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Objective & Challenge
In the midst of a seemingly unending pandemic, struggling Malaysians including single mothers, started flying white flags outside their homes as a plea for help. Emotional stories of families with depleted savings surviving on one meal a day started making the news everywhere. More alarmingly was that suicide rates skyrocketed, with police data showing that 468 people had taken their own lives over the first five months of 2021. We were finding out that mental unwellness had crept into our society and was going undetected Challenge: The agency set themselves a task to bring the needed attention to the unnoticed single mother, and show leadership in bringing advertising agencies, corporate clients, donors and civil society organisations to support single mothers.

Insight & Strategy
Life is challenging for single mothers anywhere in the world, more so for those who are living in poverty. In Malaysia, single mothers are in their predicament because of spousal death, spousal abandonment or divorce. Many face financial challenges and the majority of single mothers that hail from urban poor areas usually lack specialized job skills, as well as the education required to get a sustainable income from employment. Faced with these barriers, many of these single mothers have no option other than accepting poorly paid jobs in generally unfavourable working conditions. A study from University Kebangsaan Malaysian (UKM), indicates that Malaysian single mothers in urban poor areas have on average of four or more children. Unable to afford childcare and often saddled with the additional burden of caring for extended family members, single mothers were housebound during the pandemic. Having to take on the additional duty of caring for their children at home, they were unable to take on full-time jobs. As a result, they are forced to rely on modest government assistance to even put food on the table. Under normal circumstances Malaysians are generally empathetic and will go out their way to help their community. However, during the pandemic many were fighting their own battles and the pleas of single mothers went unnoticed. Everyone seemed to have no time to care for themselves, much less care for others. For the agency, fighting the cause of single mothers is not new – we championed them since 2018. While past efforts involved upskilling and opening new business opportunities, we knew that in this pandemic year, we had to fulfil a more basic need: helping single mums feed their families. The solution? Heart & Sole. It was an effort that was conceived not just to create positive social impact, but to unite our clients and partners around a worthy cause while strengthening bonds with an unnoticed community – single mothers.

Execution
1. Rallying our partners to walk for a good cause To make the effort truly inclusive, the mechanics were simple – pledge RM10 for every kilometre walked. Walking was seen an easy and accessible to stay active within your compound, while improving mental health. So, we rallied our industry partners (Unity Media, AOS, RCA, F45, Artalive Artificial Limb, M&CSaatchi and Grey Worldwide) to participate in this noble initiative. We then involved our clients Sunquick, Malaysia Airlines, Firefly, Tune Talk, CIMB to join this exercise by pledging and walking too. For our partners, this was a welcomed activity to get them and their moving and ease the pandemic blues while doing good. Then to ensure transparency, we used “Map My Walk” to record every kilometre that was pledged for this good cause. 2. Assembling a team to deliver packages filled with goodness We supported Pak Grocer, a local SME that was also struggling, and enlisted them as our grocery and logistic partner. Furthermore, NGOs such Yayasan Chow Kit and the Malaysian Relief Agency came together to help execute and distribute care packs with 1 month worth of groceries for single mothers. 3. Bringing on experts to encourage good mental and physical health In addition to the distribution of care packs, the agency organized a talk titled “Resilience Amidst Change” by licensed psychologist John Pinto from Thougthfull and brought in fitness experts F45 to speak to the single mothers. These experts gave them tips and tricks on how to navigate the mental and physical challenges. It’s probably the first time that an industry CSR effort has encompassed such a wide and diverse spectrum of partners, each contributing in invaluable ways to our common cause.

Effectiveness
Spectacular, heartwarmingly effective and all done at ZERO COST. 1. By reaching 8,027,800 Malaysians, the initiative brought much needed awareness to the plight of the unnoticed single mothers. 2. Heart & Sole united our clients and partners to walk 3,534 kilometres (that’s roughly the distance from Kuala Lumpur to Shanghai!). 3. Raised RM30,000 in funding and helped 300 single mothers 4. The most gratifying and important result of all – we ensured that each single mothers was able to put food on table for an entire month 5. Earned RM300k worth of exposure via 6 digital publications: The Sun Daily, The New Straits Times. Astro Awani, The Rojak Daily, Syok.my and Wiki Impact.

Objective & Challenge
Sunquick Orange variant was once the special treat and a staple drink in many Malaysian households. Despite being the category leader, the brand is losing its appeal amongst young families especially young mothers, who are the health guardian of their family. Ribena, the closest contender has been advocating the richer source of Vitamin C in Blackcurrant variant to appeal to the health-conscious young mothers where blackcurrant is positioned as a superior source of vitamin C. Leveraging on the spiked demand for Vitamin-C enriched products during Covid-19, Sunquick intended to introduce Sunquick Blackcurrant variant during the typical low-season in Q3 with in-store sampling, which is a well-tested method to drive trial and conversion. However, when the government announced that the country will continue to be in locked down state until the large percentage of Malaysians were fully vaccinated, the in-store trial activation was not possible for the scheduled launch in August 2021. Challenge: The launch of Sunquick Blackcurrant is timely to capture the vitamin c consumption frenzy. Given the above situation, Agency’s task was to creatively develop a launch solution with a budget of RM15,000.

Insight & Strategy
For generations, mothers bought Sunquick for its good source of Vitamin-C in orange variant. However, young mothers who are constantly researching what is best for their family prefers blackcurrant as the assumption is vitamin C content in blackcurrant is higher than in Oranges per 100 gram (blackcurrant 181mg vs. 53.2mg). Sunquick needs to bring in a new variant to strengthen its leadership. As Malaysia entering 2nd year of pandemic, we continue to see the spike in search for Vitamin-C enriched food and drinks. It was trending in tandem with the spike of Covid cases. In general, Malaysians are well-educated on consuming adequate Vitamin-C in any form to boost their immune system. With the budget of RM15,000, we knew that investing it on any media channel will not create any impact and it will be a waste of money. Then, came the announcement of vaccination rollout. While majority of Malaysians cannot wait to be vaccinated, the congregation of public at the PPV (Vaccination Centers) raised the concern of potential ‘PPV Cluster’. Hence, the birth of the idea: SUNQUICK BLACKCURRANT HELPS BUILDING COVID-19 DEFENCES AT PPV. The idea to pivot the sampling ground from hypermarket to PPV presented two opportunities to address the brand challenge: 1. Sunquick has the ready sampling sachets that was intended for sampling 2. PPVs have the captured audience who want to protect themselves by boosting their immune system before and after stepping into the designated PPV. Location data from agency proprietary tools pointed to areas with health-conscious young families and subsequently the agency identified PPVs in those areas (refer to Table A).

Execution
Armed with the location data and selected PPV centers, we presented the plan of action to officers at MOSTI (Ministry-of-science-technology-innovation) who are also the Client of the agency. The proposed collaboration got approved within one week. The Sunquick Blackcurrant sampling activation was deployed in 15 selected PPV centers. A team of 4 on 2-shift rotation was allocated for each PPV. All our promoters were trained to manage SOPs and handle delicate situation in case there were queries related to vaccination. Each PPV Person-In-Charge shared the number of people expected at the center a week in advance so that logistic hick-ups can be avoided, and sufficient sampling products were delivered.

Effectiveness
TINY BUDGET; BIG RESULT. 1. Sunquick Blackcurrant were sampled by 270,000 vaccinees at the 15 selected PPV centers over a period of 2 months. 2. Sunquick Blackcurrant won a healthy share of love from those vaccinees and guarded its leadership position stronger than 2020. Figure 1 shown the brand’s emotional connection was stagnant since 2019 until the launch of the Blackcurrant variant in Q3 2021, which are now showing an upward movement. 3. The small budget activation campaign delivered incremental value share by 22% and 19% growth in volume share (Q3 2021 vs. Q3 2020) 4. Sunquick achieved a much stronger brand performance against competition as Favourite Brand with Higher Purchase Intent (Table B) 5. Through our collaboration with Agency’s Client, MOSTI, we managed to accomplish the project with only RM7,000 vs. the budget of RM15,000.

Objective & Challenge
Pandapro is a monthly subscription plan for foodpanda’s customers to dine, shop and enjoy exclusive rewards and benefits on the app’s food essentials and services. Since it’s official launch in July 2021, covered by the press, there has been no further media support to drive the awareness of the product. Subscription to the service has been growing organically, but the sign-ups were coming from only a fraction of the app’s ‘super heavyusers’. With the limitation on budget of only RM50,000, we were tasked to come up with a campaign in December 2021 that is impactful, effective, cost effiicient, yet driving high awareness to reach out to the wider ‘heavyusers’ audience that transacts on foodpanda app at least once every 2 weeks.

Insight & Strategy
In terms of media, both TV and OOH remains the highest reach medium. Impact wise, it’s definitely going to be in OOH, purely based on the sheer size of the format. Consumer wise, how are we able to effectively reach our target audience when OOH is the medium of choice. Most would also agree that majority of billboards and DOOH screens in town are notoriusly looping contents to any person within proximity, which is not effective. Given such challenges, we brought in a partner called Hivestack to solve this conundrum. Hivestack is a martech company that provides a full stack programmatic digital out of home (pDOOH) solution platform. The strategy is to be able to leverage data and technology to plan, buy, target, deliver and measure Ads in DOOH screens like never before. In this pilot project, we will be shifting from loop-based location targeting (pre-programmed screens and times) to programmatically bought DOOH (buying impressions based on audience concentrations). By fusing 3rd party data from Lifesight with traffic data from media owner, the pDOOH platform are able to denote a dynamic impression multiplier by the respective hour of the day, allowing us more precision to reach our target audience. As pDOOH are still in it’s infancy stage in Malaysia market, where OOH media owners are still struggling to grasp with the impression concept, a huge shift from the current JKR traffic data, we felt there may be opportunities on cheaper rates on media cost as well as media owner are still going through trial and error and may hv submitted low rates into the platform’s system. True enough, the average 30%-50% loading fees for daypart spot were not accounted for by media owner through the Hivestack platform

Execution
The trigger-based delivery on Hivestack are setup to deliver Ads across connected screens based on nuanced targeting parameters, and for this case audience concentration. Proximity geofence are setup to serve Ads across 171 connected screens, covering 54 locations, delivering a total of 3.1 million impressions. The delivery was split across 4 weeks while campaign peaked during the 2nd week with the highest impressions contribution. We are able to learn that 53% impressions are served across screens on Federal, LDP and Sprint Highway, with another 43% coming from shopping mall’s screen, and lastly 4% from petrol station’s screens.

Effectiveness
Business wise, pandapro subscription grew from an average of 13% organic growth throughout July’21 – Nov’21 to a staggering 236% post the campaign. Subscription drops significantly when no campaign is running. This clearly shows the direct impact from the pDOOH campaign in the month of Dec’21. Media investment wise, it generated an ROI of 16.0 compared to direct DOOH investments into the respective sites, as the base. But due to the insights of no loading fees, the ROI was further improved to 19.50 for the campaign