Pepsi CNY 2024: Finish the Unfinished - Ad Analysis

In the crowded arena of Chinese New Year advertising, brands face the dual challenge of standing out while adhering to well-worn cultural themes of family, prosperity, and renewal. Pepsi Malaysia’s 2024 campaign, “Finish the Unfinished,” navigates this challenge with a clever, if slightly contrived, narrative that targets millennial and Gen Z anxieties through a lens of lighthearted humor. The ad effectively marries a cultural insight with a product-specific solution, creating a piece that is both entertaining and commercially driven.

The core insight is refreshingly modern: for many young adults, the new year isn't just about celebration, but also about the quiet pressure of unmet personal goals. The ad taps into the feeling of showing up to family gatherings with a list of failed resolutions—a relatable source of modern angst. We see this play out through three archetypes: the struggling professional, the aspiring fitness enthusiast, and the frustrated influencer. Their failures are depicted not through simple flashbacks, but through the visual language of social media—job rejections on a mock LinkedIn, fitness fails on Instagram, and influencer drama on a livestream. This execution is a smart choice, immediately signaling to a digitally native audience that the brand understands their world.

The ad follows a classic Problem-Solution structure, but with a clever turn. The initial problem presented is the characters' failure to achieve their resolutions. The film spends most of its runtime exploring this, building empathy and humor. The 'turn' comes from the youngest character, who reframes the issue. She diagnoses their grand failures as a symptom of a smaller, more mundane habit: not finishing things, exemplified by the half-drunk Pepsi cans on the table. This is where the strategy pivots from a broad emotional story to a specific product pitch. The ultimate payoff is the introduction of the 1.5L Pepsi bottle, positioned as the perfect solution to prevent the waste of unfinished cans at gatherings. The tagline, “Have a good start to finish,” neatly ties the product solution back to the initial emotional problem of unfinished resolutions.

The debrief for the team would be positive. The campaign successfully integrated a sales-driving promotion (win a gold cup) into a piece of brand-building content. The use of local KOLs and culturally specific references, like a job interview at a Mamak stall, grounds the ad firmly in the Malaysian context. While the leap from 'finishing a can' to 'finishing a life goal' is a big one, the ad's charming and humorous tone allows it to get away with it. It chose shareability and entertainment over a perfectly logical argument, which is often the right trade-off for a seasonal campaign on social media.