The Friday Ad5 rounds up five campaigns worth your time — the work that made us stop scrolling, raise an eyebrow, or occasionally feel something we weren’t expecting.
This week’s lineup has a little of everything: a 10-minute love letter to Hong Kong, a powerful road safety idea you might not have expected, a fictional country star with a biography like no other, a football legend watching himself in a K-drama role, and an e-commerce brand that looked to Kerala and a great idea.
From Hong Kong to Thailand, Australia to India — with a quick detour through 25 European markets — here’s what caught our eye this week.
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Cathay’s 80th Birthday Film Is a 10-Minute Love Letter to Hong Kong
To mark its 80th anniversary, Cathay has released “The Journey Home,” a 10-minute short film directed by David Tsui and created with Leo Hong Kong. The film follows a daughter who leaves Hong Kong to study abroad, tracing the milestones and memories the airline has shared with its passengers across generations. Tsui — who grew up near Kai Tak — worked with Cathay archivists to recreate retro boarding passes, vintage uniforms, and the airline’s beloved “lettuce leaf sandwich” livery.
The score is inspired by a Barry White tune used in Cathay ads during the 1970s and ’80s, and the film’s closing PA line — “Welcome to our home, Hong Kong” — was drawn directly from social media conversations about the emotional response that announcement triggers in returning Hong Kongers. It’s a rare piece of brand filmmaking that earns its runtime.
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Thailand’s Road Safety Sign That Only the Reckless Can See
Wrong-way motorcycle riding kills two people every hour on Thailand’s roads — and conventional traffic signs face the wrong direction to reach the riders that are causing the problem. Thanachart Insurance and YDM Thailand address the issue with brutal elegance: they flipped the problem around and installed warning signs on the reverse side of traffic signs on National Highway 202 in Roi-Et Province.
Those signs were transformed into funeral wreaths made from real motorcycle accident parts — broken mirrors, bent frames, fragments from previous crashes. The installation is visible only to riders approaching from the wrong direction, designed to withstand outdoor conditions and register at motorcycle speed. Suwannaphum Municipality has since adopted it as permanent road safety signage.
The line from the local official says it all: “If you are doing the right thing, you will never see this sign.”
Woodstock Bourbon Signed a Country Star. He May or May Not Exist.
Woodstock Bourbon & Cola has a new brand ambassador. His name is Bobby Doggins. He was born in Woodstock, Kentucky, sometime between 1978 and 1984 — the ambiguity, apparently, is intentional. By age three, he was proficient in banjo, guitar, and bareback bronco riding. By four, the organ and the motorcycle. His career was famously derailed by “strummer’s knuckle.” He has since recovered.
Created by independent agency Kerfuffle for the Asahi-owned brand, the campaign — titled “The Wood Life” — includes a debut Spotify single, a music video, a second music-video-style ad for a track called “Mars,” an album cover, and a photoshoot spot. The platform extends across OOH, social, and partnerships with Triple M and TikTok. Phase two, rolling out in the second half of the year, will take Bobby to regional Australian markets. Whether he makes it there in person remains to be seen.
Thierry Henry Is a K-Drama Lead, an Action Hero, and an Astronaut — All on a Samsung
With the 2026 World Cup six weeks out, Samsung and BBH Singapore have recruited Thierry Henry — France’s all-time leading scorer and a man who spends considerable time watching himself on television — to front a campaign for Samsung TVs. The premise is delightfully self-aware: Henry needs a TV that makes him look and sound his best.
Across a series of short social sketches directed by Matthew Pollock, he appears as an action star dangling from a helicopter, a brooding K-drama heartthrob, a football pundit, and, for reasons the campaign wisely doesn’t over-explain, an astronaut. Each scenario is pegged to a different Samsung TV feature. The campaign rolls out across 25 European markets through digital, social, and in-store channels, timed to Samsung’s claim of 20 consecutive years as the world’s number-one TV brand.
Flipkart Looks to India’s Twin Town for a New Campaign
Kodinhi is a village in Kerala with an unusually high number of twin births — a genuine real-world curiosity that 22feet turned into the creative spine of Flipkart’s SASA LELE summer sale campaign. Titled “Kodinhi Code,” the film is set in the village and captures everyday moments where everything comes in pairs, using doubles as a metaphor for the sale’s “sale par sale” double-offer proposition.
The campaign extends the idea through a “Kodinhi Store,” where purchases made by local residents during the sale period unlock double offers for all Flipkart customers. Directed by Chalees Chor and produced by Suprvlln Films, the work is live across digital platforms with amplification on Meta and in-app activations. It’s a campaign built on a data point — which, as the creative team notes, is sometimes all you need.
Seen something clever, quirky, important, or downright brilliant? Let us know.
