For the latest Campaign Shoutout, the spotlight goes to a product, not an ad. "One Noodle" took this year's PR Lotus Grande for Haraku Ramen, created by BLKJ Havas, Singapore, with media agency Havas Moonfolks, Jakarta. The work also won a PR Lotus Gold, a Direct Lotus Silver, and a Design Lotus Bronze. Haraku earned its way into Indonesia's gaming culture by solving a problem most brands never noticed was there, and took home the Grande for Breakthrough in PR.
Haraku Ramen plays in a crowded category. Instant noodles are a national staple in Indonesia, and a handful of large brands hold most of the market. Rather than compete for the whole country at once, Haraku went after one audience it understood well, and went after it precisely.
That audience was gamers. Indonesia has over 100 million of them, one of the largest gaming populations in Southeast Asia. Snacking runs alongside play, but the two never quite fit together. A controller takes two hands. A bowl of noodles takes two hands. Something has to give, and it is usually the game.
The friction was physical, not emotional. Gamers already loved noodles and ate while they played. The only thing in the way was the simple mechanics that eating required hands. Hands they needed for their controllers, consoles, and keyboards.
Haraku and BLKJ Havas built the answer around that exact constraint. The One Noodle is a single unbreakable strand, 3.5 meters long, made with an egg-enriched dough engineered for strength and slurpability. This allowed gamers the ultimate experience of hands-free ramen slurping.The packaging carried a U-shaped cutout to make the slurp cleaner. Every design decision traced back to the way a gamer's hands are already occupied.
This is closer to interaction design than to food. Haraku did not make a better noodle so much as reshape the noodle around a behaviour, fitting the product to how people already live rather than asking them to change. Get that close to a real behaviour and the product can carry the brand the way a campaign usually has to.
The launch met the culture on its own ground. Haraku ran a live gaming event at its Jakarta outlet, where players tested the noodle on the spot, fully immersed in gaming and eating simultaneously. The moment was filmed and carried across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube through gaming creators the community already followed, which gave the product a kind of organic spread that paid media rarely reaches.
The response came quickly. The limited run of 20,000 bowls sold out within weeks. Footfall to the outlet rose by around 60%. Online delivery impressions climbed sharply once the buzz took hold. The attention was earned through the product itself, not bought through a media plan.
A 3.5-meter noodle takes a second to make sense. To a gamer, this solves a real and present problem, the choice between continuous play and refuelling their bodies. A gamer picks it up, keeps both eyes on the screen, both hands on the controller, and slurps through a match for an uninterrupted gaming experience.
The win came from a product with a targeted audience, an identified problem, and one long noodle designed to take up the challenge. Haraku did not force itself into the gaming world, it seamlessly integrated itself into the gaming community, who organically embraced the brand into their culture.
Stay tuned for more Campaign Shoutouts from ADFEST!
