Air Selangor Turns CNY2025 Into a Story About Absence
Air Selangor's "The Empty Chair" is a Chinese New Year 2025 short film, released in Malaysia in January 2025, that tells the story of two brothers confronting the unexpected absence of their younger sister during the festive reunion, inspired by a true-life account and distributed exclusively through Air Selangor's own Hydro Hub content platform.
The campaign — also titled "Air Selangor Chinese New Year 2025 | 空椅子 | The Empty Chair | Kerusi Kosong" — centres on siblings Keong and Meng as they sit with a void that the season of togetherness makes impossible to ignore. Their younger sister, Xiao Li, is missing from the family table, and the weight of that empty chair becomes the campaign's defining image. Published on 29 January 2025, the film belongs to the Public Utility category and was produced by Petak and Peti TV Production, as documented by Ads of the World. In Malaysia, where Chinese New Year remains one of the most commercially and emotionally charged cultural moments of the year, the campaign makes a deliberate choice to step away from service messaging and towards something far more intimate.
"The Empty Chair" is one component of Air Selangor's 2025 festive video programme titled Bahagia, a series that also includes a Hari Raya film and a Deepavali film, according to reporting by LinkedIn and Marketing Interactive. That programme context matters: Air Selangor is not treating CNY2025 as an isolated campaign moment but as part of a sustained, year-round content commitment built around Malaysia's multicultural festive calendar. The Hydro Hub platform, described by Air Selangor as a one-stop content platform for all, serves as the exclusive home for the film. Clapboard, which archives and evaluates global advertising creative, awards "The Empty Chair" a Clapboard Score of 76 out of 100, recognising the campaign's emotional clarity and strategic coherence within the public utility sector.
Air Selangor serves approximately 9.3 million consumers across Selangor, Kuala Lumpur, and Putrajaya, according to hydrohub.airselangor.com, with later figures from the same source indicating growth toward approximately 9.6 to 9.62 million connections as population and infrastructure expand. That scale defines the strategic logic of "The Empty Chair": when a utility already supplies virtually every household in its regulated territory, competitive acquisition is not the goal. Brand trust and emotional relevance are.
In Malaysia, the Chinese New Year festive period generates significant consumer sentiment and media attention, creating an environment where branded content that speaks authentically to family experience can reach audiences far beyond a utility's conventional communication channels. Air Selangor operates in a regulated public-utility category where, as documented by Hydrohub Airselangor, it runs 34 water treatment plants and more than 31,000 kilometres of pipe infrastructure, distributing approximately 6,500 million litres of water per day against a demand of approximately 5,400 million litres per day. A brand with that operational footprint has little to gain from promotional advertising and everything to gain from cultural belonging.
The strategic pivot toward true-life storytelling also positions Air Selangor distinctly against peers in the Malaysian public utility space. Competitors such as Tenaga Nasional Berhad and Telekom Malaysia have historically used festive campaigns to drive product awareness or tariff messaging. Air Selangor's choice to anchor "The Empty Chair" in a documented real-life sibling story, without a product call to action, signals a more sophisticated content strategy — one that treats the Hydro Hub platform as a media asset in its own right rather than a distribution afterthought. The campaign's inclusion in the broader Bahagia programme, as reported by marketing-interactive.com, further demonstrates that this is a structured editorial approach rather than a one-off festive execution.
"The Empty Chair" was produced by Petak and Peti TV Production, as documented by Ads of the World and corroborated by Weekender Com My. The film is a single-asset campaign — one film, one platform, one emotional argument — and that restraint is itself a creative decision. Rather than deploying a multi-format campaign across paid media, Air Selangor and its production partner built something closer to a short drama than a commercial, trusting the narrative to do the work that media spend might otherwise do.
The central creative device is the chair itself. An empty seat at a reunion table is an image that carries immediate resonance across cultures, but within the Malaysian Chinese New Year context it lands with particular precision, because the reunion dinner is the ritual heartbeat of the festive period. Keong and Meng's gradual reckoning with Xiao Li's absence unfolds through that physical space, allowing the film to articulate loss and longing without exposition. The Kerusi Kosong framing — the Malay-language title used alongside the Chinese character 空椅子 and the English title — also speaks to Air Selangor's position as a utility serving a genuinely multilingual Malaysian public, and signals that the emotional territory of the film is not ethnically bounded.
Production credits beyond the production house attribution to Petak and Peti TV Production are not publicly documented in available sources. What is documented, by Ads of the World and linkedin.com, is the film's exclusive release through Air Selangor's Hydro Hub, a platform positioning that turns the creative work into a reason to engage with the brand's own digital property. The multilingual titling — Malay, Chinese, and English all present in the campaign's full name — reflects a production philosophy aligned with Malaysia's multicultural audience rather than a single community demographic.
No independently verified third-party performance data for "The Empty Chair" — including view counts, engagement rates, or paid media reach figures — is publicly available at the time of writing. The campaign was documented by Ads of the World upon its publication on 29 January 2025, and coverage appeared in weekender.com.my and linkedin.com, according to those sources, but no verified audience or conversion metrics have been disclosed by Air Selangor or Petak and Peti TV Production.
Clapboard awards "The Empty Chair" a score of 76 out of 100, reflecting the campaign's structural strengths: a clearly defined emotional premise grounded in a true-life story, disciplined creative restraint, culturally specific but broadly legible imagery, and a distribution strategy that builds platform equity for Hydro Hub rather than renting audience attention through paid channels. The score acknowledges the campaign's limitations in documented reach and the absence of agency transparency, which prevents a fuller assessment of strategic and executional depth.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness argument rests on three pillars. First, emotional authenticity: a true-life inspiration for a festive sibling narrative is a meaningful differentiator in a market where CNY2025 advertising is heavily convention-driven. Second, platform coherence: exclusive distribution through Hydro Hub turns a single film into a reason to visit Air Selangor's own content ecosystem, as reported by hydrohub.airselangor.com. Third, programme continuity: as part of the Bahagia series documented by marketing-interactive.com, "The Empty Chair" contributes to a cumulative brand narrative rather than functioning as a standalone asset. Together, these elements suggest a campaign built for long-term brand equity rather than short-term metric performance.
"The Empty Chair" is a Chinese New Year 2025 short film by Air Selangor, released in Malaysia in January 2025. Inspired by a true-life story, it follows siblings Keong and Meng as they confront the absence of their younger sister, Xiao Li, during the festive reunion season, using the image of an empty chair to explore sibling bonds and loss.
Petak and Peti TV Production produced The Empty Chair for Air Selangor. This attribution is documented by Ads of the World and weekender.com.my. Beyond the production house credit, individual director or creative director names are not publicly available in current documentation of the CNY2025 campaign.
Air Selangor's Kerusi Kosong film is available exclusively on Hydro Hub, Air Selangor's own content platform at hydrohub.airselangor.com. The exclusive distribution model is documented by Air Selangor and Ads of the World, positioning Hydro Hub as the brand's one-stop content destination rather than distributing through third-party video platforms.
Yes. Air Selangor states that The Empty Chair is inspired by a true-life story, as documented by Ads of the World and the campaign's own description on the Hydro Hub platform. The real-life inspiration underpins the narrative of siblings Keong and Meng missing their younger sister Xiao Li during Chinese New Year.
The Empty Chair is one part of Air Selangor's 2025 Bahagia festive programme, which also includes a Hari Raya film and a Deepavali film, according to marketing-interactive.com. The programme reflects a year-round multicultural content strategy built around Malaysia's festive calendar, treating storytelling as a sustained brand-building tool rather than a single seasonal activation.
Air Selangor's The Empty Chair received a Clapboard Score of 76 out of 100 from Clapboard, the global advertising archive and creative intelligence platform. The score reflects the campaign's emotional authenticity, disciplined single-asset creative approach, and platform-building distribution strategy, balanced against limited public documentation of production credits and third-party performance data.
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