myVillage at Serangoon Garden is seen as a neighbourhood service mall by the inhabitants of the Serangoon Garden area, with many locals visiting it on a regular basis for necessities and dining.
The mall is also not situated near the major transport terminal of Serangoon Central, a veritable transport hub where bus and train services intersect with each other. This meant that the mall risked having a purely local audience, with little traffic coming in from other parts of Singapore. Given the lower than average population density in the area, this was a major threat to the mall’s survival.
Without ‘pull’ factors to attract an audience out of the immediate vicinity, the mall would then face the possibility of falling into public obscurity in Singapore’s competitive retail mall environment and can even lose its foothold in the Serangoon Gardens Community.
The Idea
Having picked out the need for a consistent flow of traffic from areas outside of Serangoon as a key indicator of the mall’s health, the Consulus team looked into various concepts that would drive required traffic into the mall. One of these was to host unique events that drive the storyline of the malls branding.
Consequent to that end, the following key requirements were set:
- The event must pique the interest of external traffic.
- It must also be able to further entrench the myVillage brand in the hearts and minds of Serangoon Gardens Residents.
- The event should leverage on the key tenets of the brand: Heritage, Family and being an extended personal space for visitors.
Bringing it all together
Working with the Developers of the mall, Chye Lee & Sons, Consulus created Paramount Night, a movie-screening event that leveraged on myVillage’s historical iteration as Paramount Theatre in the 1950s.
This event was initially run on a monthly basis, screening predominantly local movies to smaller crowds of 40 to 50 people. As the audience base and popularity of the event grew, the team realised that the event was ready to be elevated. We decided to use this as the jump-off point to create the mall’s very first marquee movie event in 2013.
Early Paramount Night events included screenings of local movies like “Kallang Roar”
Earlier iterations of Paramount Night saw acclaimed movie directors like Wee Li Lin would have film discussions after movie screenings
2013 marked a shift into high gear for Paramount Night, with a rooftop screening of major Disney hit, “Wreck-it Ralph”
This year’s Paramount Night 2014 was themed “Filmhouse Festival” and screened a first-time public run of the Academy Award winning movie “Frozen”.
The Consulus team conceptualised, planned and executed the event, leveraging on Mediacorp’s extensive reach to run a print and radio campaign.
Event Posters were placed within the mall to encourage word of mouth
Ads like this were run on 8Days and i-Weekly on a weekly basis, starting 1 month before the actual event
Web advertising was also a key feature, with banners like this going out to the target audience
The myVillage team also focused on Social Media, with a focus on creating a higher level of buzz surrounding the event. That meant being featured on blogs that were relevant to families.
This year’s event was featured on popular parenting blogs like Cheekiemonkies
On March 15th, 2014, the myVillage Paramount Night 2014: Filmhouse Festival event kicked off, with popular Mediacorp radio DJ Jean Danker as the event host. The event drew close to 500 people throughout the day and exceeded our objectives. If it were not for physical limitations on the mall’s roof, we would have had a much larger turnout.
Games and activities got the kids warmed up before the movie event
Specifically, the team chose Jean Danker for her ability to connect warmly with kids and families
Families like this one came for the event
Paramount Night is the result of a strategy oriented at creating memories at myVillage
The myVillage team also used crowdsourcing concepts to get user-generated event photographs. We used a system which would automatically print all photos that were tagged as #myvillagesg on Instagram. The results were overwhelming, with hundreds of photos posted online in just 4 hours.
Crowdsourcing the event photography resulted in great photos like this one
As an extension of the objective of creating memories at myVillage, images like this one were automatically printed for guests.
Results of the Event
Through an array of web analytics, social media reports, mall sensors and survey data, the team was able to quantify and attribute significant ROI to the Paramount Night 2014 event.
The key objective of an increase in traffic was achieved.
Traffic rose by 33% from January
The event also had a significant number of first timers. This result was in line with our objective of bringing in visitors from outside of the Serangoon Garden area.
First time visitors to the mall accounted for 17% of total event traffic
Due to strong in-mall and online publicity, word of the event grew organically. A significant portion of attendees heard of this event from friends and family. Word of mouth is an indicative metric of the strength of the event as well as the depth of entrenchment that the brand has achieved in the community.
Friends and family account for 28% of event traffic
The event grew social media audience by 10% and engaged audiences and drew a large number of first timers to the myVillage Facebook page. Instagram was also flooded with over 200 event pictures within the 4 hour event period.
Likes for the myVillage Facebook Page rose steadily through our publicity period
The future of Paramount Night
myVillage’s yearly Paramount Night events have continued to draw crowds, with event attendance growing yearly. Such intense interest from attendees has fueled the idea of furthering Paramount Night’s evolution into the Paramount Movie Festival in coming years.
This would entail screening a series of award winning movies across multiple nights and finally, growing it into an iconic marquee event that would screen the very best movies, just like how the Paramount Theatre thrilled audiences with great movies 60 years ago.
Events like these are key for driving outreach, engagement and return traffic to locations like myVillage and the Consulus team looks forward to creating more celluloid magic with Paramount Night.
