Fortune Pharmacal continues emotional theme with ad featuring the fight of a marginal school principal

As a 58-year-old homegrown Hong Kong brand, Fortune Pharmacal’s previous ad campaigns were mostly very corporate and traditional.

However, last year Metta Communications helped it to create a thematic TV ad campaign, featuring the touching and uplifting real-life story of Paralympics Games Gold medalist So Wah-wai.

Iris Chan, the agency's GM, told Campaign Asia-Pacific that, although there was no hard-sell of the company's corporate image or medicine products, the response to the campaign was very good.

The client was confident that her team could continue this realistic and touching marketing approach for this year's campaign aimed at showing how people go the extra mile.

The campaign feature local primary school ‘Fish Traders’ School (鮮魚行學校) in Tai Kok Tsui (大角嘴) in West Kowloon. It is a marginal school with a significant proportion of its 230 students coming from working class or single-parent families. Its principal, Leung (梁紀昌), previously a senior civial servant in the Education Department, also comes from a poor working class family background.

The TVC uses past news clips of how Leung fought for the survival of the school, which was threatened with closure twice due to its under-recruitment of students.

Chan said that all the people in the ads are actual students and their parents, and the voice-over is by Leung himself. Leung speaks of his passion for teaching and how he loves his students as if they were own children. He explains, for example, how he rewards students with canned foods rather than useless gifts.

In the TVC, Leung says: “I have many children, each of them is different, yet everyone is like me. A long time ago, I was very poor, hungry and eager to go to school. Hence, however difficult, I won’t give up on any of them. They call me ‘Principal papa’. I have 230 kids."

Chan said her agency was happy that the client has guts to do something emotional, as the majority of clients in Hong Kong prefer to use a ‘rational or gimmicky’ approach. "We want to inject some positive energy into society with our ad campaigns," she said.

The ad campaign also includes a Facebook component featuring real-life stories of how ordinary people go the extra mile to find happiness.

 

 

Last year, Ogilvy Taiwan also created a touching TVC for TB Bank, based on the true story of five old and fragile men who decide to revisit their motorcycling youth after one of them passes away,  it accumulated over 450,000 views on popular mainland China video sharing website Youku less than two days after it was uploaded.