Santan - Pilih Pakai Hati
How Sasa hijacked election season and turned political jargon into a coconut milk ad
The Concept + My Role
It was Pemilu season — Indonesia's massive 2024 general election — and the entire country was saturated with candidates telling voters to 'pilih pakai hati' (choose with your heart). Banners, debates, TV spots: everywhere you turned, someone was urging Indonesians to make the right choice. The brief was to cut through all of it for Sasa Santan. My role was to find the cultural tension point and build a campaign around it.
The insight was simple and a little mischievous: what if we took all that solemn election rhetoric — the voting booths, the deliberation, the gravitas of national decision-making — and applied it to buying coconut milk at the pasar? The absurdity was the point. Sasa has always leaned into humor, and this was the perfect moment to remind Indonesia that the most important choice they'd make that year might just be which santan to bring home.
The Execution
The campaign mimicked the visual language of Indonesian political advertising — the earnest talking heads, the bold typography, the patriotic color palette — before revealing the punchline: this was a tutorial on how to choose healthy coconut milk. The tone walked a razor-thin line between parody and sincerity, which is exactly where the best Indonesian humor lives.
Distributed as a short-form vertical video, the spot was built for social-first consumption. It leaned into the same absurdist energy that makes Indonesian internet culture so distinct — knowing, self-aware, and deeply local. The result was a piece of content that didn't feel like an ad at all, which is exactly why it spread the way it did.
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Cultural Moment Hijacked
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Pilih Pakai Hati — The Full Campaign Film
A mock election ad that turned Indonesia's biggest political moment of 2024 into a very important public service announcement about choosing the right coconut milk.
Watch on YouTube