Hi SushiVidFam,

In Southeast Asia, the festive calendar is the marketing calendar. Hari Raya, Chinese New Year and Ramadan aren't just holidays — they're the highest-intent, highest-spend, highest-emotion moments of the year. Every brand wants in, which means the feed gets crowded fast.

We've run a lot of festive campaigns — for YSL Beauty, Shopee, Lazada, Watsons, Marrybrown, Chek Hup and more. Looking back across them, the campaigns that broke through weren't the ones that spent the most. They were the ones that understood how festive audiences behave. Here's the playbook.

Lesson 1: Emotion and culture beat product features

Festive audiences aren't in a spec-sheet mood. They're thinking about family, food, tradition and togetherness. The winning campaigns wrap the product inside that feeling rather than shouting about it.

Watsons' "Jauh Di Mata, Tetap Beraya" — "far from sight, still celebrating" — leaned entirely into the emotional reality of a Raya spent apart, and drove member sales and app installs off 422K reach. Gene Martino's Raya campaign built around its ready-to-wear "Sedondon" matching-outfit line — the ultimate family-togetherness format — to reach 1.8M.

Lesson 2: Food is the universal festive language

Across every festive season, food content travels furthest. It's shareable, aspirational and endlessly localisable.

Lazada's Raya Cooking campaign had 10 influencers cook Raya recipes with ingredients sourced from Lazada — reaching 1.1M with 1.4M views. Marrybrown's "Eggstra Ong Lagi Power" paired KOLs to review a salted-egg range for CNY, and Chek Hup flooded Instagram Stories with its Coffee Brown instant coffee for Raya. If your product touches a table, put it on one.

Lesson 3: Give the season a mechanic — contests and redemptions

Festive generosity is a real behaviour. Gifts, ang pao, giveaways and limited-time offers fit the mood perfectly — and they turn passive scrolling into action.

The best example is YSL Beauty's Raya TikTok campaign: 50 TikTokers engaged in under two weeks, and the Raya gift promotion was fully redeemed within two days. Summerie x Machine's Raya selfie contest used a giveaway to drive standout engagement across 233K reach. A festive offer with a real deadline is one of the highest-converting mechanics there is.

Lesson 4: Match the roster to reach, because everyone is shopping

Festive periods are when it's worth going wide. Purchase intent is high across the entire population, so saturation pays off in a way it doesn't the rest of the year.

Shopee's Raya campaign seeded pre- and post-campaign content with 100+ influencers to hit 745K reach and 744K views. When the whole region is in buying mode, a big, well-timed roster stops being overkill and starts being table stakes.

Lesson 5: Ramadan is its own moment — respect the rhythm

Ramadan isn't just "pre-Raya." The daily rhythm of fasting, sahur and iftar changes when and how people engage, and brands that honour that rhythm connect more authentically.

Cooltopia's Ramadan campaign highlighted its cooling-water benefits in exactly the context they mattered during fasting — reaching 1M and beating the 2% engagement benchmark. Context is everything: the same product, framed for the moment, performs better.

Lesson 6: Start early — the best creators book out

The single most practical lesson: festive inventory is finite. The strongest creators get booked weeks in advance, and the content needs lead time to feel considered rather than rushed. Campaigns that lock creators early consistently get better talent, better content and better placement than those scrambling in the final fortnight.

The festive checklist

  • Lead with emotion and culture, not product specs
  • Use food wherever your product plausibly can
  • Build in a mechanic — a contest, giveaway or time-boxed redemption
  • Go wide on roster, because intent is high across everyone
  • Respect Ramadan's rhythm as distinct from Raya itself
  • Book early — the best creators disappear first

Festive seasons reward brands that show up like they belong to the celebration, not like they're crashing it. Get the cultural read right, add a reason to act, and the season does a lot of the work for you.

Planning your next Raya or CNY push? Let's map it out together — and start before everyone else does.