Month: October 2022

  • AI and creativity

    Why AI and creativity?

    This post on AI and creativity was inspired by experiments being done at work by a member of our design department. They had been using Midjourney to create images within a minute of receiving an initial set of words as creative prompts.

    For example we created this surreal image which fits somewhere between Christian kitsch familiar to catholic households around the world and a touch of Syd Mead‘s visual futurism. This comes from the prompt.

    Jesus fighting alongside the US Air Force
    https://flic.kr/p/2nSGwLB

    Other efforts weren’t successful, we had faces featuring eyes with two pupils and when it tried to render round shapes, it didn’t know when to stop. The hands would go on and on as a twisted mass of flesh. This could be resolved by creating a human character in a service like MetaHuman and uploading that to Midjourney as a base model instead.

    How neural networks drive AI and creativity?

    Midjourney works using two neural networks. The first works to render an image. The second compares the processing image to exemplars from a data bank of images. There is a back and forth exchange between the two networks until a number of variants are rendered. At this point the human operator is given a choice, or they can choose to have other variations created if the originals don’t meet their requirements.

    These images can be rendered in high resolution allowing for an amazing level of detail.

    Dystopian vibes

    The dystopian feel of the use of AI and creativity is down to a few different factors.

    The first reason is that dystopia is at the centre of our cultural zeitgiest in the west. Documentary maker Adam Curtis covers it really well in this discussion with with the Joe Politics channel on YouTube. This zeitgeist affects the type of imagery that the AI has available to draw upon and the kind of prompts that people use to create AI images.

    Secondly, the use of AI to ‘create’ something lacks the feeling and collective emotional experiences of a real person. Those elements can’t be captured in prompts which is why images land with the sensation of a dead fish.

    What does AI and creativity mean for agencies?

    Concepting

    The most immediate impact could be in rapid concepting, analogous to how rapid prototyping for manufacturing design. Creative teams would still need to conceive of ideas but concepts could then be brought to live in minutes.

    It’s as far away from the black marker and pad that creative directors traditionally used; as paste up graphic design techniques from the use of desktop publishing software that started to impact the design world in the mid to late 1980s.

    News illustrations and graphic novels show the way

    One of the first areas that is really shaken up by AI and creativity has been the world of the political cartoonist and news illustrator. At the moment newspapers and news magazines pay skilled artists to develop and conceptual designs that convey a political concept.

    A good example of this is the covers of The Economist magazine. However things are starting to change. US political publication The Bulwark has already started using AI generated illustrations processed by Midjourney. Midjourney has also been used to create graphic novels.

    One could easily see how this might be extended into business-to-business marketing for intangible products like software and services.

    Production

    The hyper-realistic effects that AI can produce is likely to inspire a desire in clients to use them more often for cost effective production costs. At the moment however, the results can be very hit and miss. There is a problem with hands, faces, interlocking round shapes and a ‘dead’ look to the work.

    Social implications

    At first we had a discussion about what happens to designers? Were they doomed? Should there be a universal income for them or should they march in the streets to ? How could the technology be stopped?

    I wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine in this discussion. I pointed out that over the past few centuries, capital won out over labour every time. So people only kept their jobs if they cost less than the process to automate their tasks.

    Globalisation versus automation

    London like a few other cities have ad agency work done that is designed for global audiences. At the moment I work on campaigns designed for markets including: the UK and Ireland, Spain, Italy, the US, Vietnam and Japan. Globalisation seems to have benefited hub cities rather than moved the work to cheaper locales.

    This in sharp contrast to what happened to British manufacturing. Whole sectors largely disappeared:

    • Steel making
    • Textile mills
    • Shipbuilding
    • Car manufacturing
    • Chemical industry
    • Pharmaceutical manufacturing
    • Engineering and fabrication

    Where capacity was spared, it was largely down to the UK being a good point of entry into the European Union. As the number of countries expanded new manufacturing jobs moved east; and workers moved west to fill workforce needs in established UK factories depressing salaries.

    Research shows that globalization only accounts for 13 percent of job loss in US manufacturing while 88 percent of losses were from automation including robotic manufacturing. In fact, availability of ever-cheaper automation options combined with uncertainty in the global supply chain has led to a resurgence in “onshoring” manufacturing.

    Debunking the Myths: Job Loss, Globalization and Automation by Greg Council Parascript (April 14, 2017).

    Automation has been the quiet destructor of roles. During the 1960s businesses had typing pools and secretaries. Many of these roles disappeared due to desktop computers, office productivity software and the democratisation of touch typing as a skill.

    The Technium

    Even if labour won out over capital in the UK, there is no guarantee that they would be able to stop the march of technology. Kevin Kelly in his book What Technology Wants shares the idea of ‘The Technium’. The idea behind The Technium is that technology has a momentum of its own building on previous progress. Kelly goes as far to describe it as a super organism of technology. He believes that it exerts a force that is partly cultural with technology influencing and being in turn being influenced by technology. All of which means adaption and accommodation are likely to be the way forward for now.

    Adaptation

    While people don’t realise it, you’ve been using what could be termed AI for decades:

    • Autofocus on a camera
    • Losing ‘shake’ in camcorder and smartphone video
    • Programmes in a microwave the attempt to cook a casserole or baked potato
    • Predictive text (although it seems to have become more stupid over time)
    • Siri, Alexa and Google’s various search functions

    In the case of a designer it would also include tools like the ‘lasso’ function in Photoshop that automatically cuts around objects including frizzy hair on a model. So it’s a bit late in the day for people to get squeamish about AI and creativity. Dominant creative software company Adobe sees the place of AI and creativity more as a technology to augment designers in their work rather than replace them. Much of the current Adobe focus seems to be on lowering the on-ramp for new users of their software packages.

    There will be more of a challenge for supporting professions like photographers. Fashion brand Hugo Boss is looking to 3D AI powered design to aid in product design and 3D rendering threatening product photography for websites, look books and catalogues.

    Limitations of AI and Creativity

    One of the things that my colleagues said which really struck with me was ‘if an AI told the world’s funniest joke’ would it know that it was funny? Software is being used to track emotional response, but it wouldn’t necessarily know why something was funny.

    The AI can’t be coded with a summation of life experiences, it can analyse emotions, but as far as we know doesn’t experience them yet. This probably explains why Studio Ghibli and Disney animation feels like it has much more life in it than the best AI renders.

    Is it art?

    Auction houses have sold works generated using AI, but is the art in the creation of the work, or in the decision to use an AI to do the work and thinking of the artist behind that idea? AI can produce works as they have existed before and mash-up genres and ideas, but it wouldn’t be able (at the moment) to create something completely novel through a leap of abstraction, such as a concept like Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture ‘Fountain‘.

    AI images can be nice, but do they involve an illusion of creativity? Everything that appears in an AI image is depended on the inputs that the AI receives and the content in image banks that it uses as a reference – which is the reason why AIs often sign works with an indecipherable script.

    Do artist styles have to be better protected as part of their IP as well as their works?

    IP issues goes beyond artists. We created an artistic rendering of Pokemon character ‘Pikachu’ on Midjourney using the prompt

    Definitely not a pikachu

    In conclusion

    If you’re a creative we eventually managed to get to four thoughts from the discussion:

    1. In the grand scheme of things, change is the only constant
    2. AI has been changing things and will continue to do so
    3. It is inevitable that there willl be some automation and augmentation happening in the creative professions such as design
    4. In the words of Douglas Adams book Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy ‘Don’t Panic’ – but be prepared to adapt and learn new skills and develop new areas of expertise

    Suggested reading

    AI-generated images open multiple cans of worms | Axios 

    AI-generated digital art spurs debate about news illustrations | Axios 

    AI Makes 1993 Video Game Look Photorealistic 

    The Push of a Button – by David OReilly – Reminders 

    DALL-E now allows anyone to cash in on AI art, but ownership gets complicated | Quartz

    GitHub – microsoft/AI-For-Beginners: 12 Weeks, 24 Lessons, AI for All! 

    Inceptionsim : Going Deeper into Neural Networks

    The Golden age of AI-generated art is here. It’s going to get weird – FT Online

    Novo Nordisk wins over doctors with AI email subject lines — and a human touch – Endpoints News 

    MAX Sneaks – by Kevin Hart & Bria Alexander, Adobe, Inc.

    Demo of AI ad copywriting and art direction for online ads 

    Books

    Harvard Business Review – Artificial Intelligence: The Insights that you need to know (HBR Insights Series)

    Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky

    Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology by Steven Levy

    Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition and Still Can’t Get a Date – Robert X. Cringely

    Inevitable & What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

    The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements by Nils J Nilsson

    8vo: On The Outside by Mark Holt & Hamish Muir

    Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy

  • Illegal foreign police stations + more things

    Illegal foreign police stations

    The amount of stories about the Chinese illegal foreign police stations that have broke over the past couple of days is really interesting. The clampdown on illegal foreign police stations seems as if it was either coordinated, or there was an inciting incident that persuaded other governments that they had to act. Secondly, what becomes apparent from the coverage is that governments were aware about them for a while, but chose to do nothing. The mainstream media lack of coverage made China critics look like paranoid cranks when they discussed Chinese illegal foreign police stations in their countries. There is a contrast between the British military Operation Motorman to stop what they perceived as the illegal provisional IRA policing of ‘Free Derry’ and the current handling of illegal foreign police stations set up by the Chinese.

    Police car

    Chinese police operatives operating in Canada, U.S. says in new court filing – The Globe and Mail 

    Chinese overseas police station in Dublin ordered to shut – The Irish Times 

    Netherlands accuses China of operating ‘illegal’ police stations | Financial Times – talk of illegal foreign police stations has been going around the Chinese critics circles for years. It just goes to show, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re wrong.

    I think that one of the reasons why illegal foreign police stations hasn’t been covered well by mainstream media is that they didn’t want to give credence to coverage by media that are right of centre like Fox News.

    China

    US think tank CSIS shares expert thought on the 20th Party Congress.

    China’s limitless presidency means limited diplomacy | Financial Times… Chinese diplomats find it disconcertingly easy to revert to behaviour that could be seen as bullying. This confirms the suspicion that European governments have of the Communist party: that it is becoming more brazen. A certain school of Chinese nationalism says that the west is set on containing China’s rise at all costs — and that, as a result, Beijing may as well conduct external relations for internal consumption. Yet European alliances are still in China’s grasp, and many of its own objectives, from technological upgrading to climate action, can only be achieved with a wide range of allies and Video before Hu Jintao’s exit from congress puts files in focus – Nikkei Asia 

    The FT on Evergrande Group bankruptcy.

    Economics

    The end of the system of the world – by Noah Smith and Are the UK, Japan, and Italy “undeveloping countries”? 

    Energy

    The foundations of Russia’s oil and gas industry

    Finance

    ‘We never lost interest’: Asian family offices buy into crypto | Financial Times – Digital asset investments fuelled by weak returns from equity and property

    FMCG

    Krispy Kreme, Crocs, and Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing 

    Households forgo air fresheners and vitamins in cost of living squeeze | Financial Times 

    Germany

    German exporters rethink €100bn ‘love affair’ with China | Financial TimesCompetition — fair and otherwise — remains a problem. “Our members know that every technology they bring into China, in a relatively short time, will be part of the Chinese market,” said Ulrich Ackermann, head of foreign trade at the VDMA. “We say, be aware you can be kicked out in a short time.” Ackermann spoke of a German manufacturer of construction machinery, whose state-owned Chinese rival sent machines to customers, free for use for the first year. “How can we compete with that?” – This has been the standard playbook for decades. Huawei won telecoms because of state bank vendor financing at negative interest rates, not superior technology and certainly not superior reliability. What took the Germans so long to catch on? I suspect it was the outsized political impact that a few large companies have on German policies versus the middle sized companies that actually drive exports, German employment and prosperity. 

    Health

    BBC: World Health Organization Says Further Research Needed on Pandemic’s Effect on Mental Health, Particularly for Younger People and Women

    Hong Kong

    Pro-democracy Publisher Jimmy Lai Found Guilty on Fraud Charges – The Diplomat – surprising lack of coverage in the UK, particularly as Lai is a British citizen

    Hong Kong Policy Address: How much of John Lee’s maiden speech was old wine in new bottles? – Hong Kong Free Press HKFPHong Kong has experienced a mass outflow of residents since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and the implementation of the national security law. The previous administration disputed the scale of the exodus, with Lam attributing it to the suspension of quarantine-free travel with mainland China, saying that the number of One-Way Permit holders coming into Hong Kong had significantly decreased. Lee, who has been pressured to stop the exodus of talent from the city, acknowledged the trend for the first time on Wednesday, admitting that the local workforce had shrunk by 140,000 people over the last two years. Lee had previously rejected the use of the term “emigration wave” to describe the city’s recent and dramatic population decline.   While Lam said that she did not want the government to be asking citizens to stay, Lee presented a series of proposals on Wednesday, ranging from new visa schemes to stamp duty cuts, designed explicitly to attract talent. – even the talent attraction proposals won’t make much difference, looking for people only from the world’s top 100 universities and earning at least $318,000 per year. That isn’t going to plug education, healthcare and social care staff gaps. It won’t fill much of the many financial services opportunities either, nor multinational regional hubs

    Ideas

    Adam Curtis on the collapse of the Soviet Union and modern Russia. His commentary on Brexit is spot on.

    Smiles in Profiles: Improving Fairness and Efficiency Using Estimates of User Preferences in Online Marketplaces

    Forbidden Questions – Marginal REVOLUTION – asks some interesting questions around science, innovation and politics. On the Flipside you have communism’s examples of bad science as an exemplar of what can go wrong when politics frames scientific exploration and ideas

    Innovation

    Chip start-up pushes into Taiwan in quest for ever-smaller chips | Financial Times – NanoWired spun out of Germany but is pinning its hopes on TSMC rather than Dresden based semiconductor plants

    I was fired from NYU after students complained that the class was too hard. Who’s next? – The Boston GlobeWhat is overwhelmingly important is the chilling effect of such intervention by administrators on teaching overall and especially on untenured professors. Can a young assistant professor, almost all of whom are not protected by tenure, teach demanding material? Dare they give real grades? Their entire careers are at the peril of complaining students and deans who seem willing to turn students into nothing more than tuition-paying clients.

    Korea

    Kakao, Data Center Fire, the Data Residency Dilemma | Interconnect – Why not data centres further south in Deagu or just outside Busan? The author presupposes that the backup has to be outside the country

    Luxury

    China’s wealthy activate escape plans as Xi Jinping extends rule | Financial Times and as an interesting counterpoint: Asian art and luxury buying boom | Financial TimesAt one level, it is a worldwide trend. From fine art to fine wine, luxury-sector companies have bounced back from the depths of the pandemic as their super-rich customers have, so far, been largely immune to global inflation and economic turmoil. After its worst decline on record in 2020, the global personal luxury goods market grew last year to reach €288bn in value, up 7 per cent on 2019, according to consultancy Bain. It says 2022 began with a further healthy rise. In Hong Kong, though, the picture has been quite distinctive, with some of the super-rich spending locally while others have moved abroad, joining an exodus of more than 153,000 residents since the beginning of 2021. The territory has recorded a 14 per cent drop in the number of millionaires in 2022 compared with last year (that is, people with at least $1mn in liquid assets, according to residency advisory firm Henley & Partners). With about 125,100 millionaires out of a population of 7.3mn, the city fell by four places to 12th globally for the number of high-net-worth individuals – building imperial palaces while China becomes redder…

    Chinese President Xi’s pledge at Congress means getting rich quick is out. Should luxury worry? – yes they should. It isn’t only about wealth but also about the defence against western values

    Second-hand Rolexes: watch out for stupid prices and superfakes | Financial Times – the FT blames millennials who started collecting watches when they couldn’t go on holiday during COVID. I think that the causes are multi-variant. Luxury brands have looked at and learned from streetwear ‘drop’ business models exemplified by the likes of Supreme and Nike’s SNKR app. Secondly, the market might moderate a bit when Rolex realises that there isn’t so much of a demand in China post the 20th party congress. I haven’t paid crazy money like what you’ve described for a pre-owned Rolex, but everyone of my watches original warrant cards have a (mainland) Chinese family name on them. Buying via the verified service on eBay at least reduces the risk of buying an overpriced real, rather than super fake Rolex. I think we should be thankful for small mercies that it didn’t go into meme stocks or OneCoin analogues.

    Marketing

    GroupM Drops New Evidence Of Disconnect Between Economy And Ad Spending 10/24/2022 – it makes sense that some marketers will be bumping spending up to increase relative share of voice during a recession as this will pay dividends from now through the next five years or so as an effect

    Materials

    Balenciaga releases coat made with Ephea, a leather alternative | Vogue Business – fungus based ‘leather’

    🌎 F* Weekly: The end of lithium batteries? – new battery technologies come out of university labs all the time but commercialising them is entirely another thing

    Media

    Chinese censors alter ending of Minions: The Rise of Gru film | China | The GuardianDuSir, a film review publisher with 14.4 million followers on Weibo, noted that the Chinese version ran one minute longer than the international one, and questioned why the extra time was needed. “It’s only us who need special guidance and care for fear that a cartoon will ‘corrupt’ us,” DuSir wrote. Huaxia Film Distribution and China Film Co, the film’s distributors in China, did not respond to a request for comment

    Hit film Return to Dust has vanished from China’s cinemas. Why? | Financial Times“In the beginning,” she says, “Return to Dust attracted almost no attention. An art-house film about poverty among rural peasants? Honestly, neither the government nor mainstream Chinese audiences would normally care.” But then came several fateful quirks of timing. Over the summer, an online short, Second Uncle, became a Chinese viral hit, telling the story of a kindly rural carpenter. On social media, the little-known Return to Dust was mooted as a companion piece. From such small acorns sprang word-of-mouth success. Week by week, the movie built an audience – it might be the government, it could also be forces in the domestic media scene as big budget Chinese films don’t need competition stealing their ability to pay back investments

    Bloomberg Media Is Removing Its Open-Market Programmatic Ads – makes a lot of sense, they can’t sell subscriptions on that poor a customer experience provided by the likes of Outbrain at the bottom of the page

    Information commissioner warns firms over ‘emotional analysis’ technologies | Biometrics | The Guardian 

    Security

    MEPs to call for greater powers for Brussels to curb EU spyware use | Financial Times 

    From East Berlin to Beijing, surveillance goes in circles | Financial TimesLast month, the Stasi HQ hosted a Berlin Biennale seminar on the “Digital Divide”, where panellists discussed the ways in which old, disproved theories are recycled in modern surveillance. Shazeda Ahmed, a post-doctorate at Princeton University, described the rise of emotion recognition technology in China. Parents have pressured schools there to give up emotion recognition in classrooms, but some police forces are investing in the technology, hoping that a person’s movements and gestures can signal their propensity to commit a crime. Such methods fall under the umbrella of “predictive policing”, but they are dangerously unproven. Academics doubt whether gestures can be analysed as discrete events that carry the same meaning from person to person. Speaking at the Biennale, digital rights lawyer Ramak Molavi gave a historical perspective, comparing emotion-recognition trends today to phrenology and physiognomy, the ideas that a person’s skull shape and facial features indicate their character. Molavi described how the ideas had been discredited, but enjoyed a renaissance during the Nazi regime – this isn’t the first time that science and ideology have led each other up the garden path

    Axios China: Spy chief joins Politburo 

    US charges alleged Chinese spies in telecoms probe case – BBC News 

    UK PM set to take on China with ‘NATO of technology’ | EETimes Europe 

    China Goes Full ‘Black Mirror’ With Robot Dog With Mounted Machine Gun 

    Taiwan

    Taipei urbanism – by Noah Smith – NoahpinionI had a disorienting sense of being back in Japan — so much so that I kept expecting people to drive on the left side of the street. So much of the infrastructure in Taiwan looks and feels Japanese — the pavement, the building materials, the signs at the airport. People cite this as a residue of the colonial period, but given that the colonial period ended 77 years ago, it’s probably more due to Taiwanese architects, urban planners, and engineers continuing to look to Japan for inspiration. After a few minutes, however, the sense of Japan-ness faded, crowded out by two key features of the Taipei landscape: lush greenery and shabby building facades

    Technology

    SK Hynix announces capex cuts by 50%, and selling China fabs could be option in contingency plan 

    Web of no web

    We are dangerously reliant on GPS to tell the time | Financial Times

    Ford, Volkswagen pull the plug on joint robocar project | EETimes Europe 

  • StetWalk

    What is StetWalk?

    StetWalk is a portmanteau of the editors term stet and walk. Stet means ‘let it stand’. An editor might mistakenly cross something out or suggest an amend. Writing stet next to it indicates that the want to rollback that change.

    Fashion Walk, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong

    The term was popularised by US editor, Tanya Gold. Gold adopted StetWalk as a hashtag to describe when an editor (or writer) stands up from their desk and goes out for a walk to take a physical and mental break from staring at their screen.

    How I came across StetWalk?

    I heard about it from my friend my friend Siobhan who works as an editor of children’s and young adult books. Siobhan is typical of most freelance knowledge workers, probably spending far too much time hunched over a laptop working away.

    StetWalk became a hashtag for writers and editors to normalise taking a break from their screen and getting a walk. They not only take a break, but normalise the act by sharing content about it on their social media.

    Why do I care about it as an idea?

    I think that there is a lot knowledge workers can learn from editors and writers.

    Zoom fatigue

    While we might not be in lockdown due to COVID-19 (at the moment at least), back-to-back calls on Slack | Teams or Zoom are now a normal part of our day. In an office you could get up from your desk or take a walk as the meetings set up are often a substitute for discussions that would have happened more fluidly. We lose the opportunities for breaks from the screen: a water-cooler moment, a cigarette break or a walk around the block that allows thoughts to come to the surface.

    Economic impact

    The causes of the ‘great resignation’ are multi-variant including chronic illness and fatigue due to long COVID, the challenges of employability that older workers face, but Dami Lee highlights a number of other work-related reasons including a sense of work life balance. Michael Page pointed out that remote work is also perceived as a benefit, but it also must have balance built within it.

    Mental health is an issue

    The agency that I currently work at has tactics in place to tackle mental health before it comes an issue and my boss is a ‘mental health first aider’. We have also contributed expertise to help charities looking to tackle mental burnout and health in other professions. I now have friends that talk openly about the challenges that they’ve faced maintaining good mental health.

    This is in sharp contrast to when I used to work in the oil industry in which resilience was prized and sucking it up was the name of the game.

    More related posts here.

  • World of Visuals & more things

    World of Visuals

    Interesting trends interview that covers a lot of the issues influencing the interviewer calls the world of visuals. The world of visuals is considered to be influenced by everything from a desire for authenticity and video content to the metaverse. While the metaverse is immature (despite what you may here elsewhere), the effect on culture of the world of visuals will be more apparent.

    I saw the impact of the web on graphic design way before I got to experience the web at college. The idea of the technology inspired (mostly wrong) cultural tropes. The move towards ‘b-roll’ video makes a lot of sense. The world of visual interview gives an insight to where Getty Images thinks that the world of visuals is going.

    John Le Carré

    I came across some amazing interviews with author John Le Carré. John is sadly no longer with us, but the video footage still feels very pertinent. Beyond the Karla Trilogy of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, The Honourable School Boy and Smiley’s People – I would also recommend Agent Running In The Field – which shows how well Le Carré still kept his finger on the pulse and was written as a riposte to Brexit. Brexit also persuaded Le Carré to change his nationality to Irish in the end, he died an Irishman.

    Gucci x Palace

    Following on from their collaborations with The North Face, Gucci has now collaborated with UK skate and streetwear brand Palace. Like Kim Jones over at Christian Dior, Gucci seem to be really on the zeitgeist.

    Soviet oil

    Asianometry has put together another great documentary. This time he focuses on how the Russian empire became an oil power. If you like John’s introduction to the subject area, I can recommend Daniel Yergin’s The Prize, as a Christmas read. This was required reading back when I worked in the oil and gas industry at the start of my career. Yergin covered the oil industry globally from 1850 to 1990 in this book and complements this introductory video to the subject.

  • Diwali 2022 adverts

    Diwali 2022 adverts celebrate the Hindu festival of light. I’ve previously covered Chinese New Year ads & thought I could cover Diwali this year as well.

    Ferrero Roche

    The advert features Hrithik Roshan. Mr Roshan is an Indian actor who appears in Hindi films. He has 41 credits as an actor. It very much fits into the theme of Diwali and comes from a very authentic place.

    Cadbury

    By comparison Cadbury has celebrated Diwali 2022 by focusing much more on social purpose and doing good.

    Khazanah Deepavali

    Khazanah Deepavali is the national investment fund of Malaysia and this advert takes the kind of family story approach that one also sees in a lot of lunar new year ads in Malaysia. Given that its a multicultural environment taking this line the Diwali 2022 advert ensures that it will reach beyond the Indian community. The togetherness of multiple generations of family is a common bond, even if the rituals are different. And there is a nice twist in the telling of the tale.

    RHB

    RHB is a Malaysian banking brand who define a hero as someone who does good for others with no expectation for a favour in return in order to celebrate Diwali.

    Maxis

    Maxis is a Malaysian cellphone provider, its an emotional gut punch of ad that South East Asian adverts seem to be so good at doing. It doesn’t so much tug on your heart strings, instead it turns you and your heart strings into a double bass which it plays with considerable skill. Probably the best ad I have seen for Diwali 2022.

    This ad is in sharp contrast to the high energy ad that Maxis did last year celebrating the ‘Most Influential Influencer’.

    Shopee

    Deepavali 2022 – Deepava-LIT catches the energy of their Chinese New Year adverts and keeps things relevant for Diwali.