How've we helped
SNYCO (Singapore National Youth Chinese Orchestra) is a youth orchestra supported by MOE under the National Project of Excellence. SNYCO’s mission is to inspire, nurture and develop youth into exemplary music advocates to serve the community. With grant support from NAC, SNYCO launched their first-ever web series as part of its online educational resources.
The aim is to position SNYCO as a cultural ambassador to bridge different cultures together, to perform and discuss music as one while showcasing Singapore's uniqueness as a multicultural society. We posed ourselves a question: How do we market the content to make it relevant for youths, especially when the majority of them view traditional music as being ‘old fashioned’? To formulate our idea, we focused on 3 major concerns:
- Duration: How do we pack centuries of instruments’ history, their unique playing methods and the youth musicians’ music journey within 6 to 8 minutes per webisode?
- Feelings: How do we enlighten the youth with a new perspective of traditional music instruments?
- Experience: How do we spark curiosity and keep the youth engaged throughout the series?
We understood that the end goal was not to create a viral web series. The issue at stake was marketing the content. It was about understanding the content, knowing who it was for, and deciding how we should communicate the content to them. To address the above, we intrigued the client with our proposal of an infotainment approach, to keep the series youthful, informative and engaging to support learning. The output will also be supported with motion graphics, peppered with slapstick elements that is similar to the type of video content consumed by youths today.
The web series was successful as a whole. It fulfilled SNYCO's intended goals to bridge and interact with different cultures, as well as to spark interest and curiosity among the youth in understanding traditional instruments and music of different cultures. Throughout the series, we also ensured that it was about communicating the use of instruments from different cultures, rather than being a platform to compare and evaluate the instruments.
SNYCO also saw a higher follower engagement with the release of the webseries. According to the data, the target audience was met as viewers were aged 34 years old and below. During the airing period of the series, there was an estimated 11.6% follower growth on SNYCO’s Instagram. There were positive feedback, praising the webseries for being informative, with clear explanations provided by the host. Some commented that this was an effective way to introduce Chinese orchestra to Singaporean youth.
On Facebook alone, there was a tremendous outreach, reaching an average of 10’000 viewers per episode Overall, the web series helped to achieve its intended engagement goals.
"As a young team, Motionsauce is a good fit for SNYCO’s project as they are familiar with making content that could reach out to the youth. Furthermore, with their expertise and creativity, they are able to take traditional Chinese music, a subject that is not intuitively relatable to youth, and packaged it into something fun and engaging. Most of all, we appreciated the palatable balance of entertainment and content depth, which our viewers have complimented the series for. Even when additional content was requested, Motionsauce managed to deliver the information using animation sequences and/or short dialogues, without weighing down on the entertainment aspect. This really showcased their flexibility as a content marketer."
Chin Woon Ying
Director
