Pocari Sweat Travel Campaign 2025
Every brand eventually has to answer the same question: what does our world actually look like? Pocari Sweat has spent years building an answer. Clear skies, clean light, a kind of youthful utopia where everything feels possible and nothing feels heavy. My task for this campaign was to place a brand new group of ambassadors inside that world and make it feel like they'd always belonged there.
Papion arrived as Pocari's newest face, a multinational girl group whose very composition mirrors the borderless spirit the campaign wanted to capture. The concept, "Go Sweat Go ION," needed to travel literally as well as thematically. We built key visuals across nearly every mode of transportation people actually use, planes, trains, buses, boats, even the quiet in-between moment of waiting at a bus stop, along with a beach setting that let the group's energy fully unfold. Wherever you go, the message insisted, this feeling of vitality goes with you.
Casting five distinct individuals into one cohesive visual identity meant paying close attention to how each member's presence would read differently depending on setting. A single figure gazing out a train window carries a different emotional register than the full group laughing together at a bus stop, luggage in tow, mid-journey energy still buzzing. I wanted each frame to hold both intimacy and joy without either canceling the other out. Solo moments needed quiet magnetism. Group moments needed to feel like genuine camaraderie, the specific looseness that only exists among people who actually enjoy traveling together.
Lighting became the backbone holding this whole utopian world together. The brief was precise and, admittedly, a little poetic: heat that reads as cool, brightness with warmth instead of clinical chill, and always a defined sun ray sharp enough to carve real shadow lines across bus interiors, train windows, boat decks. Too flat and the world loses its sense of dream. Too harsh and it stops feeling aspirational. The color temperature had to sit in that narrow, deliberate space between summer heat and refreshing clarity, echoing the product's entire promise without ever spelling it out literally.
What made this project distinct from a typical travel campaign was the insistence on universe-building over simple documentation. This wasn't about photographing a group having a nice trip. It was about constructing an entire visual mythology, blue skies as a kind of emotional constant, motion as a stand-in for freedom, five new faces stepping into an identity larger than any one of them individually. By the time we wrapped, Papion wasn't just endorsing a beverage. They were living proof of a world Pocari has spent years convincing people they already want to be part of.
Adhitya Himawan
Co-founder and photographer of HIRA Imaji, Jakarta.