Thailand’s blind box market is one of the most active in Southeast Asia. The collectable toy format, where buyers don’t know which figure they will receive until they open the box, has created a specific, well-documented consumer behaviour: an obsessive, daily, life-disrupting hunt for the one piece that completes the set. KFC Thailand launched a collectible blind box. Seven days later, Bananas and Publicis Thailand launched a film about what happens to the people who do not get the one they need.
The Timing
The campaign’s creative decision to wait seven days before deploying the film is the most considered single element of M SSING PIECE. On launch day, every blind box collector buys in hope. The packaging is new. The figures are unrevealed. The possibility of completing the set is equal across every purchase. Seven days in, the reality has arrived. Some collectors have multiples of pieces they do not need. The one piece they need has not appeared. The itch begins.
Bananas CCOs Justin Gomes and Saf Sindhi, and Executive Creative Director Sean Harrison, identified that specific moment, not the launch day enthusiasm but the seven-day post-launch desperation, as the campaign’s subject and its optimal timing. The film did not promote the blind box. It validated the psychological state of everyone who had spent a week failing to find their missing piece.
The Film
M SSING PIECE was directed by Bruno Bossi through Carbon Films and Ta Production. Bossi, whose KFC Thailand film Let There Be Cake had won a Gold Lion at Cannes Lions 2025 and placed first in Ad of the Year, brought the same quality of surreal humour played with complete straight-faced commitment to the missing piece obsession.
The film turns daily life in Thailand into a tapestry of missing pieces. Every environment the protagonist moves through has something incomplete in it. The humour is specific and sustained: the psychological torture of the collector’s itch is depicted not through exaggeration but through accumulation, scene after scene of ordinary life disrupted by the specific absence of the one thing that would make it complete.
Lead actor Seadthawut Porntanawut, known as Man, carries the film with the precision that Bossi’s direction required. The D&AD jury’s comment on the Direction category described what the film achieved: “I love the quirky world that this piece sets up and that the humour is played straight, which is always the way to go for me. Many of the familiar ad choices aren’t made in this piece which gives it an appealing edge, and there is a lot of love and craft in the playful details.”
The Campaign’s Argument
Most collectible toy promotions show the toys. They display the full set, photograph each figure, emphasise the completeness of the collection and the joy of ownership. The implicit argument of every such campaign is: here is what you could have. M SSING PIECE made the opposite argument. Here is what you do not have. Here is what having everything except that one piece is actually doing to you.
The campaign’s D&AD description captures the strategic inversion precisely: while the market drowned in generic cute toy showcases, KFC Thailand validated the specific state of mind of the collector, the itch of the missing piece that changes their life. By speaking to the obsession rather than the plastic, the campaign transformed a toy promotion into a cultural commentary on the agony of the incomplete.
That inversion is the campaign’s commercial logic as much as its creative position. A collector who sees their own obsession reflected accurately on screen, who watches a film that understands exactly what the hunt feels like, has been reached by a brand at a level of psychological precision that no product shot achieves. The film does not need to show the toys. It shows the feeling that makes the toys matter.
The Broader KFC Thailand Creative Direction
M SSING PIECE belongs to a consistent creative body of work that Bananas and Publicis Thailand have built with KFC Thailand across multiple years, with Bruno Bossi as the recurring directorial voice. The films share a visual world: surreal, precise, funny because the absurdity is played completely straight rather than signalled.
Bossi’s description of the approach, as reported across the coverage of his work, consistently emphasises emotional precision alongside visual boldness. The M SSING PIECE film operates on both registers simultaneously. It is visually specific in its construction of a world permeated by absence, and emotionally precise in its identification of the exact psychological state it is addressing.
The result is a campaign that placed third in Ad of the Year globally, and was recognised at the Ciclope Asia Pacific Awards as a finalist in Branded Comedy. A toy promotion about the toy you do not have, deployed seven days after the toys went on sale, made in the specific creative register of a director who understands that the most useful thing an ad can do is make its audience feel accurately seen.
Campaign Name: M SSING PIECE
Agency Name: Bananas / Publicis Thailand / CCOs: Justin Gomes, Saf Sindhi / Executive Creative Director: Sean Harrison / Copywriter: Justin Gomes / Art Director: Sean Harrison / Production: Carbon Films / Ta Production / Director: Bruno Bossi / DOP: Liam Gilmour / Editor: Julian Redpath
Brand Name: KFC Thailand
Location: Thailand (film, digital; 2025)
