The Brief

The Standard Chartered Marathon Singapore (SCMS) is one of the biggest and longest running race events in Singapore, beginning in 2002. Every first Sunday of December, thousands of local and overseas runners take part in Singapore’s marquee running event. It invites runners of all ages, with categories ranging from the Kids Dash, to 10km, 21km and 42km runs, and Ekiden – where a team of 6 runners complete the Marathon in a relay. In 2015, SCMS retained its Gold Label status by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), placing it amongst the world’s elite races such as the New York City Marathon. SCMS has grown from just 6,000 runners in 2002, to a peak of 65,000 runners in 2011. With the increasing number of race events growing in Singapore, participants are not only pushing themselves for better timings. They’re pushing organisers to provide better running experiences as well. Every year, when SCMS announces the opening date for registrations, local runners queue up for up to 24 hours at the launch event to snag the best discounts and registration goodies. Busier runners, or those based overseas, fail to get in on these deals. We wanted to refresh the brand experience and activate a much larger portion of SCMS runners - reaching out to runners aside from the same groups queueing every year. We needed to create a new, innovative way to reel in runners of all kinds, no matter where their geographical location even, to have a shot at these registration goodies. It was an opportunity to sculpt a new dimension to exemplify the race's SG50 theme of "This year, we race as ONE!".

IN JUST 8 DAYS, WE HAD… - Total participation of 2,225 runners. Nearly 10 times the number of runners at the physical queue last year. - Total reach of almost 2.5 million in just 8 days, with 60-70% of reach being organic - Almost 30,000 pieces of content received through #SCMS2015 and #DigitalQueue hashtags from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram even before registration was opened - Accumulated over 5,000 Instagram posts on hashtags before registration opened. More than halfway (and over 4 months ahead) to hitting last year's count of 8,000 posts AFTER the race was over in December. - Covered widely in mainstream and sports media - Helped propel early bird registration sales, with ALL early bird slots across ALL categories being sold out in just 3 weeks post-Digital Queue. Registration sales are way ahead of the usual mark as according to client.

THE INNOVATION Runners joined by connecting their social media accounts on our microsite. Daily content was posted on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for 8 days and they engaged with it on social media, completing different tasks with the hashtags #SCMS2015 and #DigitalQueue. Points were earned through first-level and second-level engagements, depending on the type of action and platform. Higher points allowed runners to "jump" ahead of others in the queue for better registration goodies. The innovation was built from scratch. Upon registration, our system pulled a person's Facebook profile picture to create a customised avatar to "queue" in line. Our microsite showed a live banner of the participants' avatars in the Digital Queue - refreshing every 15 seconds. The microsite had a searchable leaderboard for participants to find themselves. It hosted SCMS' content, and pulled submissions of user-generated content from our hashtags. Every engagement on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram would earn a participant points. These points were tagged to each participant's identity by pulling the APIs for their actions from each social platform. A large, outdoor screen was set up outside Plaza Singapura showing the live updates of the SCMS Digital Queue, leading up to the launch event itself. INTENTION As the first such innovation for a mass sporting event, it allowed bigger engagements with a passionate community while refreshing the SCMS experience. It was created as a complement to the annual physical queue for runners to get registration goodies. Being inclusive to runners of all kinds, it exemplifies the race's SG50 theme of "This year, we race as ONE!". NEXT STAGE Top participants in the queue are to be pushed as online ambassadors for SCMS 2015. It provides insightful grounds to create an improved, alternative concept of the Digital Queue that's inclusive to runners anywhere and everywhere in 2016.