Carsome's rude newspaper love letters sold a pre-loved car as a CNY gift

For Malaysian car brands, Chinese New Year is the highest-stakes sales window of the year, and the festival's gifting culture sets the terms: you give new things, and the bigger and more expensive the gift, the more love it shows. Into that season came Carsome, Southeast Asia's largest car e-commerce platform, selling exactly the wrong product — second-hand cars — to consumers who also distrusted buying cars online at all.

VMLY&R COMMERCE Malaysia's answer, 'Carsome New Year: Love Is The Greatest Prosperity', ran as two-page print wraps in Malaysia's top five English- and Chinese-language dailies. Each execution opened with a huge rude headline — 'This Chinese New Year, give your mother the boot', 'Stop buying your brother new things!' — then turned into crowd-sourced love notes, hand-lettered by local artist SshownC, wishing readers a 'Happy Carsome New Year'. Prosperity was redefined as love given and received, not wealth displayed: 'wealth doesn't have to be shiny and new; it can also be shiny and used.'

The medium did as much work as the copy. Print newspapers were framed as the original pre-loved medium — still the most-read format among the older relatives who both give and receive festive gifts — so the channel itself demonstrated that pre-loved doesn't mean lesser. Opting out of the CNY brand-film genre, where every automaker competes, also bought the campaign disproportionate attention. The Kancil Awards 2022 jury gave the work a Merit as 'Carsome's Rudest Chinese New Year's Ads'.

Pre-loved medium for a pre-loved car — rude opener, warm end

The barrier was a cultural rule — new equals love — so the work argued at the level of meaning, not product features

The rude-to-tender structure lets the reader feel the reframe: judgment turning into affection, like a used car turning out to be an act of love

Two-page wraps in the top five dailies reached the older gift-buyers who fund car purchases, and the medium's second-hand status proved the message

Exiting the cluttered CNY brand-film genre made a modest print buy feel like an event

When your product contradicts a sacred ritual, don't counter-argue — perform the reframe in the ad's own structure, and pick a medium whose nature proves your point. The channel is part of the claim.

The campaign ran over Chinese New Year in February 2022 as part of Carsome's wider 'Carsome Je Lah' push to normalise buying cars online, supported by Carsome Certified assurances — a 175-point inspection, five-day money-back guarantee, one-year warranty and fixed pricing. It was VMLY&R COMMERCE's second major campaign for Carsome in Malaysia, after the 'Setelus Raya Carsome' Hari Raya work, and the pair cemented the agency's role across the region. At the Kancil Awards 2022 the work took Merit for its Chinese copywriting.