While working for Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s Corporate Communications Department, I was tasked with managing the polytechnic’s yearly advertising campaign. Ngee Ann Poly is a publicly-funded institute of higher-learning in Singapore with a student population of approximately 15,500. As such, the objectives of these campaigns were to inform prospective students — students leaving secondary school having completed their GCSE “O” Levels at the age of 16 or 17 — of the benefits of further education at Ngee Ann Poly and to boost enrolment.

For the first two years, we left the creatives of this campaign to advertising agencies. My job was to manage the agencies by helping them understand our brand messaging, balance the budget, fine-tune media strategies, and gain internal approval from key decision-makers.

For the 2011/2012 campaign, we decided to go in another direction. We decided to create the campaign ourselves.

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