Singapore Entrepreneurs

Some random musings about the recent controversial NUS Business School Ad from a marketing viewpoint.

Author’s Disclaimer: The opinions from the author of this post is strictly personal and do not represent the organizations that the author works for.

Recently this NUS Business School advertisement took the blogsphere by storm. You can read all the netizens’ reactions from Tomorrow.sg. For that matter, Singaporeans are very creative people, and within two days, the netizens has produced a spoof of the ad (that one reminded me of the NKF one they did in August last year). Since we have heard so much nay-sayers type “blasting” comments, I won’t be listing them down here. What I will do, is to show what this ad is aim to do, and how it does manage to capture the attention of many bloggers. Believe it or not, in the physical world, a discussion of the ad from the professionals (NUS alumni), they thought that the ad has done their part to generate reactions from people. They expected the reaction but they felt that it was a gung-ho move to do something like that.

Let’s first view the ad, and then I will take the contrarian view to dissect how the ad has successfully captured the attention of many people. Before watching that, I would like the reader to remember this rule of thumb in publicity is good or bad publicity is better than no publicity.

First of all, let’s take into perspective that the ad is targeted to foreign nationals. I was told by grapevine in the blogsphere that there is an extension of the ad which includes the American gal being rejected from the schools she applied for. I shall not dwell into controversial issues about this ad linking to NUS admission rates and NUS fee hikes. For those who wants to read a rational assessment, Hui Chieh in From a Singapore Angle discussed this issue about admissions in detail. Here is a question I would like to pose to most people who tries to make such associations, “How do you get people from the outside world to know about your school?” The answer is by marketing. It does not matter how the message is packaged, as long as it passes the point across, it is successful.

Based on the irrefutable laws in [1], I will show how this ad has demonstrated the success of it being able to capture attention:

• The Law of Negativity: Most Singaporeans do not believe that NUS is on par with the best in the world, despite its rankings in newspaper. That is added by the fact that our government sent the best scholars out to the Ivy League and Ox-bridge universities. There is a persistent belief established that the moment on how the logo, message and punchline made by the ad will trigger someone’s response. Imagine one of the comment I read is from a blogger is that he thought that the person who made the ad is having a crack. Twisting the negative side in the locals, more people will talk about the university. Believe it or not, subliminal messages will continue to flood your mind, till one day, you question why you reacted so much towards it.
• The law of chat: Using the chats between a mother and daughter, and brothers (in the other one), the ad directly aims at the people who are planning to apply to university. By the way, if another university, say Harvard, did this ad, what will your reaction? If I am not wrong, the company did not really innovate much with the ad. I recall that I saw a similar ad in the UK which was promoting the city academies.
• The law of positioning: NUS wants to position itself out of Singapore, instead of being locked in local competition with the other two universities. At the same time, the other two universities are throwing figures like high employments, strong branding, and how “cool” they are compare to the rest. Changing the context of their competition is also why I believe that the ad is created. Since they picked the best, they are aiming high.

At the end of the day, it’s a just a PR exercise to me. Of course, thanks to the Da Vinci Code, we have creative taglines coming out from the blogsphere. So much for this little ad that spiced up a normal day in my life.

References
[1] Michael Newman, “22 Irrefutable laws of Advertisting”, Wiley Press.

Follow-ups
[1] Bjorn Lee, “NUS Business School Commercials: Visibility vs Message”

Technorati Tags: Publicity, Advertisements, NUS Business School, Marketing

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