How To Turn Vibes Into Invoice: Emotions Are The New Financial Instruments
Introduction
This is the story of how 114 million people were invited to a dinner they’ll never forget. And how, along the way, we built a blueprint for inviting the world into your world.
47 Seconds of ...
In 2025, McDonald’s launched a new campaign. Just a simple ad: two people, sharing a meal. Before I tell you anything, watch it. Then ask yourself: Did you feel something? Or nothing at all?
Kilig
If you’re from the West, you probably thought: “Okay, that was sweet… but so what?”
Exactly. That reaction is the point.
Western audiences don’t have the emotional vocabulary for what they just saw. But 114 million people on this planet do, and some of them watched that ad with tears in their eyes. So who are they?
Kilig is a Tagalog word with no direct English equivalent.
It’s the electric, weightless moment between eye contact and confession. The look that says more than friendship, but doesn’t quite land on love.
For millions, it’s a common emotional language. For the rest, it takes a Hollywood budget to simulate it.
That single word launched McDonald’s to emotional stardom faster than any media plan ever could. The campaign was a huge success, with aftershocks across social media. They got the people to do the heavy lifting, by handing them an emotional grenade, and boy they detonated it on TikTok. People shared their own kilig moments and tagged McDonald's.
You might think that’s the whole trick. It’s not. Kilig was a rosy-tinted patch of an impressionist painting. Let's step back and see the whole masterpiece.
Autopsy
To serve that feeling on a silver tray, McDonald’s called in the big guns: BarDa, the love team of Barbie Forteza and David Licauco. They’re the two actors in the ad. These two time-traveled into public affection. Their explosive chemistry in Maria Clara at Ibarra, a historical drama that aired from late 2022 to early 2023. The show made them household names.
The series took Barbie’s modern-day character, Klay, and dropped her into the 19th-century world of José Rizal’s revolution-era Philippines, where David’s character Fidel simmered with silent longing. The show was a love letter to Filipino identity, with a slow-burn romance at its heart.
You see, you need history as the scaffold, identity as the texture and emotions as the door, to enter this cathedral of meaning, and of course, avatars, a reigning love team.
So by the time McDonald’s launched their 2025 ad campaign starring BarDa, the audience didn’t need introductions. They were already invested: emotionally, nostalgically, and borderline irrationally.
That’s why the campaign hit so hard. It didn’t waste time trying to make us feel something new. It took a national obsession and plugged it into a brand.
McDonald’s wasn’t the first brand to tap emotional myth, but they were the first to make it unforgettable.
The rest? They tried to whisper it like Netflix, or shout it like… Kilig C (I won’t name names).
Let’s leave them where they belong: oblivion.
Romanticised, strategised like a fairytale then mesmerised, magnetised by the perfect scale
Now go to Netflix.
Type “kilig” into the search bar. You'll see some RomCom.
Why did Netflix bother figuring this out?
Because emotions are not universal. Each one of us has a slightly different emotional granularity and lexicon to describe how we feel. Netflix knows it, and profiting widely from it.
Someone who is looking for kilig movies on Netflix, does not necessarily want to watch a movie from Philippines, they want to watch the moments, they want to feel the emotion by visualisation and that's how you keep people in your service.
Welcome to personalization by clustering.
By 2025, you already know the truth:
You can’t make one product speak to everyone.
But you can meet them halfway. Diversify your product into categories, and serve the categories.
Framework (From Seraph to Soil)
A top-down blueprint of how abstract emotion becomes customer churn. I identify four components, the emotion, the history, the perception and the identity.
The Emotion
This is the genesis. But that's not enough on it's own to make commercial value. It does need a medium to propagate.
Question: What do we want people to feel before they think?
The History
The best stories survive and become collective memories, a fancy phrase for market penetration, or brand awareness. History is the medium. No emotion sticks without memory. It gives the emotion somewhere to echo.
Key Question: What familiar chord does this campaign strike in the audience’s collective memory?
Perception
You can name emotions, invent them, but people should be able to perceive it as well. Kilig is meaningful in Philippines, and spelling mistake in Australia. Emotions are not universal, your environment defines your emotions.
Key Question: Does your audience have the cultural/emotional literacy to even register this signal?
Identity
This is the part they own. It’s where emotion and perception are unifying into something personal. Identity is what they see in themselves when they watch your ad.
Key Question: Does this reflect who they want to be, or who they used to be?
Caveat
Did the creatives think in frameworks?
Of course not.
Genius acts. This is the autopsy.
They felt something and connected the dots. But, we can construct our version, we won't be original, unless we twist it. Even with knowing all of these components, it is still difficult to re-produce a commercial like this, it takes a genius to transcend abstraction.
I might have misread or miss something in this analysis, but I found at least two examples that fits like a glove:
Dove - Real Beauty Sketches
Watch it here
- Emotion: Taps into self-perception free fall from tower of impossible beauty.
- History: Your mom wore makeup, She passed the brush to you. You’ll pass it to your daughter.
- Perception: Women in the West has seen enough extreme beauty thanks to modelling, so they understand it in a heartbeat.
- Identity : This was talking about most women, maybe in 2025 with all the awareness this ad doesn't make much sense, but people connected with it back then
NFL – I Am Somebody
Watch it here
- Emotion: Evokes pride and a sense of belonging.
- History: Reflects the NFL’s evolving stance on inclusivity and representation.
- Perception: Showcases diverse athletes, challenging traditional stereotypes.
- Identity : Inspires marginalised communities by affirming their place in sports.
The Fifth Element (Avatar)
Of course there is more.
When crafting emotional experiences, you always need a conduit. Someone or something that delivers the emotion and binds it to the audience.
Now, this conduit takes two forms; External or internal.
External Conduit – The God Complex Character
Think: BarDa. Think Clooney in a Nespresso ad. They’re archetypes with cheekbones and charisma. They carry the burden of emotional projection. We want to be them, or be chosen by them.
- Used when you’re appealing to collective imagination or social identity.
- Why it works: We trust what others believe. If everyone is in love with BarDa, then loving BarDa is an identity shorthand.
Internal Conduit – The Mirror Effect (You)
This is what Dove does. It doesn’t give you someone to look up to. It hands you the mirror, look again. It’s raw, personal, and intimate.
- Used when you’re speaking directly to the individual’s inner world.
- Why it works: The viewer fills the space. They become both the storyteller and the subject. That’s high emotional leverage with minimal character cost.
The Emotional Arms Race
There is no turning back, the race started years ago, and it’s only accelerating. AI is coding and blockchain enforces trust, the only currency will remain for us is humanity, emotions and feelings.
And that might sound beautiful. Until you see how it’s spent.
You’ve got three choices with emotion:
Cash out. Invest. Or harvest.
Most brands? They go for the fast buck.
They take one of the noblest human feelings, slap it on a logo, and call themselves “brand whisperers.”
At first? It prints money. Feels like magic.
But soon, it’s sedation. Then desperation.
Because when you attach a deep, sacred emotion to a cheap product, you dilute it.
That McDonald’s ad? It was a curtain call for a love story no one wanted to end.
But like all beautiful things; It did.
And now the absence lingers, maybe forever. And that’s what makes it unforgettable.