Ogilvy and Scentify Turn CNY Scent into Social Entertainment

Chinese New Year campaigns are often built around familiar festive tropes — reunion dinners, nostalgic journeys home, or the symbolism of prosperity.

This year, however, Ogilvy Malaysia and Scentify took a markedly different route: turning fragrance into episodic entertainment designed for the social-first generation.

Their latest campaign, Fabric Scented, Fortune Granted, transforms the launch of Scentify’s new Golden Breeze variant into a serialised social drama distributed primarily on Xiaohongshu (XHS), one of the fastest-growing lifestyle platforms among Chinese-speaking audiences in the region.

Rather than relying on a single hero film, the brand leaned into weekly narrative episodes, tapping into the platform’s rising appetite for short-form drama content and building anticipation as the festive season approached.

The Rise of “Scent-ertainment”

At the heart of the campaign is a fictional “Scent Feng Shui” master, portrayed by personality Elaine Wong, who demonstrates how the Golden Breeze fragrance can bring prosperity and positive energy into the home.

Each instalment blends humour, superstition, and cultural symbolism, creating a narrative arc that mirrors the emotional build-up to Chinese New Year celebrations.

The approach reflects a broader industry shift. Brands are increasingly moving beyond traditional festive advertising into culturally grounded storytelling formats designed to sustain engagement across weeks rather than minutes.

Episodic content, particularly on platforms such as XHS, has become a powerful way to keep brands present in daily conversations while aligning with audiences’ entertainment habits.

For Scentify, the storytelling was anchored in the mandarin citrus notes of Golden Breeze — an intentional cultural cue, given the fruit’s long-standing association with prosperity and renewal during the Lunar New Year period.

AI-Assisted Craft, Not Just Efficiency

Another notable aspect of the campaign lies behind the scenes.

Instead of conventional film production, the team adopted an AI-assisted workflow developed with D Moving Pictures, capturing still photography during a single-day shoot before using AI prompting to animate facial expressions and movements.

The process allowed the creative team to produce multiple episodes efficiently while maintaining visual consistency and cinematic polish.

This hybrid production model signals a growing trend in festive marketing: the use of generative AI not merely as a cost-saving tool, but as an enabler of new storytelling formats that would otherwise be difficult to produce at scale within tight campaign timelines.

Platform-First Thinking for Cultural Moments

Equally strategic was the campaign’s platform-first distribution approach.

Launching the series on Xiaohongshu allowed the brand to speak directly to culturally engaged Chinese audiences, while subsequent rollouts on Instagram extended reach to Scentify’s wider consumer base.

The initiative was supported by integrated elements including KOL collaborations and retail activations, creating a seamless link between entertainment, social conversation, and purchase occasions — a hallmark of increasingly sophisticated festive campaigns across Malaysia and the wider region.

A Glimpse into the Future of Festive Marketing

As festive advertising becomes more crowded each year, the Scentify initiative offers a telling glimpse of where brand storytelling may be heading.

Culturally rooted narratives delivered in serialised formats, powered by agile AI-enabled production, and designed specifically for the consumption behaviours of social platforms.

In a season where brands compete intensely for emotional resonance, Ogilvy Malaysia’s “scent-ertainment” experiment suggests that the future of festive marketing may not lie in louder storytelling — but in more immersive, episodic experiences that audiences choose to follow week after week.