The challenge
Chinese New Year advertising is loud and predictable. By the second week of January, the audience has watched twenty CNY ads and is already bracing for the next emotional appeal.
Compasia is a one-stop platform for second-hand devices: buying, selling and instalment plans. It’s a brand built on practicality, value and easy service. Forcing that into the season’s emotional template would have felt wrong.
The brief was a CNY film that did three things at once: honour the season without forcing the fit, land the one-stop idea, and earn attention people would actually enjoy.
The audience knows when a brand is reaching for tears that don’t belong to it.
The strategy
Playful, not tearful
While the rest of CNY went emotional, Ong in One went playful. Every CNY has its songs. They play in malls, in cars and at every gathering, and Malaysians sing along without thinking.
We took a CNY song every Malaysian would know and rewrote the lyrics around Compasia. The melody stayed where the audience expected it. The words went somewhere completely different, landing the one-stop idea inside lyrics the audience couldn’t help but follow.
Cinema cut
Built to cinema standards. Longer and fuller, with room for the comedy to breathe, for audiences watching in focused darkness.
Social media cut
Shorter and sharper, made for sound-off scrolling. It lands the comedic hook in the first few seconds.
Across both versions
- Casting and performanceCharacters who could play the song straight while the joke lands around them
- Direction and cinematographyComedic timing, visual confidence, and lyrics that carry the comedy
- Music production and audioThe arrangement tuned to match expectation, then turned at the right beats
- Post-productionColour, edit and pacing tuned separately for cinema and social
In motion
The film
The outcome
A CNY moment that fits the brand
Ong in One gave Compasia a CNY moment that didn’t ask the audience to cry. It asked them to laugh, and made the one-stop idea land at the same time.
For a value-led brand, it was a festive moment that matched the brand’s real character: practical, useful and designed around how people actually upgrade, wrapped in a comedic idea that travelled by word of mouth.
