Capitalising on the tearjerker viral video

Thai Life Insurance has today released Opportunity, its latest tear-tugging emotional rollercoaster of a short film.

In Opportunity, the theme is overcoming adversity: bravery, strength and doing right by others. It’s an everyday hero tale, of the type the brand has become renowned for. You watch this rooting for the female lead and genuinely invested in her wellbeing.

As you probably did when you watched their other viral tearjerkers: #FollowTheFather (4.9 million YouTube views), Street Concert (8 million), Unsung Hero (28.9 million) and Garbage Man (4.1 million).

Thai Life has become synonymous with heart-wrenchingly brilliant cinematic TV spots in recent years. But it still remains rare for an insurance company to incite such emotion from audiences. Thai Life has reached deep connections with audiences through genuine, honest emotive storytelling that people beyond its homeground of Thailand can identify with. These emotional narratives are in harmony with one of the brand’s core beliefs, “Value of Life”.

The film starts out with our hero, a smartly dressed middle-aged woman, thanking an employer for her job interview. His reply, “How do you think opportunities arise?” We learn of our hero’s back story. We see her coming from two very different worlds—privileged and underprivileged.

In the first instance, we learn that she is a self-made woman and created her own opportunities in life. And when the viewer is asked, “Or do opportunities arise when you have never had them before?”, we learn the real path our hero has taken to create her own opportunities in life. And it’s a mighty sad tale.

She is kicked out of her home with her child and forced to live on the streets, only for her little boy to tragically die in her arms. Overcome with grief, she mourns on gritty Bangkok streets.

One day a little homeless boy coughing in his mother’s arms stirs our hero from her misery and she realizes that it’s now her duty to help save this little boy and mother from her same fate—to create opportunities in life for others. The scene speaks to a bigger spiritual belief, widely held in Thailand: When she gives her last bao, held tightly in her hand to the baby, it symbolizes how “When you let something go, you will be free for even more opportunities".

So she picks herself up and does whatever she can to find work. Her persistence pays off and after landing an interview at an insurance firm (we assume Thai Life) she gets the job.

In the final scene we see our main character desperately running in a hospital juxtaposed with scenes of a dying boy being denied a life-saving operation because his mum doesn’t have insurance papers.