Other brands have been producing similar “emotional” webfilm content. We wanted to stand out from our competitors and inspire Malaysians on a deeper level and most importantly, we wanted to go beyond the surface of CNY traditions and give it a deeper meaning of what it really meant to have a blessed year ahead.

Chinese New Year has always been synonymous with prosperity. However, prosperity is often strongly associated with material wealth, aspirations and status. This diluted the core values of the true traditions of CNY.

Traditional Chinese customs, virtues have been neglected as it’s deemed burdensome and an anachronism.

We wanted to redefine the meaning of prosperity and remind Malaysians that their most important possession has always been by their side –

their loved ones.

The everyday things in life are easily taken for granted.

We do not truly appreciate the struggles that our parents had to overcome, and the sacrifices they had to make in order to provide a better life for our family.

We created a story featuring a young boy named Ah Hock, who is mocked and made fun of at school for being the son of a rubber tapper.

Frustrated after a bad day in school, he takes it out on his mom, blaming her for being poor. His mom invites him to work for a day to experience the life of a rubber tapper

After spending a day in his mother’s shoes, he learns the values of sacrifice, gratitude and acceptance.

The results:

Rubber Boy became the nation’s highest mentioned Chinese New Year advertisement of 2016.

Spontaneous brand recall for PETRONAS was 64% during and post CNY 2016 period, the highest for any brand that advertised during CNY 2016 (the next best score was only 17%)

(Source: Millward Brown Tracking 2016).

Ad recall lift was 71.3% (vs best-in-class 36.5%) and the brand awareness lift was 13.8% (vs best-in-class 8.9%) after viewing this webfilm.

(Source: YouTube Brand Lift Report)