Dealing with the 'pig' in the room, how brands market CNY in a sensitive Malaysia

IT MUST be a stressful time to be in advertising right now. You spend months and thousands of ringgit to come up with brand ideas, produce billboards and newspaper ads, make videos that will be skipped after five seconds on YouTube - only to have all of that work undone by one Facebook post from some guy who mistook wagyu beef for pork.

Even when brands are not going out of their way to market non-halal imagery, the case of Malaysia Airlines' Going Places magazine - which came under fire last week when social media users thought that a beef dish in one of its pages was pork - is an example of how hyper-sensitive Malaysians can be when it comes to this subject.