Festive Campaign Video: Raya, CNY and Deepavali

Why festive films work when they are about people rather than festivals, the production calendar they demand, and how brands get them wrong.

Festive advertising in Malaysia is a category with unusually high expectations. Audiences anticipate these films, compare them, and share the good ones widely, which means the standard is set by the best work of the previous year rather than by the brand's own previous effort. A festive film that merely applies seasonal decoration to a product message is not neutral; it is visibly worse than what the audience expected.

The films that succeed are almost never about the festival. They are about something universal expressed through a festive setting: the obligation to return home, a reconciliation that has been postponed, the distance between generations, a small kindness between strangers. The festival supplies the occasion and the emotional permission, and the story supplies the reason anyone watches to the end.

The brand's position in these films is usually light, and this is the hardest thing to sell internally. A product that appears throughout undermines the emotional premise, because the audience recognises the mechanism immediately. The convention that works places the brand at the resolution, as the thing that enabled the moment or simply as the signature on it. Brands that insist on prominence throughout produce films that are watched once and not shared.

The narrative research supports this structure rather than merely the convention. Houghton (2023) developed a framework showing that story elements and narrative transportation contribute to brand storytelling effectiveness, and transportation is the state these films depend on. A viewer who is following a story stops evaluating; a viewer being sold to does not enter that state at all.

Cultural specificity is what makes these films work and what makes them risky. The details matter: the food, the dress, the rituals, the intergenerational dynamics, the specific awkwardnesses of a family gathering. Getting them right requires people from that community in the creative process rather than as a review step at the end. Getting them wrong is noticed instantly and discussed publicly.

The research on cultural appeals is a useful caution against transferring an approach between festivals. Huhmann and Albinsson (2026), in a longitudinal cross cultural content analysis of rational versus emotional appeals, documented systematic differences in how appeals are used across cultures. Chen et al. (2025) found that cultural capital appeals raise purchase intentions for higher priced products but not lower priced ones. A formula that worked for one festival and one product tier does not automatically transfer to another.

The production calendar is the practical constraint that catches brands out every year. A Raya film that airs in March needs to be shot by January, which means casting in December, concept approval in November and briefing in October. Chinese New Year, falling earlier, compresses this further. Brands that begin the conversation eight weeks out are choosing between a rushed shoot and a film assembled from library material, and both are visible.

Availability compounds the calendar problem. The best directors, crews and post houses are booked for festive work months ahead, and the weeks immediately before each festival are the least available in the year for everyone. A production planned late competes for whoever is left, at premium rates, with no schedule contingency.

Generated material has a real but bounded role here. The category depends on human performance, family dynamics and emotional authenticity, none of which generation delivers convincingly. Kirk and Givi (2025) found that perceptions of AI authorship shape consumer responses to marketing communications and can produce negative reactions in some conditions, and a festive film is the most emotionally exposed content a brand makes all year. Generation belongs in the environments, the transitions, the abstract sequences and the shots that would require an impractical location, not in the faces.

The measure of a festive film is not views, which are inflated by the season, but whether it is shared and whether it is remembered the following year. Brands that treat the festive slot as an annual commitment, building a recognisable approach over several years, accumulate an audience that anticipates their film. Brands that treat it as a seasonal obligation produce something new and forgettable each time, at the same cost.

References

Houghton, D. M. (2023). Story elements, narrative transportation, and schema incongruity: A framework for enhancing brand storytelling effectiveness. Journal of Strategic Marketing, 31(7), 1263–1278. https://doi.org/10.1080/0965254X.2021.1916570

Huhmann, B. A., & Albinsson, P. A. (2026). A longitudinal cross-cultural content analysis of rational vs. emotional appeals in US and Sweden. International Journal of Advertising, 45(4), 990–1013. https://doi.org/10.1080/02650487.2025.2525024

Chen, W. F., Wang, X., & Shao, C. (2025). When to appeal to cultural capital in advertisements? Cultural capital appeals increase purchase intentions for high- but not low-priced products. Journal of Advertising Research, 65(3), 363–374. https://doi.org/10.1080/00218499.2025.2464291

Kirk, C. P., & Givi, J. (2025). The AI-authorship effect: Understanding authenticity, moral disgust, and consumer responses to AI-generated marketing communications. Journal of Business Research, 186, Article 114984. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2024.114984