Emobot encourages Singaporean youths to express their feelings and show support for peers

In a bid to encourage Singaporean youths to share their feelings and show support for their peers, the Health Promotion Board (HPB) has launched the “What’s Your Song” campaign. Conceptualised by Ogilvy Singapore, it is a digital campaign that centres predominantly on Facebook, where an application affectionately named “Emobot” will help Singaporean youths to express their emotions through music.

In today’s hectic Singaporean society, young people face many challenges in their studies as well as personal relationships and often grow up driven by the need to be perfect. It is not surprising, then, that they may feel hesitant about sharing their feelings especially negative ones. The “What’s Your Song” campaign was conceived to as a platform for youths to share their feelings through song, and in this way, negate the possible fear of judgment or vulnerability that they typically associate with sharing their feelings.

At the Facebook page, users can key in a word that describes how they feel at that moment and the Emobot will play a song depicting that feeling. At the same time, users can share the song with their friends and even offer peer support by sending friends a song to cheer them up.

“Music and Facebook are the perfect tools for this campaign as they are highly interactive platforms that youths use on a regular basis. Music has always been a powerful and accessible medium to convey one’s innermost feelings, which is why we created the Emobot. Also, Emobot lives on Facebook because the nature of social media supports the sharing of emotions. Friends can provide peer support and even cheer one another up with songs through Emobot,” said Troy Lim, Creative Director at Ogilvy & Mather Singapore.

“Through the Emobot, we want youth to know that it is all right to feel down occasionally and that there are resources online, such as audiblehearts.sg1 that youths can tap on should they need a listening ear,” said Ms Prema Govindan, Deputy Director, Youth Health Programme Development 2, HPB.

The “What’s Your Song” campaign will run from now till February 2011, and Emobot will keep youths company till November next year.