Results and Effectiveness

• 898 comments and 250,653 hits across multiple social media platforms • Covered by 8 major newspapers across Singapore and Malaysia • Covered by more than 20 online news portals, blogs and radio • Alex Wibo is still receiving friend requests daily With Alex Wibo, we turned indifference into involvement and transformed a social network into a support network. This serves as an important starting point for Singapore’s preventive drug education, which SANA believes should be youth-driven.

Creative Execution

To effectively engage young people on drug abuse, we created Alex Wibo, a fictitious teenage drug abuser on popular social network: Facebook. Through his extreme, addiction-induced behaviour, we presented them with an intimate, live experience of a life ravaged by drugs. It sparked a fervent, honest and constructive discussion that manifested the collective wisdom of youth against drug abuse; affirming them as advocates—not mere recipients—of the campaign. Facebook allowed us to befriend, tag, comment, like, upload, hyperlink and share; paving the way for our core audience to interact, tweet, respond, take sides, view, publish and broadcast to a wider audience. In essence, Facebook; YouTube; Twitter; blogs; online forums, news portals; press; and radio fed off each other in a non-linear fashion that maximised the campaign.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Conventional belief attributes drug abuse among young people to the foolishness of youth. Hence the prevalence of top-down, one-way drug-prevention campaigns that fail to engage them as intelligent, responsible individuals. This has left the Singapore Anti-Narcotics Association (SANA) with a problem more dangerous than drug abuse: the growing indifference in youths towards the issue, as long as they know not to break the law or destroy their health with this ill habit. Our idea aims to get them thinking and responding on the issue—in ways and channels unique to them.