WTF MOF?

By Wesley Gunter

I’m sure you’ve read the news lately about the brilliant marketing strategy taken by The Ministry of Finance to promote the upcoming budget - ‘Ministry of Finance pays for Instagram 'influencers' to promote Budget 2018’.

Firstly, this article is not meant to slam bloggers. As a marketer and owner of an agency I work with them on a regular basis to promote my clients. However, using fashion and lifestyle bloggers to promote a financial product to the masses is tantamount to eating soup kambing with chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant… Just because everyone in the room thinks chopsticks is an effective tool, it’s not necessarily gonna work.

There are just so many things I want to rant about regarding this whole scenario from society at large to just how stupid it sounds but I’m going to just speak from a marketing viewpoint and silently scream to myself…


The Numbers Game…

One of my greatest pet peeves about how marketing and PR has evolved is how everybody loves pegging it to numbers and statistics. Not everything is a god damn algorithm for Christ’s sakes..
PR IS NOT FUCKING SALES! There I said it! … Moving on now let’s get to the point. You can’t just make a marketing decision based on numbers alone and just because an ‘influencer’ has 3 million followers on her Instagram because she has silky smooth skin, she’s going to be the best marketing tool for your product and audience.

As much as this may be common sense, many marketers have lost the plot and are sold just because of the number of likes and followers REGARDLESS of the influencer’s background and what they actually do.

Which brings me to my next point..

What’s the objective???

It’s not surprising that the majority of Singaporeans who eagerly anticipate what the G will roll out every year with the budget are above 30. If you’ve got surmounting bills to pay, mouths to feed and probably an aging parent with some illness to look after while earning a meagre salary you’re gonna take every bit of charity you can get. The budget is not just ‘freebies’ to some, it’s a fucking matter of survival.

Now let’s shift focus to our adorable youth. The ‘disruptors’ of our society who wouldn’t bat an eyelid when it comes to splurging on that fancy meal or just going on a ‘sabbatical’ to ‘discover themselves’ in some far-flung destination. This is of course a generalisation of our ‘spoilt’ youth as branded by the older Singaporeans which is far from the truth. But by looking at the ‘influencers’ selected by MOF they tend to fall into this ‘fluff’ category

I’m sure there are many younger Singaporeans who depend on the budget to get by. It’s a shame that the ‘influencers’ used by MOF don’t seem to be a good representative of what younger Singaporeans would want from a government initiative


Do you know what you’re selling?

So we covered the problem with using a wrong marketing tool for a wrong audience. Now let’s talk about the human element here. If you wanted to sell nail polish to a bunch of teenagers would you use 45 year old retiree with a pot belly to do the job? I really don’t get what a bunch of happy go lucky millennials that spend their time eating at fancy restaurants and wearing little clothes would have something useful to say about a financial product which even the people that came up with the budget have trouble explaining.

I am all for ‘dumbing’ down something to make it understandable to your average joe. But how can you get someone that doesn’t even understand the fundamentals of your product to explain it to the masses?? That’s like getting a guy in China who just learned the English language for the past year to teach a classroom of foreigners modern literature. Bottomline: No one is going to learn jack shit.

So in a nutshell the problem doesn’t lie with bloggers but the medium used. It’s honestly pretty appalling to me how such a huge government body which is the authority on everything to do with money in this country can be so clueless when it comes to marketing their own product..

I’m sure the Ministry of Finance has enough budget in their coffers to hire a decent marketing and PR agency no?


Wesley Gunter is the owner and PR Director of Right Hook Communications (www.righthook.com.sghttps://www.righthook.com.sg/), a boutique agency that loves to push boundaries and buttons

Seeking Diversity

I’m going to start the early part of 2018 by being unashamedly commercial of a potential venture that is probably not going to generate much money – my blog, which I started sometime in 2006, when I had my own little PR business.

I started blogging with no idea of where things would lead. At the time of writing, it was just a place where I placed the articles that I was planning to write for the mainstream until they were actually published by the mainstream. I didn’t even think of the possibility of making money from it.

However, times are changing. Over the years, the blog has grown an audience. If the analytics of blogger platform are to be believed I am no longer a “Singapore” only blogger. If you believe the analytics provided by the blogger platform, the largest audience for most of my blogs is in the USA and ironically the second largest audience for my main English blog is in France. One of the most popular pieces on the blog is a piece that lifted from Haaretz, the Israeli liberal paper.

On a personal basis, people have told me that they read what I write. I remember Supriyo Sircar, the CEO Digileap and former CEO of Polaris Financial Technology Asia Pacific telling me that my blog was “spicy,” and Meshari Bin Khalid, former Director General of SAGIA ASEAN thanking me for this blog. I’ve received further signs of the blog being read. One of the most prominent was a Reuters Journalist contacting me out of the blue for a quote and more importantly, my father told me with regards to this blog – “I can protect you from many things – but this government isn’t one of them.”

So, it did occur to me that if people were going to know me for the blog(s) that I publish, I might as well try and earn a few pennies of the blog. Thankfully Google has made it fairly easy in as much as all I had to do was to sign up for an AdSense account. So, sometime in 2017, ads have started appearing and to the shock and horror of my parents (lifelong advertising producers), I’ve become a space owner.

However, times are changing and its tough to get the traffic to make online advertising pay. I seem to have a following but like as every parent knows, things have to become about something more than me. My main “Ah-Ha” is that the blog needs more contributories. My views are known but I want the views of others to be shared.

Other than the blog, I’ve realized that I have a diverse group of friends, ranging from CEO’s and Excellencies to street hawkers and bar girls. So, I’m hopping my diverse range of friends with a diverse range of views will contribute to this blog and ad some spice. In the age of Donald Trump, we have a wonderful range of disunified people who can be brought together to make a beautiful story.

So far, four friends have agreed to contribute to the blog. I’ve made an announcement that that they’ve agreed to contribute to my blog on a Facebook Page called “Tangoland Blogs.” Once again, the analytics have shown that the decision to have other people contribute has proven to be popular.

I’m looking for more people to contribute to the blog. My basic terms and conditions are:

• 1.      You can write about anything you want and you should try and make a commitment of once a month or at least once every two months.
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• 2.      While I can’t pay you directly (I still need my day and night job), I can provide you with some publicity with the right audience. You should have your byline, copyright for your piece will belong to you and if you want to add a designation or weblink to promote yourself, please do so.
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• 3.      There are two main points. I don’t have the resources to hire sub editors to fact check and so, responsibility for the accuracy of information is yours. I’m in the business of expressing opinions not reporting news.
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• 4.      If you have to get permission from your boss, please do so. I will assume that you when you send me a piece, you have cleared whatever you are supposed to get cleared.
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• 5.      I believe in Freedom of Speech and Expression. I don’t want people who will praise me for the sake of it. You can use my platform to slag me off and attack my opinions. I will not tolerate smear campaigns against my friends and family.
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• 6.      I will promote you on my Facebook and linkedin pages, so I think reciprocity on your social media pages is not unreasonable. I will also provide machine translation and publication of whatever you write in English, Bengali, Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, German, Bahasa Indonesia, Vietnamese, Italian, Nepali, Arabic, Hindi, Tamil and Thai.
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• 7.      Please support the advertisers of this blog. I need money to survive and if you want to build it to a stage where you get money for your contributions, please support the people paying.
• 8.      For those of you who want to sponsor an article, please let me know. I’m starting out and I don’t turn down offers for money. But please make your sponsored article well written. I do provide writing services and I know writers who could do with the work.
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• 9.      So, if you want to have a bit of fun drop me a line at tigertang@hotmail.com and let me know what you are interested in writing about, how often you want to write and something about yourself. Please send your piece via MS Word format so that I can upload everything.  

The Things That Matter

Had a funny experience yesterday when I took a taxi. The taxi driver kept telling me how familiar I looked and I didn’t think much of it until he asked, “Are you from the Picture Farm (Dad’s Production House.)” It was then that I clicked, he was talking about my Dad, even if he had no idea who I was.

I used to get that a bit, especially when I worked in advertising. In fact, I got one of my best jobs (a small creative powerhouse called 10AM) from my Dad. Helps that the Old Man and I look very similar and to a certain extent we sound very similar.

My Dad has always been a special person. He’s done exceedingly well from his talents and his work as a photographer and advertising film director is still talked about even today. While, he hasn’t worked the way he has in his heyday, he’s doing well enough. An example of his work can be found at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6iV2tv_j50

and the credits can be found at:

https://www.spikes.asia/winners/2011/film/entry.cfm?entryid=3775&award=101&keywords=&order=0&direction=1

You could say that as a son of a successful father, life was always interesting. As a kid, everyone told me I was lucky to have him as a dad, even though I was living overseas most of the time. As I grew older and wasn’t make it in a similar industry to him …..well, life did get a little interesting

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However, I’ve always been proud of my Dad and the work that he’s produced. My Dad came from humble beginnings and made it big as a local boy in a one-man show in an industry where someone from outside is always seen as more upmarket. Having gone through my own struggles, I have a lot of pride in the old man for doing what he did.

I don’t his achievements but I felt really proud of him when the guy told me, “Your Dad is a man of principles.” For some strange reason, being the son of a man with principles meant so much more to me than being the son a well to do businessman or a top artist.

I guess, I’ve learnt that life is filled with geniuses at this and that but it has very few men of principle and very few men who make it a point of take care of the little people. It also helps that my father doesn’t make a big deal about his “character.” It’s more my mother who talks about principles and integrity (Mum’s Dad being a civil servant who was known for being absolutely incorruptible.)

So, it suddenly made me feel really happy that I was the Son of Man of Principle. It was like a title or potential inheritance that was worth having and fighting over. So, I got say thanks to him for being a man of principle.

Wonder what my kid will want strangers to say about me?