SINGAPORE – A group of students from the Sales and Marketing University (SMU) have done their school proud by pioneering a bold new marketing scheme that promises to change the advertising landscape in Singapore.
The advertising technique exploits the unique media regulations in Singapore to help create awareness of products and stimulate consumer interest in them. By injecting verboten material into the advertising campaigns of the products, the students were able to increase the viewership of their advertisements by 530%. The following is an excerpt of our interview with the head of the project group, Ms Selliceto Eskimos.
Serious News (SN): What was the source of inspiration for your new marketing idea?
Ms Eskimos: Over the past few years, we have heard so much news about media being censored, banned or confiscated by the authorities in Singapore. So, as good SMU students, we asked ourselves, could this be turned into a marketing opportunity? After doing more research, we found that the more the authorities tried to suppress something, the more advertising it received in the form of word-of-mouth, blog entries, forum posts and even news reports.
For example, the game “Massive Fat” was initially banned because it contained a scene of two pairs of lips touching. Paradoxically, banning the game only resulted in free advertising for it, helping it obtain higher sales volume when the ban was ultimately overturned. Similarly, films like “One Corporation Under Lee” were virtually unknown until the authorities gave it free publicity by confiscating it when it was filmed at a private gathering.
Thus, we theorised that the power of censorship can be harnessed to sell products.
SN: So how did you go about proving your hypothesis?
Ms Eskimos: As an experiment, we crafted an advertisement for our university that depicted NUS and NTU students standing stupidly at the side of a deserted road, unwilling to cross because the red man was on. In contrast, SMU students crossed the road in defiance of the traffic light. The other students only started crossing after they saw the SMU students doing so. The tagline of the advertisement was “Above all, it’s about defining the rules”.
As predicted, the authorities disapproved the commercial on the grounds that it contradicted community values and advocated unlawful behaviour. However, we posted it on YouTube and circulated news of the ban in the blogosphere. Two days later, the mainstream media also picked up the news. Soon, our video got more than 500,000 views, and applicants to our university increased by 65% for that admissions cycle. We managed to reach our target audience without having to spend a single cent on TV ads.
In fact, the advertisement was more effective because viewers had actively sought it out, and were thus more receptive to its message. It would have been less impactful and persuasive had viewers merely absorbed it passively during a commercial break. Furthermore, the very fact that our advertisement was barred by the authorities enhances our image as a cool and edgy university that isn’t afraid to push the boundaries, encouraging creative mavericks to favour us over the alternatives.
SN: But won’t the authorities soon wise up to this scheme and react accordingly?
Ms Eskimos: It doesn’t matter. For all its much vaunted pragmatism, the Singapore Government is really fond of futile and counter-productive symbolic gestures. Censorship is one of them – the bureaucratic elite know that censoring something only achieves the opposite effect of giving it more publicity and piquing people’s interest in it, but they continue doing it because it fortifies their illusion of being in control. It reinforces their belief that they are intellectually superior to the rest of society, that they are uniquely qualified to decide which material is suitable for public consumption and which is too complex, confusing, controversial or racy for the plebeians to handle.
