The Campaign

The Life Saving Pot is the world’s first plant pot that stops disease-carrying mosquitoes from breeding at home.

Creative Execution

Each Life Saving Pot is a marriage of tradition and technology coming together to solve an age-old problem. First, we worked with one of the oldest surviving wood-fired kilns in Singapore to handmake clay pots. Thanks to the labour-intensive, ancient process, the shape and glaze of each resulting pot is unique. Then, we worked with traditional ceramic artists to decorate each pot in paint containing a non-toxic insecticide that has been proven to repel up to 80% of mosquitoes. But each design has a hidden story: what simply appears to be traditional Ming-style designs from afar are revealed to be hundreds of dead mosquitoes on closer look.

Results

The on-ground and online launch resulted in a 250% increase in social media engagement, the highest ever recorded for the brand. Many people across the region asked to purchase the pot, which led us to make the pot available for sale online and in nurseries in Singapore. And as the scourge of dengue and Zika are a serious problem throughout Southeast Asia, we are currently working with artists in Malaysia and Indonesia to create additional Life Saving Pots that are culturally-relevant to each country.

By designing and distributing a common household item that, simply by being in homes, drives disease-carrying mosquitoes out, the Life Saving Pot helped Manulife Singapore build positive brand equity in a creative manner.

Mosquitoes are a widespread and common problem all across Southeast Asia. No home in the tropics is safe from dengue and Zika, especially as we’ve found that the great majority of houses here have at least one plant pot at home. While the Singapore government’s “5-step Mozzie Wipeout” campaign has been running for many years now (one of the steps includes regularly emptying out overwatered plant plates), like for most PSAs, the message is often ignored. Our approach was to make prevention effortless. By replacing your household pots with the Life Saving Pot, you could even overwater your plants (which creates stagnant pools of water that mosquitoes breed in) and not have larvae growing in them.