Tet 2027 advertising: lessons from Prada's handmade ads

Before Tết 2026 (the Lunar New Year, Vietnam's biggest shopping and advertising season), a company that makes Tết commercials with AI told Tuổi Trẻ, a major Vietnamese daily, that a 45-second video used to cost VND 2.5 billion, while an AI version costs about 20% of that. The company planned to make 10,000 videos for the Tết season. By the 2026 holidays, according to B&T, Levi's said its clay-animation team needed 4 hours of shooting for every second of animation.

The two numbers point in opposite directions but tell one story. AI has made polished images far cheaper, so a glossy frame no longer shows how much work a brand put in. What is scarce now is the time of real people, and a few big brands have started to show it off.

Our view at 126Insights on Tet 2027 advertising: Vietnamese brands do not need to drop AI, but the part viewers actually see should carry the maker's fingerprints. The most useful thing to copy from Prada this season is that it put the method into the campaign name, so the handmade process became the message. A small brand can make its own version with a phone, a pen and a few evenings.

The 2026 holidays: Prada, e.l.f. and Levi's show off handmade work

In late October 2026, Prada launched its holiday campaign “Drawing Prada: Animated by Hand”, featuring Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Chen Haoyu and Luther Ford (Variety). According to Vogue Adria, every frame was drawn by hand. The animation was directed by John Pomeroy. Per Cartoon Brew, he joined Disney in 1973, drew for Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too, and later supervised the animation of John Smith in Pocahontas.

On Nov 2, 2026, e.l.f. released “e.l.f. Made to Stand Out”, the brand's first holiday campaign. It is a 60-second stop-motion video (animation shot one frame at a time and stitched together), directed by Cami Kwan and narrated by Alan Cumming. According to AWN, the clay characters were sculpted one by one, the sets were built in miniature, and even the e.l.f. products were re-sculpted; AWN also reports that the animation team was all women and the puppet team was 90% women. According to Cosmetics Business, e.l.f. left generative AI out of this campaign.

Levi's chose clay for “Let's Get Fuzzy”, its 2026 global holiday campaign: a film about a Fuzzyeti named Gus, used to sell sweaters and cold-weather clothing (Brand Innovators). In the company's press release, quoted by MediaPost and Brand Innovators, Kenny Mitchell, Levi's global CMO, called the campaign “the celebration of the craft and human creativity synonymous with the Levi's brand”.

On Nov 3, 2026, Sarah Mahoney opened her MediaPost piece with “Take that, AI-created holiday ad spots” and observed that handmade ads are “making a bit of a comeback”. Trendhunter also put “Anti-AI Celebrity Campaigns” in its Top 65 Marketing Trends for October 2026. That entry covers Blue Diamond Almond Breeze and the Jonas Brothers making a video that mocks low-quality AI ads.

Keep this in proportion: it is a counter-signal from a few large campaigns, not an overwhelming wave. In Vietnam, many brands brought AI into the story of their Tết 2026 ads, such as LG's music video “Tết Nhất có AI” or the Pepsi and Google Gemini collaboration (Advertising Vietnam).

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Why does effort look more believable as AI ads get cheaper?

Vietnamese elders say “của một đồng, công một nén”: roughly, the goods cost a coin, but the labor is worth an ingot. The item may be cheap, yet the work of the person who made it is what people value. You see this every Tết. A bánh chưng (the square sticky-rice cake families eat at Tết) bought at the market may be neater, but the one wrapped at home, corners a little crooked, is the one the whole family talks about, because someone sat up all night watching the fire.

Advertising works the same way. When anyone can produce beautiful images at low cost, beautiful images stop being a signal. Viewers start asking a different question: did someone spend real time on what I am watching?

Data from overseas markets leans this way. According to eMarketer, citing a survey of 8,000 people in the US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia and Singapore run by Klaviyo and Datalily in December 2025, only 7% said marketing content that is clearly AI-made makes them trust a brand more, while 31% said they trust it less. A survey by IAB and Sonata Insights of 505 Gen Z and Millennial consumers in the US and 104 advertising executives found that 82% of executives think young people feel positive about AI ads, but only 45% of young people do (IAB). Neither sample includes Vietnam, so read them only as outside signals.

Per Variety and B&T, Pomeroy gave his reason in a behind-the-scenes video released by Prada: “There's a very distinct and purposeful reason to do hand-drawn animation, and that's to see that there's value in the human touch.”

What Prada teaches: make the method the message

Prada put the process ahead of the finished film. You know from the campaign name that it was drawn by hand before you watch a second of it. The brand also released a behind-the-scenes video in which Pomeroy himself explains why he chose hand drawing (Cartoon Brew).

B&T describes the hand-drawn choice as an aesthetic decision. The reading of the campaign as a response to AI ads comes from the press, including Variety, DesignRush and B&T. For brand builders, this is worth noticing: Prada shows viewers what it did, and the press supplies the meaning.

Put the three campaigns side by side and there are three ways to show effort:

• Put the method in the name: Prada's “Animated by Hand”.
• Talk about the makers: e.l.f.'s all-women animation team, per AWN.
• Measure the effort with a number anyone understands: 4 hours of shooting for 1 second, a figure Levi's published itself via B&T.

The cost needs to be stated plainly too. Variety notes that the traditional approach “may come with steeper production costs”. Prada can pay that. A small shop needs a different version.

Tet 2027 advertising: how can a small brand show its effort?

Start with one question: which step of making your product is done by hand, and has your customer never seen it?

Suppose a small mứt gừng (candied ginger) shop in Huế is preparing for Tết 2027. It cannot hire an artist who once drew for Disney, but it already has what a film crew would have to build: hands slicing ginger, a pan for simmering the candy, wrapping paper. A few things this shop could do:

• Shoot stop-motion on a phone: fix the phone in place, photograph each step of wrapping one box of candied ginger, and stitch the frames into a 15-second clip. A slightly jerky result is fine, because the jerkiness shows that someone arranged every frame.
• Hand-draw the packaging: each gift box gets a brush stroke or a handwritten line, so no two boxes are quite the same.
• Film behind the scenes: a full day of simmering from morning to afternoon, lightly edited, with the rising steam left in.
• Put the method in the campaign name, something like “Hand-simmered candy, handwritten boxes”. The name already tells half the story.
• Find your own number, like Levi's “4 hours for 1 second”: the hours spent on one batch, the number of boxes written by hand. The number must be counted for real.

This is where small brands have an edge. The maker is often the shop owner, customers can meet the maker, and the story already exists, so nobody has to stage it. Our piece on how small brands use content to beat big ones (in Vietnamese) goes deeper into this.

Use AI behind the scenes, keep hands in what viewers see

AI suits the work customers never see: drafting ideas, sketching a storyboard (a panel-by-panel plan of the scenes) before building sets, writing many versions of headlines and captions to test ads. What reaches the screen should come from hands: the frames, the packaging, the voice, the faces and hands of the people who make the product.

The money can follow the same logic. If AI cuts the cost of drafting and testing, the savings can pay for a few days of work from an illustrator or a sculptor. Viewers recognize real people through small details, much like the balance between a human voice and a brand voice in digital communication (in Vietnamese).

If you say “handmade”, be ready to prove it

Showing effort only pays when it is true. A “hand-drawn style” video made with AI and labeled handmade does more harm than an openly AI-made ad, because it burns the very thing in short supply: trust. A few rules to keep:

• Say “handmade” only for the handmade part. If the characters are hand-drawn but the backgrounds use AI, say which is which. Do not write “100% handmade” unless you can prove every step.
• Keep a record of the process: photos of each step, sketches, source files, the names of the makers, the dates. When someone asks, the brand can answer immediately.
• Count the effort, do not estimate it to look good. One number that customers expose as false will wipe out the story behind it.

Before you lock your Tết 2027 brief, try a task that takes about half an hour: list every step in making your product and mark the steps where a human hand is involved. The marked steps are where the camera goes, and maybe the campaign name too.