The Brief

With Singapore increasingly becoming a greying nation, the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports, a key ministry within the Singapore government, needed a campaign to curb the potential abandonment of the elderly by the younger generation. Highlighted by an alarming increase in occupancies/registration in retirement homes. The objective of the campaign was to raise the issue of ‘filial piety’ in Singapore - a pertinent issue in the city-state whose population is turning increasingly grey ala Japan. What we needed to do was create the largest and the most impactful conversation on filial piety ever witnessed in Singapore.

Describe how the promotion developed from concept to implementation

Within families, love flows freely – downwards; from parent to child. We wanted to challenge this with a powerful insight: that the only time people consider how they love their parents is when they think about how their kids will love them. Playing on the fact that children typically mimic their parents, the campaign focuses around an emotional 180-second spot that revolves around the dynamics of a three-generation household. The final take-out of this crystallized via the campaign tagline, ‘How one generation loves, the next generation learns.’

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

Just 4 weeks into this campaign, there were already more than 200,000 views of the film on social media. The Facebook page has more than 47,000 (likes/fans) making it the third largest Facebook campaign in Singapore, ever. We have since had over 15 million impressions over 10,000 interactions and more than 1400 unique stories and pledges. The campaign has become a national phenomenon with positive public feedback but perhaps more importantly, Singapore’s largest banks decided to become part of the effort and continue to actively support it by creating financial products that enable families to help the elderly. The film is also new curriculum in schools under civic education.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

For an issue like filial piety and the society’s lack of it, we knew we had to instigate a debate. Using the film as stimuli across local television, cable, cinema and virally, there was considerable discussion that followed. Across social media and blogs where there were more than 10,000 interactions and over 1,400 unique stories and pledges. Across live radio call-in’s on prime time radio where over 1,000 Singaporeans aired their views on what it means to be filial. And across hundreds of forum contributions in the city-state’s major newspapers where they discussed the issues yet again.