Every week, Bestads crowns a global film that deserves a second look. This week the honour goes to Five Star Chicken’s ‘Past Lives’, created by BBDO Bangkok.
The work was chosen by guest judge Mark Hendy, Executive Creative Director at HeimatTBWA in Germany. He was weighing two campaigns that both took on the same category brief: “Show how food connects families.” KFC’s film earned credit for its nuanced take on a blended home. But Five Star won the vote.
“The bonkers way Five Star Chicken’s ‘Past Lives’ navigates the trope gets it my vote as the winner,” Hendy said.
The twist: one taste outlives a lifetime
The film opens with a deceptively simple question: how long does it take to forget something? A day, a year, a lifetime? The answer for Five Star Chicken is that even a lifetime is not long enough.
The story follows Aod, a foreign man who claims to remember a past life. The moment he realises he was once Thai, memories rush in. The one that stands out above all is the taste of Five Star Chicken, the brand’s “Thai-conic Taste”. From the airport welcome to the taxi driver and the most important person from his past life, the journey is stuffed with unmistakably Thai details. The film was directed by Teerapol Suneta of Suneta House.
Why it matters for marketers
This is not just a fun ad. It is a reminder that food brands do not win on the category emotion alone. KFC and Five Star both told a story about food connecting families. The difference was the brand asset at the centre.
Five Star made its signature flavour the plot trigger, not a product shot. The taste is what unlocks Aod’s memory, so the brand becomes the point of the story. It also leans into local, absurdist Thai humour, which gives the film texture and re-watch value.
- Start from a distinctive brand asset, not the generic category emotion.
- Make the product the trigger for the memory or feeling, not a prop.
- Use local humour to add texture, but keep the asset at the centre.
For agency folks, the win is also a useful reminder about awards and memory. Judges see dozens of spots built on the same insight. The work that gets remembered is the one that takes a familiar human truth and reroutes it through an ownable brand detail. Here, the past-life device could easily have been a gimmick. It works because the reveal is always the taste.
If you want your own campaign in front of an international audience, the Bestads judging is free to enter and open to all ad formats. But the real lesson is to enter work that has a memory hook already built in.
The takeaway
If your category is crowded and every rival is telling the same warm family story, find the sensory cue only your brand owns. Build the plot around it. Then let cultural specificity make the ad impossible to forget.
Source: Campaign Brief
