Patronas Turns Chinese New Year Into a Road Journey Reward
Patronas launched "Embrace Your Journey 2025 – CNY" in Indonesia in January 2025, positioning the brand as an everyday travel companion during the Chinese New Year season and offering activated PETRONAS Mesra Rewards members five chances to win RM15,000 each month through a structured prize draw running from 1 January to 30 April 2025.
The campaign, also titled "Mesrakan Perjalananmu 2025 – CNY," operates as a retail services activation delivered through the film medium. Its central proposition is straightforward: every drive — whether a long festive road trip, a routine daily commute, or a series of Chinese New Year errands — becomes an opportunity to earn meaningful rewards. The mechanic anchors the emotional promise in tangible incentive, asking audiences in Indonesia to see their journeys not simply as transit but as participation in something worth celebrating.
The campaign period coincides deliberately with the culturally dense first quarter of the year in Indonesia, a market where Chinese Lunar New Year carries significant social and commercial weight. PETRONAS, which operates Patronas-branded retail stations, structured the promotion so that eligible spending at PETRONAS locations entered participants into a monthly grand-prize draw, with five RM15,000 prizes available each month, according to details documented on setel.com and penangfoodie.com. A secondary mechanic allowed participants to fuel or transact through the Setel app to redeem additional rewards, extending engagement beyond the physical forecourt into the brand's digital ecosystem. The campaign contained one primary media asset — a film — and accumulated nearly three million views, with engagement figures recorded in the Clapboard archive.
PETRONAS Dagangan Berhad designed "Mesrakan Perjalananmu 2025" around a durable consumer insight: festive travel in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia concentrates driving behaviour, making the fuel and forecourt category unusually salient during Chinese New Year. The campaign name — Mesrakan Perjalananmu, meaning "make your journey more intimate" in Malay — frames the brand as a companion rather than a commodity, a distinction that separates retail fuel marketing from pure price competition.
The Indonesian retail fuel services market sits within a broader Asia-Pacific context that accounted for approximately 31% of global retail-fuel value in 2025, according to 6wresearch.com. Gasoline represented approximately 42.5% of global retail-fuel value in 2025, per globalgrowthinsights.com, underscoring how central pump-side consumer relationships remain to the category's commercial logic. In Indonesia, a country with a large vehicle-owning population and deeply embedded festive road-trip culture, the Chinese New Year period represents a natural amplification window for a brand with PETRONAS's forecourt footprint.
Competitively, Patronas faces direct pressure from Shell, which operates between roughly 42,700 and 46,000 retail and mobility locations globally, according to petronas.com data, and which has pursued its own loyalty and app-based engagement strategies across Southeast Asia. BP and other regional operators also compete for forecourt loyalty in Indonesia. Against this backdrop, the Mesra Rewards programme — accessible through the Setel app — gives PETRONAS a proprietary digital layer that Shell and BP do not replicate identically in the Indonesian market, making the loyalty mechanic both a differentiator and a retention tool at the heart of the campaign's strategic architecture.
Production credits for "Embrace Your Journey 2025 – CNY" are not publicly documented. The creating agency for this specific campaign has not been disclosed in publicly available records, and no verified quotes from the creative team have been located. It is worth noting that a separate PETRONAS Chinese New Year campaign — "PETRONAS CNY 2025 – STAY / Tetap Di Sini" — lists Accenture Song as its agency, according to kancilawards.com, but that campaign is independently credited and should not be conflated with "Embrace Your Journey 2025 – CNY."
What the film medium achieves structurally is a narrative repositioning of routine travel. The campaign draws on a creative lineage within PETRONAS festive marketing that frames driving not as a functional act but as an emotionally freighted journey shared with family. PETRONAS's 2022 festive platform "Live Again," developed with agency Ensemble and documented by Marketing Interactive, demonstrated the brand's appetite for long-form narrative and communal storytelling — a tradition that "Mesrakan Perjalananmu 2025" inherits at the retail and promotional tier rather than the brand-equity tier.
The activation layer adds tangible texture to the film's emotional framing. Per details reported on penangfoodie.com and setel.com, PETRONAS station pop-ups during the campaign period featured mandarin-orange and angpow giveaways, on-site games, vehicle checks, and branded merchandise — Chinese New Year cultural touchpoints that reinforce the film's festive narrative in physical space. The Setel app mechanic extends this into a digital channel, creating a three-way coherence between the film, the forecourt experience, and the loyalty programme. For a retail services campaign, that structural coherence is the primary creative achievement: the narrative exists not only on screen but at the pump and in the app simultaneously.
The "Embrace Your Journey 2025 – CNY" film recorded approximately 2.99 million views alongside 65 likes and 7 comments, as documented in the Clapboard archive. On a raw view-count basis, the campaign achieved substantial reach for a retail services film in the Indonesian market. The engagement ratio — likes and comments relative to total views — is notably low, a pattern common to promotional campaign films where the primary consumer action is directed off-platform toward a loyalty mechanic or in-store participation rather than social interaction with the content itself.
The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 58 out of 100. That score reflects a campaign that delivers functional competence — coherent mechanic, clear proposition, multichannel activation — without reaching the creative distinction that would elevate it above category norms. The prize structure is generous and well-communicated: five RM15,000 grand prizes per month across a four-month promotional window represents a meaningful consumer incentive, according to details verified through setel.com and penangfoodie.com. The Setel app integration and forecourt pop-up activations demonstrate operational ambition.
No independent third-party performance data — such as verified redemption rates, Mesra Rewards member growth, or campaign-attributable sales uplift — is publicly available for this campaign. What the view count does confirm is that the film found a substantial audience within Indonesia during the Chinese New Year window, which in itself validates the seasonal strategy. The campaign's structural effectiveness lies in the alignment between its emotional film narrative, its cultural timing, and its loyalty-programme mechanic — a combination designed to drive forecourt visits rather than content virality.
"Embrace Your Journey 2025 – CNY" is a retail services film campaign by Patronas for Chinese New Year in Indonesia, running from January to April 2025. It offered PETRONAS Mesra Rewards members five RM15,000 monthly grand prizes for eligible spending at PETRONAS stations or through the Setel app, according to setel.com and penangfoodie.com.
Activated PETRONAS Mesra Rewards members earned draw entries through eligible spending at PETRONAS stations during the campaign period. Five RM15,000 grand prizes were available each month from January through April 2025, according to details documented on setel.com. Participants could also transact via the Setel app to redeem additional rewards.
The creating agency for "Embrace Your Journey 2025 – CNY" has not been publicly disclosed. No verified production credits are available for this specific campaign. A separate PETRONAS Chinese New Year 2025 film — "STAY / Tetap Di Sini" — lists Accenture Song as its agency, according to kancilawards.com, but those credits belong to a different campaign.
The campaign film recorded approximately 2.99 million views, according to the Clapboard archive. Engagement in the form of likes and comments was limited, consistent with promotional retail films where consumer action is directed toward in-store participation or a loyalty app rather than social content interaction.
Patronas "Embrace Your Journey 2025 – CNY" received a Clapboard Score of 58 out of 100. The score reflects functional campaign competence — a clear mechanic, coherent multichannel activation, and a culturally timed film — without the creative distinction required to rise above standard category benchmarks in the Indonesian retail services market.
"Mesrakan Perjalananmu 2025" operates as a retail promotional activation rather than a brand-equity film, distinguishing it from prior PETRONAS festive campaigns. PETRONAS's 2022 "Live Again" platform, developed with agency Ensemble and documented by marketing-interactive.com, pursued long-form narrative storytelling. The 2025 CNY campaign prioritises loyalty-programme mechanics and forecourt engagement over standalone creative storytelling.
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