The challenge
Chinese New Year is the loudest advertising moment in the Malaysian calendar. Telcos run multi-million-ringgit emotional epics. Banks roll out family reunions. Retailers turn out musical numbers. Every one of them is fighting for the same few weeks of attention, and the brands with the biggest budgets usually win them.
CompAsia wanted in on the season, but its business does not fit that playbook. It is a one-stop platform for second-hand devices: buying, selling, trade-in, instalments. A brand built on practicality and value. Reaching for tears it has not earned would have been obvious, and audiences can tell.
So the film had to honour the season without faking the feeling, land the one-stop proposition, and be something people actually enjoyed watching.
The audience knows when a brand is reaching for tears that don’t belong to it.
The strategy
Everyone goes emotional, so we went funny
Every CNY has its songs. They play in every mall, every car, every gathering, from the first week of the season. Malaysians sing along without deciding to.
That familiarity is the setup. We took a song the whole country knows and rewrote the lyrics around CompAsia’s world, so the melody arrives exactly where the audience expects it and the words go somewhere else entirely. Buying, selling, trading in, paying by instalment, all sung to a tune already stuck in their heads.
Cinema cut
Runs longer and gives the comedy room, built for an audience watching in the dark with nothing else to do.
Social media cut
Lands the hook in the first few seconds and is built to be funny with the sound off, since most people will meet it that way.
Across both versions
- The song is the propositionThe rewritten lyrics walk through buying, selling, trading in and paying by instalment, so the message is the song rather than something sitting on top of it
- The song sets the paceIt holds the timing, so every cut, performance and visual gag lands on a beat the audience is already following
- Casting and performanceCharacters who could play the song straight while the joke lands around them
- Post-productionColour, edit and pacing tuned separately for cinema and social
In motion
The film
The outcome
A CNY moment that fits the brand
CompAsia ran the film as the anchor of their CNY campaign, in cinemas nationwide and across social.
It gave a value-led brand a CNY moment that made the audience laugh, and landed the one-stop idea at the same time.
