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National Heritage Board (NHB), together with National Library Board (NLB) and the Media Development Authority (MDA), launched the campaign \"Explore Singapore!\", an integrated multi-dimensional campaign covering events, TV programming, mass media content and new media interactivity, in late 2006 to spark a national passion in discovering and learning about Singapore’s heritage.

We were approached by NHB to create a viral project that cross-marketed a television show named after the campaign with Singapore’s first heritage and museums blog - Yesterday.sg. The project needed to leverage on the television show to raise awareness of the blog, as well as provide an online viral mechanism that would encourage blog visitors to forward the campaign to their friends. We adopted "exploration" as the viral project's theme, and crafted "Heritage Hunt", an online contest that featured various forms of multimedia content that inter-weaved the blog with the television show. During the 6 weeks that the show was on the air, the blog featured weekly challenges in the form of flash games, animation clips and article hunts. Upon completion of the challenge, the visitor would be rewarded with a keyword for the week. At the end of the campaign, the collected keywords had to be unscrambled to form a sentence that could be submitted for the contest. Correct entries would be entered in a lucky draw to win attractive prizes.

We faced multiple challenges on this project. One of them was a very rapid working schedule, which effectively only gave us about a week ahead of each release to complete the games, animation and other related production tasks. By alternating the complexity of the releases we were able to successfully deliver on schedule.

Another challenge was to appeal to a wide age range, which also included possible visitors from the less-than-net-savvy crowd. Each activity had to be carefully considered and crafted to be intuitive and straightforward, yet fun and challenging. The Flash games, for example, were based on game concepts that go way back, such as spotting the difference between two pictures - a concept that has universal appeal and can easily be found in any children's activity book.

We also had to create a strong affiliation between this online project with the television show. Thanks to NHB, we were given access to show schedules before their air date. These allowed us to create activities that expanded on themes and heritage information from the show, while also encouraging blog visitors to explore the blog site for information and hidden easter eggs.

The Flash animated clip presented a three-fold challenge. It had to be done fast, it had to feature the television show's celebrity hosts yet not involve them work-wise, and it had to have a viral effect. We decided to play on the fact that the show was also being aired during the festive Christmas season, and conceptualised the clip as an animated short cum E-card. By utilising an animation technique inspired by South Park's Saddam Hussein caricature, we were also able to rapidly create animation clips starring local funnyman Moses Lim and Elizabeth Naomi Tan from nothing but still photos. The characters also spoke using gibberish sounds, which made the clip accessible across language barriers. Yesterday.sg experienced a greatly increased visitorship throughout the campaign, and we were commissioned to do a follow-up project for NHB and Yesterday.sg. Back to Portfolio Home