Written by The team from the Lee Kuan Yew Fund for Bilingualism, recognised our creativity when it comes to creating branded content. They decided to tap into our custom content creation capabilities, and we jointly created the series “Makcik Reveals” for them.
Together, we came up with the idea of an entertaining Makcik persona and through comedy, got our audiences acquainted with simple greetings, basic phrases and pronunciation. The Makcik Reveals original series showed how easy it was to try them out through everyday situations, such as ordering food at the Nasi Padang stalls in your hood and over mealtimes with family and friends.
What TSL provided:
- Concept And Ideation and production
An original video series which is made up of 3 videos to promote Conversational Malay. - Production
All pre-production, filming and post production was handled by our in-house production house. - Permanent hosting
A dedicated video playlist on our Facebook channel that would stay up forever. - Organic distribution
Leveraging on TSL’s reach of over 200 million video views a year, to make this content widely accessible.
How we did it:
As one does not always speak in their Mother Tongue language, we decided to start by showing that speaking conversational Malay isn’t as hard as it sounds. The challenge was getting people on Facebook engaged in something that they did not see as highly relevant to them – conversational Malay.
Using a data-driven approach gleaned from producing over 700 long-form videos a year, we zoomed in on entertaining situations relatable to our audiences. For example, one episode showed the Chinese girl meeting her prospective Makcik-in-law for the first time and wanting to impress them with her knowledge of Malay.
We turned such a situation into a comedic moment as the girl did not employ the most accurate usage of Malay. This resulted in us being about to show to our audience in a humorous way, the correct and wrong ways to use simple Malay as the guys around her did their best to salvage the situation by letting her know the correct pronunciation and phrases to use.
The Results:
These three videos garnered a total of over 1m video views, 1.9 million reached and very positive and high-quality engagement – all organically achieved with $0 in Facebook spending.
We also achieved the main objective to promote greater interest in Conversational Malay in Singapore. Here were some of the comments. We believe that people don’t hate ads, just bad ads and you can often see these sort of comments in our videos.
Catch Makcik Reveals series here.
Other Similar Video Branded Content
Check out more comedy videos where we’ve worked with brands here:
- Microsoft: The Real Daily Life Of A Tech Specialist
- MyRepublic: Best Ah Beng Handphone Shop In Singapore
- CPF: Ah Bengs Explain CPF
- STB: Hotel Reviewer Extraordinaire
- Singapore Road Safety Council: Singapore’s very own road safety specialist extraordinaire
When executed in the right style, we are able to achieve incredible results for our clients, attract positive engagements and effectively educate their audience.
If you have a message to communicate which isn’t the easiest to get across or if you’re interested in exploring more of our custom branded content or comedy formats, drop us an email at hello@thesmartlocal.com today to get started!
