The Campaign

Mentos National Night was created as a hyper local campaign for a Singaporean audience that managed to find itself global fame. Mentos has had a long legacy of championing fresh thinking. With Singapore’s Birthday coming up, we saw a chance for the mint candy to freshen up the country’s National Day celebrations, build stronger brand affinity in the local market and ultimately try to give the brand a moment of fame on such an auspicious day. National Day isn’t just any public holiday. It’s the day that marks the birth of the nation. A day that reminds all Singaporeans of their nation building achievements and a day on which the government goes all out to ensure celebrations close with an almighty bang! Meanwhile, a mass of brands all vie for the same space in pushing out bland and upbeat ‘happy birthday’ messages that congratulate the country on being. Well. Singapore. We set out to break the mould by seizing the opportunity of turning a customary birthday message into an opportune PR moment to build fame for the Mentos brand and build affinity with the Singaporean people. We did this by identifying a highly topical and newsworthy issue to champion. One that resonated deeply with all Singaporeans and one that we could help effect change. The nation’s dwindling birth rate became our birthday-related issue to champion and seed and the eve of National Day, a window of time we could own and encourage Singaporeans to do their duty for their country!

The Brief

Being a nation of only 5.1m people, Singaporeans really are a patriotic bunch. The desire to preserve their unique identity is of strong concern, with issues regarding population size being hotly discussed. Our goal was to leverage interest in this hot topic and communicate it in a fun and surprising way that would get the nation talking. We discovered our target of 18-32yr olds were big fans of the government’s annual National Day anthem, and set out to use the seductive power of music and the familiar anthem format as a way to drive interest and sharability of our message.

Results

Mentos’ birthday message received 29k more views/day than the government’s official anthem in the lead up to National Day. In the space of 9 days, our birthday message was viewed over 400k times online and had 16,000 mp3 downloads. We received coverage on 200+ websites and despite being rejected by the press due to ‘overly racy content,’ all top national newspapers and local radio stations covered the story once they saw how well it resonated with the people. We found global fame thanks to coverage on CNN, a front page feature on the WSJ, amongst others. Even the ex-Prime Minister made a new population crisis statement the following day. We created approximately S$736k worth of media value with an estimated PR value of S$2m. Approximately 40 times our budget. Mint rolls created a 103% sales uplift in August against the same period in 2011 and doubled sales across the portfolio.

Execution

Our National Night song, stuffed with local innuendo was pushed out via Youtube and Facebook, 10 days prior to National Day on the 9th Aug. All Singaporean media titles were approached. But all refused to cover the campaign citing ‘overly racy content’. That being so, we shifted focus to encourage Singapore’s top bloggers to review our campaign. Offline, we owned the ‘night’ and gave club DJ’s and coverbands the chance to ‘freshen’ up the song by playing their own version in clubs over a 7 day lead up. Meanwhile, ‘Do Your Duty’ flyers and packs of Mentos were handed out to revellers.

The Situation

Singapore’s National Day is the most celebrated day of the year. We were tasked with driving cut through to make Mentos the most talked about brand during this most media-congested day. All brands vie for the same space, pushing out bland, upbeat ‘happy birthday’ messages that congratulate the country on being, well, Singapore. Playing to our legacy of fresh thinking, we wanted to break this mould by questioning what a birthday message from a brand could be. We found an opportunity to inspire a nation into doing something great for their country.

The Strategy

To play to our audience’s social nature and love of music, two environments became our focus: Singapore’s compact social media landscape and Singapore’s young offline music scene. National Night was hubbed out of Facebook and YouTube and Singapore’s most influential bloggers were invited to review the song in order to add fuel to the propagation of our message. Brand fans could also own and further seed our message via the mp3 Facebook download. Offline, we set out to fill all big music venues with the sound of National Night in order to turn our catchy lyrics into a viral hum.