VCCP launches Immersive Experience for the Straits Times

The Straits Times, Singapore’s most widely-circulated newspaper with a 178 year old legacy - faced a simple yet existential challenge: a lack of relevance in the age of “continuous partial attention” i.e. consumers being engaged on multiple fronts while simultaneously being unable to fully immerse themselves on a singular topic.

With time-starved but information-hungry Singaporeans relying on social media and other digital platforms for their news; the Straits Times App was on the verge of becoming obsolete.

In crafting our strategy, our brand exploration revealed a clear challenge: A news and information landscape noisier than ever. We were not competing solely with other news sites, but instead every digital pixel fighting for our reader’s attention.

From a behavioural perspective, we found that this abundance of readily available information has turned readers into “media ice skaters” - swiping and skimming headlines, but not deep-diving into the stories that matter.

The Straits Times was founded on the principle of providing a diversity of views through rigorous journalism. We realised that in order to make our App culturally relevant, the brand needed to lean into this founding ethos and unlock the innate curiosity in all of us. Asking “why” is a deeply human trait and we crafted our creative to speak to this mindset. 

The Straits Times is for The Ever Curious - those not content with mere skimming of headlines but instead constantly questioning in order to get deeper, nuanced perspectives. Through immersive multimedia experiences and in-depth articles - The App gives readers a holistic view of the world around them; from infographics and animation, to videos and long-form content. In a world of one-dimensional stories, the Straits Times App truly gets beneath the surface to feed the innate curiosity of our readers.

Our creative work reflected this mindset with our campaign line - “Feed Your Curiosity” - which positioned the App as the hero that enables deep-dives and multiple perspectives. The visual language, a combination of illustration and pastel colours helped to position the Straits Times as a youthful and modern brand while our messaging played up the App’s multimedia functionality through data analysis; focussing on the most relevant topics to illustrate our in-depth reporting and features across a range of executions - from digital to outdoor.

This integrated approach resulted in a campaign that was not only creatively inspiring, but importantly, led to tangible business results with total App downloads reaching 130% of the intended target.