By Sandeep Joseph As the year comes to an end, and you kick off your shoes, settling into your most comfy sofa, you may just pause for a moment and think, “What on earth just happened?” Advertising has just been through its annus horribilis. Make no mistake: the advertising industry
Taylor’s Christmas Film 2025, “Between Us”, arrives in a season where everyone is trying to own emotion. Yet the strongest festive work rarely wins by being louder. It wins by being truer. For Taylor’s, the challenge was bigger than releasing a year-end film. Education brands are competing in a market
There is no screech of tyres. No slow-motion shattering glass. No swelling soundtrack telling you when to feel sad. Instead, Toyota’s latest Thai road-safety film opens with something far more uncomfortable: certainty. Aerial, clinical, almost God’s-eye in its detachment, the camera hovers over a quiet stretch of road. It looks
For a decade, marketers worshipped dashboards. Trend lines became truth. Sentiment scores replaced understanding. Mountains of social data were mistaken for insight. But according to iWISERS Founder and CEO Dr Shakthi DC, that myth is about to collapse. In 2026, she argues, data-heavy brands will lose to culture-smart ones. In
By Kunal Sinha, Chief Knowledge Officer of Ampersand Advisory If 2025 taught marketers anything, it was that attention is both cheaper and trickier than ever. In Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, brands raced to be clever, earnest, extreme and occasionally tone-deaf, sometimes in the same week. Platforms kept mutating (hello, livestream commerce
There are movie promotions that try to charm audiences. There are others that chase outrage. And then, once in a while, there’s a campaign so sharply calibrated that it doesn’t need billboards, trailers or influencers at all — just a well-aimed invitation and a knowing smirk. That is exactly what
For much of the past half-century, global culture flowed in one direction. West to East. Hollywood to the world. Silicon Valley to everywhere. Paris, London and New York set the tone; the rest localised it. TBWA\Backslash’s Eastfluence report suggests that era is quietly, decisively ending. What we are witnessing is
Astro has partnered with Naga DDB Tribal to conceive and execute the marketing campaign for its latest Astro Original series, The Exiled — a Malaysian reimagining of the iconic Hong Kong gangster drama genre. A Local Lens on a Classic Genre Set against a Malaysian backdrop, The Exiled follows the
The Association of Accredited Advertising Agents Malaysia (4As), together with The Edge Partnership Malaysia, has released its 2025 Salary and Charge-out Rate Survey, giving a current view of salary levels, charge-out rates, talent trends and agency workforce patterns across Malaysia. 4As President Tan Kien Eng said, “The 4As Salary Survey
When Papa Zola The Movie crossed the RM10 million mark within its first week in cinemas, it did more than notch up a commercial milestone. It quietly rewrote a long-held assumption in Malaysia’s creative industry: that local animation works best when it plays safe, skews young, and avoids uncomfortable truths.
