in at a whooping 11 minutes 59 seconds although a good minutes is the credits.
Bottega Veneta
Bottega Veneta’s Chinese New Year film is all about vibes. There were some interesting styling choices in the film. The older guy with the women’s hand bag. That most of it seemed to be around older alleyways that have been refurbished. The lady in the 1980s era Jaguar. Pre-1997, a number of more anglophile Hong Kong businessmen used to get driven around in Jaguar and Daimler cars with a large V12 engine – that spoke to old money in this film.
I was stuck by the lack of explicit references to new year, which you can also see in the Miu Miu film – what there is are more subtle cues.
All of which is a world away from many luxury brands slapping a snake on everything this year.
Gucci
Gucci taps into the traditional multi-generational party and memories of ‘snake’ new years of the past. It’s probably the strongest bit of storytelling and the most cinematic of all the films that I have looked at this year.
Miu Miu
Prada sub-brand Miu Miu is one of the few stand out brands in a tough 2024 for the luxury sector. This Chinese New Year film is playful, borrowing from Asian mid-century set design and 1990s era Chinese electronica to tell a small story.
Hong Kong
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola has a dominant position in the soft drinks market thanks to its dominance in distribution. The only places I could buy Pepsi was in my local Pizza Hut when I lived there. This year they focused on out of home posters to reinforce memory structures. The unusual aspect to the campaign was that it went up in early February at the end of Chinese New Year. That’s a bit like launching your Christmas advertising on New Year’s Eve. Not sure why that’s happened.
Giordano
Multinational clothing brand Giordano promoted a CNY 2025 collaboration featuring the Kung Fu Panda character on its social media accounts. The preponderance of red in the clothing isn’t only about it being a seasonal colour, but also you are supposed to wear new red clothing for the new year.
This social media film was run on channels in Hong Kong, Malaysia and other countries where Giordano has a presence.
Malaysia
100PLUS
100PLUS is an isotonic drink similar in function to Gatorade or Lucozade Sport popular in Malaysia and Singapore. Its advert for Malaysia promotes the drink as alternative to colas during new year celebrations. A secondary aspect is the opportunity to win a free prize draw. The blue in the outfits is to presumably signal the blue in the brand and packaging.
It’s slightly unusual in that it doesn’t feature multi-generational family members, which I suspect is down to a single-minded focus on teens and young adults.
Aeon
Japanese supermarket Aeon highlighted their CNY themed collaboration with Italian artist TokiDoki as a music video format that you could sing along too. It’s a little too mild to be an aggressive earworm of a tune.
Aglow Clinic
Aglow Clinic is an aesthetics clinic in Malaysia that treats a range of skin conditions including sun spots. They partnered with social media personality Roderic Chan to make this film. Considering the small size of the brand they hit well above their weight in terms of production values.
Aiken
Aiken is a Malaysian based beauty brand. The creative was done by the media buying agency and features Malaysian influencers as the talent in the advertisement.
Aiken wishes you Double the Brightness for a Brighter Year! is clever word play that implicitly links feeling beautiful and the promise of good fortune. This advert went out very late into the market for 2025.
Carina
Carina is a household tissue brand in Malaysia, similar to Kleenex in the UK and Ireland. It has gone down the ear worm route with its song. The montage of footage feels crowdsourced.
Eu Yan Sang
Eu Yan Sang did separate creative for Malaysia. There are higher production values than their Singapore creative and storytelling that ties back to creating memories and tradition being a key part of Chinese New Year. The advert sought to show that the family weren’t wealthy, but had food on their plate, good manners and retained their cultural roots. As a first-generation emigrant myself this one spoke to me.
First Pride
Tyson Foods First Pride range of processed chicken product including chicken nuggets and satay slices featured a simple sales promotion with a sweepstake format. The advert also introduced a fluent object ‘Kevin’ the chicken nugget on a TV advert.
Kevin had previously been shared only on out of home formats. It would be interesting to see if and how they make future use of Kevin.
Guardian
Guardian is the Malaysian brand of the better known Asian pharmacy retail chain better known as Mannings in Hong Kong and China. A UK analogue would be Boots. It has higher production values and evokes togetherness, good fortune and memory-making for our young protagonist. Click here to see on YouTube.
Haier
Chinese white goods manufacturer took an unconventional storytelling approach. it’s the kind of creative concept that could be used year on year, just changing the product line-up.
Harvey Norman
Electrical retailer Harvey Norman ties into the fact that bargains are a constant discussion around the table during Chinese New Year (and any other family gathering). The production feels rather low rent compared to other adverts here.
HongLeong Bank
HongLeong Bank took the story of two customers that fitted neatly with the festivities around Chinese New Year. It gives a good old tug on the heart strings.
Julie’s
Julie’s a is a biscuit brand that tries to focus on the human side of food. Given the visiting and gifting culture for Chinese new year – the opportunity is ideal for its brand. I was surprised by the high production values of the advert. The 3d animation is creatively consistent with work that they’ve put out over the past year. As a direction the CNY 2025 campaign is very different from their last festival campaign for CNY 2022.
Julie’s can continue to run this campaign after CNY 2025 is over due to the lack of overt seasonal themes in the advert.
KitKat
KitKat Malaysia have attached the Chinese New Year creative back to ‘have a break, have a KitKat’ for creative consistency. There is enough in here to say new year. But a sufficiently light touch that they could use it year-in, year-out – so long as the brand uses the same promotional packaging design.
If they had used snake imagery, it would be one-and-done.
Knife
Knife are a food flavourings brand from Malaysia. Their main advertising push is for Chinese New Year and they have made a constant effort to bring creative consistency and storytelling into their work. CNY 2025 is no exception to this approach.
https://youtu.be/Oxo8jP-67tE?si=aSnwKB5YVxoT96z_
Lay’s crisps
Lay’s (known as Walkers in the UK) highlight their role as a snack at new year’s gatherings. The ad promotes a new year themed sweepstake including mahjong sets.
Lotus’s
Lotus’s is a supermarket market chain. In Malaysia, the shops were formerly Tesco Malaysia and sold on to a Thai retail group. This film focuses on the stress of preparing for new year, together with sales promotions. Aside from holding red t-shirts with the ‘Fu’ symbol on them, this sales promotion video could be for any time of the year. The 1970s called and wants it’s ad creative back from this Malaysian supermarket chain.
Melinda Looi
Malaysian fashion designer Melinda Looi came up with a homage to Wong Ka wai’s In The Mood For Love. The advert nails the mid-century elegance but struggles to get the cinematic richness and tension of the original.
I respect that they gave it a good try and love their ambition; but it’s like Ted Baker trying to pull off the introduction to The Italian Job.
Mr DIY
Mr DIY is a hardware chain similar to Lowe’s in the US or B&Q in the UK. Their advert riffs on the heightened tensions of family get togethers and the relative popularity in Hong Kong film making of court room dramas – to add a bit of cultural relevance. It taps into the stressor of very direct questions similar to BRANDS Singapore campaign.
Mr Muscle
Household cleaner brand Mr Muscle had a Korean celebrity record a CNY 2025 specific message for their Facebook page viewers.
The advert features Korean drama and film actor Kim Seon Ho. In common with other Korean celebrities he endorses a variety of brands in Korea and other Asian countries. For some of the brands endorsed, they have had record sales which they attribute to working with Kim. It’s not sophisticated but will appeal to his many fans in Malaysia.
Munchy’s
Munchy Food Brands is a Malaysian snack brand. The advert itself is pretty self explanatory. Like Watson’s they are leaning hard into trying to create an ear worm to aid long term brand recall that’s complete with an EDM-style drop.
Nivea
Nivea looked to promote their men’s products as a way to solve for the stress of direct family feedback on how you look. It has been shot for mobile.
Pantai Hospital
Pantai Medical Group runs a private hospital in Malaysia that caters to more well-off Malaysians. The emphasis on healthy food in the advert relates to the central role that food plays in Chinese New Year celebrations.
Their elective treatments are likely to be quiet during CNY 2025, so they have provided the option for health-focused external catering. It’s an interesting product innovation for those close to their hospital in Penang. The behind the scenes clips at the end draws on Korean and Hong Kong productions. The best known in the West would be the blooper reels that used to appear at the end of Jackie Chan films.
https://youtu.be/2tKxHrCldts?si=WIQqF1PRPsyzdKEG
Petronas
Petronas is the Malaysian national oil company. There is a natural fit with CNY 2025 because children go home to see their parents and siblings. Later on during the celebrations they will drive to visit relatives. On the Malaysian peninsula you could be a long time in heavy traffic, so pit-stops for fuel and refreshments are pretty much obligatory.
Ribena
Brutally short creative with the tagline left right at the end. ‘Ooo Juicy Fu’ – the fu is a reference to the Chinese character fu symbolising ‘fortune’. It is creatively consistent with campaigns that Ribera ran for Ramadan and the previous CNY in Malaysia.
Shopee
Shopee is a mobile marketplace think Shopify, Depop or Uber Eats in an app. Like Watsons Malaysian campaign it relies on a ‘new years’ song. Why a song? Entertainment during Chinese new year features newly composed catchy earworms. These may come from film series put out as family entertainment for the new year like the All’s Well, That Ends Well series of Hong Kong comedies, or television and adverts.
Watsons
Watsons is a Hong Kong-headquartered pharmacy chain with stores across Asia and a strong focus on health and beauty products. It’s parent company AS Watson is a set of diversified retail brands including:
Superdrug and Savers in the UK
Rossmann
Fortress (a PC World or Best Buy analogue)
PARKnSHOP, Taste, FUSION, GREAT FOOD HALL – grocery stores
Watson’s Wine
They have been teasing a song related Chinese New Year campaign for Malaysia to embed in your memory structures, but were only showcasing the song 2 1/2 weeks before CNY 2025. Rapid screening of sales promotions drown out the ‘Happy Beautiful Year’ themed brand building effort.
https://youtu.be/KpAXOYxxGvc?si=jzwNGGW5HXz8pbHk
Yakult
The Japanese yoghurt drink brand used some good fortune themed imagery to promote a brand sweepstake. A very simple execution that could be used again in future years.
Singapore
BRANDS
BRANDS is a food and supplement business. Traditional Chinese Medicine often recommends eating particular foods to treat different ailments, which is why BRANDS essence of chicken sits in a kind of ‘wellness’ space.
Their advert draws on the universal experience of very direct questions that people have to field from relatives when they go home for Chinese new year.
Eu Yan Sang
Eu Yan Sang run traditional Chinese medicine and related wellness foods shops and clinics across Asia. This Singapore ad focuses on the challenge of gift giving and the close link between good fortune and good health. Unusually, they’ve also run a second lot of creative promoting their CNY themed hamper designs as well.
https://youtu.be/dGc3_cDjtCA?si=pTA3fXpeL481jw-P
FairPrice
FairPrice is a Singapore institution. Like the UK’s Co-op, it is a supermarket owned by the National Trade Union Congress and is the largest grocery chain in Singapore owning both supermarkets and convenience stores.
The ad focuses on everyday Singaporeans with many of the shots modelled on HDB flats – Singapore’s public housing. The colour grading and small moments designed to evoke different types of nostalgia from the rituals of family and the Chinese New Year.
Hockhua tonic
Hockhua is a Singaporean local wellness foods brand who did a simple sales promotion for their hampers to be provided for the new year. The cut-off time then gave the brand a few weeks to assemble to the appropriate amount of hampers.
Lazada
E-tailer Lazada leads with sales promotions. The imagery draws on Fu xing, the god of good fortune who you would pray to in order to get a prosperous new year.
Ministry of Digital Development and Information
The government of Singapore used Chinese new year to reinforce a common Singaporean identity and celebrate the 60th anniversary of the city state. Sing-a-longs are a part of Chinese new year. The video featured a 1980s song that was originally recored by the artists in 1998 re-recorded by them for the government department encouraging t he citizens to look out for each other. The video was published just days before new year and relied primarily on the reach of the former prime minister’s Instagram account. It shares a common theme of small but joyful moments with the FairPrice CNY 2025 advert.
Thailand
This is the first year that I have covered a Thai market campaign. Thailand has a significant ethnic Chinese minority (between 10 – 15% of the population depending on which estimates you reference). Like Indonesia, Thailand integrated them for political reasons and many of them no longer have Chinese sounding family names – but the traditions live on. A second aspect is the increased role in the Thai economy that Chinese expats and tourists now play.
Central
Central is a premium department store in Thailand (think Peter Jones in London) and has a mid-tier brand called Robinsons (think Debenhams or House of Fraser). You have a stylistic version of the new year dinner and a cool grandfather who owes a lot to mature Japanese hipsters and The Sartorialist. The film has high production values and leans on vibes rather than storytelling, but is distinctive.
You can find my previous reviews of Chinese New Year ads here.
Japan Re-Emerges is Ulrike Schaede’s riposte to the neo-liberalist dogma that Japan is done. Since the bubble era finished, corporate Japan has been reinventing itself and building blue ocean strategies to stand up and out against the rise of China and South Korea. Schade has turned this journey into a book, Japan Re-Emerges. This interview was conducted at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan.
Going back to neo-liberal doctrine, Japan Re-Emerges offers a way out of the terminal societal and economic death role that many middle powers like the United Kingdom and Germany are currently undergoing – if they have the leadership who can make it happen. I’ll let you know how I get on with Schade’s book.
The Detroit of Asia
Thailand earned its name as the Detroit of Asia thanks to factories assembling vehicles like the Toyota Hi-lux and manufacturing a wide range of car parts. Nikkei put together a film on how Chinese electric vehicle makers have entered Thailand poaching staff, expertise and market share from Japanese manufacturers representing an existential risk of non-Chinese businesses and threatening how Japan Re-emerges.
Futurama
General Motors was a large conglomerate in the 1960s. This seems to be based on footage made at the New York World Fair of 1964/65. This Futurama exhibition was a homage to a similar one done at the 1939 world fair. The themes of the exhibition at the time reflect big societal concerns including overpopulation and creating adequate food. The seabed was seen as an equally momentous destination as space. Deep sea exploration was post-war phenomenon and the first submarine that had gone under the north pole did so only six years previously.
The space and modernist themed architecture feels like it’s from a different universe to our current world. Despite M Hubert King warning about peak oil in 1956, concerns about energy seemed premature at the time when nuclear power seemed to have so many uses and man was actively exploring outer space implying a technological solution was possible for everything. Out of this World as a film builds on the Futurama work done by General Motors as a cohesive vision of the future. While the Ford Motor Company still uses futurists, General Motors subsequent history is one of missed future opportunities, from the German, Japanese and Korean ‘invasions’, its futuristic EV1 car project to efforts in autonomous driving efforts.
Cadillac racing
At first I thought that the idea of a Cadillac racing programme was an oxymoron. As a European my idea of a Cadillac is the black armoured land barge that ferries the US president around, or its historic civilian equivalents that represented mid-century luxury prior to the German invasion of the U.S. car market. So I was curious when I came across No Perfect Formula.
What was more interesting about this film for me was that it was part of a wider trend. While Liberty Media’s Drive To Survive series looked to bolster its Formula One motorsports franchise, manufacturers like Cadillac and Porsche have been producing their own feature-length content and publishing it on YouTube – disintermediating brand partnership type deals with the likes of Netflix or Amazon Prime in favour of YouTube. This makes sense when one thinks about YouTube in terms of raw reach.
Where I think it gets more interesting is what is says about the value of the latent endorsement of a partner media brand and what this will mean for the likes of BBC Worldwide and non-subscriber revenue streams for streaming platforms.
If we go back to 1949 Dutch economics Petrus Johannes Verdoorn came up with a law – the long run productivity generally grows proportionally to the square root of output. This law addresses the relationship between the growth of output and the growth of productivity. Faster growth in output increases productivity due to increased returns.
“in the long run a change in the volume of production, say about 10 per cent, tends to be associated with an average increase in labor productivity of 4.5 per cent.”
Causes of the Slow Growth in the United Kingdom Nicholas Kaldor (1966) Cambridge University Press
A heuristic called Vandoorn’s coefficient of 0.484 was found in estimates of the law following Vandoorn’s original publication. Nicholas Kaldor who made similar points as far back as 1960 in his work Essays on Value and Distribution. Kaldor built on Verdoorn’s Law observing that manufacturing was the best way of increasing output.
Slater, Walker Securities
The UK economic hole isn’t anything new. Back when I was a child we saw UK industry disappearing at about 1.5% of industrial capacity a month. The source of the destruction was apparent in the post war period, although manufacturing innovation had been underbanked and under invested for decades. Jim Slater and his financial vehicle Slater, Walker Securities was the harbinger of forces that unleashed the UK economic hole.
The State We’re In
Economics editor Will Hutton wrote the The State We’re In and I got to read it while I was in college. It caught the policy wonk zeitgeist of the future Blair administration – making the argument for long termism and manufacturing as a creator of wealth together with Keynesian economics.
Slow Growth Britain to Cool Britannia
Hutton wasn’t alone in his viewpoint but building on the expertise and experience. Wilfred Beckerman in his book Slow Growth in Britain: Causes & Consequences published in 1979 is a case in point. As you read these books the same points are made over and over again about what has become the UK economic hole. The discovery and exploitation of North Sea oil provided a sticking plaster from 1982 through to 1999. But production in UK oil and gas fields have been in decline since. Any economic productivity benefit provided to British industry through a massive shake out was transferred to unemployment relief. Secondly industrial eco-systems or ‘clusters’ as Richard Florida would term them in his work Who’s Your City? disappeared, causing the manufacturing base to lose critical mass. Any gains were largely spent by 1990. Manufacturing was a driver and a shock absorber for productivity related issues – this is important for the subsequent UK economic hole.
While Hutton was read by the future Blair administration they did little about it, due to the Augean task that confronted them.
Following the decline of manufacturing the UK, focused on financial services which turned toxic in 2006. There were additional smaller bets on professional services and the creative industry (remember pre-millennium awkwardness of Cool Britannia)? As an economic rational decision maker, I pivoted my career out of industry and into the creative sector – thankfully I was young enough to be able to do it. Many couldn’t and were trapped in low value services jobs or living on long term sickness benefits to massage unemployment figures.
Young tax-paying workers
The collapse of financial services saw the current productivity collapse and stagnation amplifying the long standing UK economic hole. Brexit could be seen as a wail of pain and anger. The reality was that being in the EU allowed cheaper skilled workers to move to the UK and use existing manufacturing plants for the likes of Cadbury’s and Unilever. So the UK benefited from young tax-paying Europeans, but lost out in terms of wage depression. Brexit severed that last gasp of productivity increases.
What is really driving ExxonMobil’s clean energy commitments? | Financial Times – the decades long algae biofuels programme failed. Back when I worked in the oil industry at the start of my work life, ExxonMobil had the best research and development / innovation team in the oil industry. They were way ahead of the likes of Shell or BP. The heuristic within the industry went something along the lines of: BP could find oil anywhere, Occidental could get a contract to drill anywhere, Shell could market any product successfully and ExxonMobil could out-innovate the rest of them.
Mobil 1 oil on the shelf at a motor factors courtesy of Mike Mozart
For instance Mobil were decades ahead of everyone else with their Mobil 1 synthetic lubricating oil back in 1974. Castrol was processing petroleum oil and calling it synthetic, they were eventually caught out in 1998 – with Mobil winning a moral victory if not a court case. The point is that if ExxonMobil can’t get algae to work, I doubt any company can – energy desperately needs its semiconductor moment.
Talking about a semiconductor moment, one of the places where this would be really welcome would be green hydrogen. I had hoped that Ireland would be able to convert its wind power bounty into generating hydrogen by electrolysis as a way of moving and storing energy in a way that electrical batteries can’t match.
Only the Global-Health Emergency Has Ended – The Atlantic – “This virus is here to stay. It is still killing, and it’s still changing,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the WHO – the cadence of an emergency might be finished but there is still subtantial health risk. It has declined to ‘only’ the fourth most common cause of death…
Genesis G80 Electrified vs. BMW i4 M50 | MACAU DAILY TIMES 澳門每日時報 – the G80 is closer to a 7 series than the i4 which is somewhere between the 3 and the 5 series. Overall I would prefer to go with a Genesis given the reliability issues that BMWs have had for the past two decades.
The Disconnect on Undersea Cable Security – Lawfare – The fibre-optic submarine cable sector is a vital, but ignored, part of the world’s critical infrastructure. Many members of Congress and the U.S. government, see the risks to subsea cables quite differently than cable owners and manufacturers. Brookings Institute’s Joseph Keller examines this disconnect, suggesting ways that the policy community can protect and advance this critical industry.
Thailand
Thailand legalised cannabis and an industry boom occurred. A key part is trying to integrate and provide value to the country’s hospitality, tourism and travel sectors.
