As Singaporeans continue to strengthen their command of English in their everyday lives, the use of our respective Mother Tongue languages progressively declines. To counter this issue in a bid to preserve our heritage and culture, we worked with the Lee Kuan Yew Fund for Bilingualism to create a customised creative campaign, called ‘Makcik Reveals’. The campaign garnered a total of over 1 million video views, with rave reviews, and even cinched us a Markies Multicultural Marketing award.
Problem
The decline of interest in our Mother Tongue languages came as an interesting challenge to overcome, with the Lee Kuan Yew Fund for Bilingualism wanting us to encourage the use of Mother Tongue languages as a lifelong endeavor. As multilingual campaign pushes are generally pushed to their respective users, we wanted to engage people outside of the typical target audience. While working together with them on the custom campaign, we decided to approach Singaporeans to engage them in something that would be harder for them to come by – conversational Malay.
Solution
To get our audience acquainted with conversational Malay, we came up with the Makcik persona, embodied by our own TSL talent. The persona was the highlight across the three videos produced and featured everyday situations that the audience could relate to, such as ordering food at a Nasi Padang Store or meeting new people. The scripts incorporated basic Malay greetings and vocabulary, in an engaging manner that would make it easy for the audience to learn. We also aimed to correct simple mispronunciations of common Malay words, and used the script to convey the message that conversational Malay is not as hard as it seems.
Results
The three videos received a total of 1.3 million views, with high engagement rates achieved organically. Audience sentiment for the series was overwhelmingly positive, with many comments stating that they enjoyed the series and learned something new. The campaign then went forward to win SILVER at the Markies Awards, under the category – Most Creative – Multicultural Marketing.
