Leo Burnett follow up ‘Funeral’ with a new MCYS spot to promote filial piety in Singapore
The MCYS/National Family Council in Singapore has released a new campaign to follow up their very successful ‘Funeral’ campaign. Where ‘Funeral’ was to deal with marriage, this latest brief to Leo Burnett Singapore was to promote filial piety.
Essentially, what’s happened and why this campaign came to be is that more and more Singaporeans have been starting to interact less with their parents; and the number of elderly being sent to old folks homes has been on the rise. What Leo Burnett was tasked with was raise awareness of the importance of filial piety to help foster family closeness.
“What we wanted to do was (continue to) step away from typical didactic government films which showed what they wanted Singaporeans to be like and instead, give a peek of what is reality and perhaps not continue with the undesired behaviour,” said Leo Burnett Singapore ECD Chris Chiu.
“We played with a couple of insights. Firstly, every parent loves their child unconditionally; whether or not the child is an angel or a brat. Just the way it is. But how do you make the younger generation reciprocate the love? Especially so when the parent isn’t the nicest of people? Primarily, filial piety is the interaction between 2 generations, so I thought it would be interesting to tell this story from a 3rd generation looking in (i.e. the grandson)”.
Leo Burnett Singapore actually shot this spot right after they finished shooting ‘Funeral’ with Yasmin Ahmad in April 2009. Funeral has gone on to be a major award winner for the agency with most recently two Gold Lions at Cannes. For this “Father & Son” spot the agency chose David Tsui and it was a four day shoot using multiple locations including the old Tan Tock Seng Hospital.
“David was brilliant and pretty much street-casted the entire main cast,” said Chiu.
“The father is actually a cab driver (the scene in which he drops his recently-widowed mum off is actually his cab) and the grandson is a student from SOTA (Singapore School of the Arts). The flashback mother and son are a real mother and son.”
Interestingly, apart from national television, cable tv and cinema, this spot gone even more gangbusters on social media than the last campaign – where “Beautifully Imperfect” picked up 18000+ fans over the course of the campaign, this one’s picked up over 34,000 in just two weeks.
CREDITS.
Title: Father & Son
Client: MCYS/National Family Council
Brief: To raise awareness of Filial Piety in Singapore.
Creative Agency: Leo Burnett Singapore
Creative Director: Chris Chiu
Writer: Chris Chiu
Art Director: Chris Chiu
Planner: Saurabh Varma
Acct Management: Kurt Viertel, Claire Chan, Lee Min Qi, Tay Yi Ling, Stella Pok, Brenda Koh
Production Company: Moviola
Director: David Tsui
Post Production: Touches (HK)/VHQ (Singapore)
Exposure: Television/Cable Television/Cinema/Digital
1 Comment
Not quite in the same class as the last film but this is still a good job done by Burnetts.