The Campaign

Previous campaigns invited the audience to share their dreams of the ideal Singapore. However, contest mechanism was complex and demanded too much from our audiences. There’s a need for simplicity in mechanism and a focused passion point to compel. The feeling of homesickness and longing by being physically away from home is a common phenomenon that affects Singaporeans overseas. Often, it is not until Singaporeans physically return home that they realise how much has changed. Here, we not only saw an opportunity to remind them of what they are missing out on while they are away but also creating relevant cut-through to garner a meaningful response. To evoke a sense of nostalgia, we created a purposefully-curated tour with highly-relatable and updated local content. This came in the form of an interactive virtual map containing bite-sized stories about the nation's past and present that kept Singaporeans up-to-date about the latest happenings.

Creative Execution

We want to create a self-evolving platform fueled by user engagement. At its heart, user insights informed the type of content served and curated on the platform. Case in point, telling the stories using colloquial language only Singaporeans understood, we brought back a sense of familiarity, but no one is a real local unless they have truly picked up the new vocabulary and widely discussed topics that emerged over the last 6 months. We also introduced a series of mini quizzes covering themes of culture, lifestyle, family and work life. These quizzes encouraged the audience to explore the virtual map and uncover stories on landmarks. The grand prize was a return flight ticket to Singapore regardless of their current geographical location as an ultimate gesture and call back for one Singaporean to return home.

Results

With a budget of $12,000 for media buy, Jalan-Jalan Singapore reached over 63,000 people on Facebook, 30% of Singaporeans overseas. In the span of six months, we attracted an 8.5% uplift from our average monthly engagement rate. We received over 2,300 entries from the series of mini quizzes in total, the best result that Contact Singapore ever received from all their previous campaigns.

Jalan-Jalan Singapore which is commissioned by Contact SG (a joint initiative by the Ministry of Manpower and Economic Development Board) is an online direct response campaign that specifically aims to target their existing database of 200,000 overseas Singaporean. One of the biggest problems that Contact Singapore face is ensuring that the CRM database remains updated. At its core, Jalan-Jalan Singapore is to develop the use of compelling content via a virtual interactive platform with a strong call-to-action to not only build engagement but to build authentic relationships.

The biggest problem was that contact databases become outdated too rapidly. Maintaining quality contact was almost impossible and social media became our only hope. However, this presented another challenge. Today, everybody’s social feeds have become so cluttered with pictures, videos and new news the probability of seeing our message was only 2.6%! Contact Singapore needed to break out of that clutter by truly compelling Singaporeans overseas to connect. Looking at past engagement numbers, we found that the most compelling topic that really resonated with Singaporeans overseas was news that informed them of the ever-changing developments in the city. With these insights in mind, our strategy was to enable Singaporeans overseas to see the changes at homes by inviting them to “take a walk back home” through a carefully curated (powered dynamically by user preferences generated on site) tour via the interactive virtual map.