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WE REFER to the letter, 'Anti-binge drinking campaign: Get serious' by Ms Magdalene Chua (ST, Feb 9). As the campaigners for Get Your Sexy Back, we are excited that young people, such as Ms Chua, recognise the importance for a campaign's message to resonate with its target audience, and more important, have a significant impact on them.
Before we embarked on this pilot campaign to raise awareness on the issue of binge drinking, we explored the many anti-binge drinking campaigns executed overseas, and conducted several focus groups and surveys with our target audience. All these were done to investigate the most effective way to communicate the importance of moderate drinking to Singaporean youth of legal drinking age.
We found that while 'shockvertising' appealed to a handful, most preferred a more subtle approach. The anti-smoking campaign last year, cited by Ms Chua, received flak from communication specialists and members of the public, as they felt such shock tactics played on the audience's sense of fear and lacked the persuasive appeal needed to communicate the message. Ad experts also commented that shockvertising excludes more people than it includes - it risks alienating the very people it wants to reach.
In turn, our aim was to put out a simple, easy-to-remember message that piques youth's interest, while providing useful tools for our target audience to learn more about how they can drink responsibly. One of the campaign's key objectives is to drive across the message that the choice to drink responsibly is ultimately that of the youth.
Our web portal, www.getyoursexyback.sg, is specifically designed with our core audience in mind and lists the long- and short-term health consequences of binge drinking, with information on where youth can seek help. Since the campaign's launch, youth have come forward to share their negative binge drinking experiences on our website, encouraging fellow youth to drink responsibly.
We began with 40 ambassadors fronting this campaign, but many others have come forward to join us on this journey and become advocates themselves as they all believe binge drinking is not sexy for their health, physical appearance and social currency.
As this is a youth-for-youth campaign, we are more than happy to hear from youth via our website, and we thank Ms Chua for her interest and feedback on the Get Your Sexy Back campaign.
Rebecca Ye Rongling (Ms)
(This letter carries three other names)
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