Knife Delicious launched Always Be There in Malaysia in January 2024, a Chinese New Year short film built on family bonds, perseverance, and collective hope.
Knife Delicious Turns Chinese New Year Into a Story About Perseverance
Knife Delicious released "Always Be There" — in Mandarin, 幸福加油 — as a Chinese New Year short film in Malaysia in January 2024, positioning the brand around a philosophy of mutual perseverance and enduring family connection rather than the conventional imagery of reunion feasting.
The campaign carries a single, quietly ambitious premise: happiness is not the moment a family sits down together at the dining table, but the ongoing commitment each person holds for the others in their heart as they strive toward a better life, according to Laughadvertising. That premise is articulated in both Mandarin and English across the film, allowing Knife Delicious to speak simultaneously to Chinese-speaking communities in Malaysia who hold the Lunar New Year as a defining cultural occasion and to a broader audience who recognise the universal weight of perseverance. The film's Chinese title uses the phrase 加油 — literally "add oil," colloquially meaning to keep going, to press on — as its emotional anchor, folding the brand's core product identity into a motivational call to collective resilience.
The campaign was created for Knife Delicious, the Malaysian cooking-oil brand owned by Lam Soon Group, and was published in Malaysia in January 2024, timed to the lead-up to the Lunar New Year period. According to Clapboard's ad archive, the film accumulated over 1.1 million views, more than 1,000 likes, and 33 comments, with a Clapboard Score of 66 out of 100, according to Marketresearchfuture. The agency responsible for the campaign has not been publicly disclosed. Production credits for Always Be There are not publicly documented. The campaign consists of a single film asset and represents the brand's continued investment in long-form emotional storytelling as its primary vehicle for Chinese New Year advertising in the Malaysian market, according to Jadhavarbusinessintelligence.
Knife Delicious occupies a specific and competitive position in the Malaysian cooking-oil category. Lam Soon Group describes Knife Delicious as a top-selling cooking-oil brand in Malaysia and Singapore, placing it in direct competition with well-established rivals including Saji, the dominant palm-oil brand in Malaysia with strong retailer penetration, and Vesawit, which competes across similar everyday-cooking occasions. In that context, differentiation through values-led storytelling rather than price or product-feature advertising becomes a considered strategic choice.
The global edible-oil market was estimated at approximately US$131, according to Kenresearch.56 billion in 2024, growing at a compound annual rate of around 7.92 percent through 2030, according to research published by Jadhav Arb Business Intelligence. The Asia-Pacific region accounts for a substantial share of that revenue — one estimate from the same source places the region at 54 percent of global edible-oil revenue in 2024 — with Malaysia sitting at the centre of palm-oil production and consumption. No reliable brand-specific market-share data for the Malaysian cooking-oil retail segment is publicly available for 2024.
Against this backdrop, Knife Delicious made a deliberate choice to anchor its 2024 Chinese New Year campaign in emotional territory that the category's conventional advertising rarely occupies. Where most food and drink brands in Malaysia default to warm reunion-dinner visuals during the Lunar New Year season, Always Be There pivots to the harder, quieter experience of families separated by work or circumstance who sustain each other through shared belief in a better future. That shift in framing — from celebration to aspiration, from togetherness to perseverance — reflects a reading of the Malaysian Chinese community's lived experience during a period when economic uncertainty has made the idealised reunion a more complex emotional event than pure festivity. The campaign's hashtag, #幸福加油, reinforces this positioning by blending the Mandarin concept of happiness with an explicit instruction to keep striving.
Knife Delicious structured Always Be There as a narrative short film rather than a conventional television commercial, a format choice that aligns with the brand's documented history of long-form Chinese New Year storytelling in Malaysia. Production credits for the 2024 Always Be There campaign are not publicly documented, and the agency responsible for the work has not been disclosed.
The film's creative architecture is built around the dual meaning of 加油 — a phrase that functions simultaneously as a colloquial expression of encouragement and a literal reference to oil, the brand's core product. This kind of linguistic layering is a demanding creative act in the context of Chinese New Year advertising, where the category is crowded with films that reach for emotional resonance without finding a genuine conceptual connection to the brand they represent. By selecting a phrase so embedded in everyday Mandarin speech and anchoring it to a product that is itself a daily household essential, the campaign creates a coherent symbolic logic: the oil that fuels the family meal is the same spirit that fuels the family's collective perseverance.
The campaign's bilingual execution — presenting its central message in both Mandarin and English — is consistent with the linguistic reality of the Malaysian Chinese market, where code-switching between languages is common in media consumption and interpersonal communication. The film's description, published in Mandarin with a full English translation, extends that accessibility without diluting the cultural specificity of its Lunar New Year framing. This approach positions Always Be There within the tradition of Malaysian Chinese New Year short films that have demonstrated meaningful reach through digital platforms, a format Knife Delicious itself helped establish with an earlier campaign that, according to data reported by Laugh Advertising, exceeded 3.3 million Facebook views following its launch in late December 2019.
Always Be There achieved measurable digital reach in Malaysia. According to Clapboard's ad archive, the 2024 Chinese New Year film recorded 1,120,955 views, 1,051 likes, and 33 comments at the time of archiving. These figures are as reported to Clapboard's platform and have not been independently audited.
The view count is a substantive number for a branded short film in the Malaysian market, particularly for a cooking-oil brand operating without the media budgets of multinational food and drink conglomerates. For context, Knife Delicious's own prior benchmark — the 2019 short film also titled Always Be There — exceeded 3.3 million Facebook views, as reported by Laugh Advertising, suggesting the 2024 iteration achieved meaningful but more modest organic reach relative to that earlier high-water mark.
The engagement ratio — just over 1,000 likes against more than 1.1 million views — points to a film that was watched widely but generated limited active response, which is a pattern common to emotionally weighted CNY short films that audiences consume rather than visibly endorse. The comment count of 33 is low relative to total views, indicating limited community conversation around the content.
The Clapboard Score of 66 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its emotional strategy competently and benefits from a strong conceptual foundation in the 加油 dual meaning, but stops short of the creative distinction that has defined the most awarded Lunar New Year advertising in the region, according to Therakyatpost. No verified recognition for Always Be There has been identified at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or the WARC Awards.
Always Be There is a Chinese New Year short film released by Knife Delicious in Malaysia in January 2024. The film centres on perseverance and mutual family support, using the Mandarin phrase 加油 — meaning both "add oil" and "keep going" — to connect the brand's product to an emotional message of collective hope, as documented by Clapboard's ad archive.
According to Clapboard's ad archive, the 2024 Always Be There film recorded 1,120,955 views, 1,051 likes, and 33 comments. These figures are as reported to the platform and have not been independently audited. The brand's 2019 film of the same name exceeded 3.3 million Facebook views, as reported by Laugh Advertising, providing a prior performance benchmark.
幸福加油 combines the Mandarin word for happiness with 加油, a phrase meaning both "add oil" and "keep going". In the context of the Knife Delicious campaign, the phrase functions as a motivational declaration — urging families to persevere toward a better life — while simultaneously referencing cooking oil, the brand's core product, creating a coherent conceptual link between message and brand.
The agency behind the 2024 Always Be There campaign for Knife Delicious has not been publicly disclosed, and production credits are not publicly documented. The film was published in Malaysia in January 2024 and was created for Knife Delicious, a cooking-oil brand owned by Lam Soon Group, which describes Knife Delicious as a top-selling brand in Malaysia and Singapore.
The Knife Delicious Always Be There campaign received a Clapboard Score of 66 out of 100. The score reflects a campaign with a strong conceptual foundation built around the dual meaning of 加油, executed with cultural specificity for the Malaysian Chinese New Year market, but without the creative distinction that defines the region's most recognised Lunar New Year advertising work.
Always Be There sits within a competitive field of Malaysian Chinese New Year short films that use emotional family narratives to build brand affinity during the Lunar New Year season. The campaign distinguishes itself by pivoting from conventional reunion-dinner imagery toward perseverance and mutual aspiration, a framing that competitors including Saji and Vesawit have not consistently occupied in their festive advertising strategies.
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