It was for Contact Singapore and the brief was essentially to invite people from around the world to try the sunny island and settle down for work.
Being an outsider (having been there for just five years), I had a completely different perspective about the little red dot. After spending a while in Singapore, you start sounding like a travel brochure. 'Streets are clean', 'Crime is low', 'Women can walk wearing skimpy clothes safely without a worry', 'MRT is great', 'Everything works' ... the list goes on (still does).
As the received wisdom goes, the magic is in the product and I didn't have to look too far or try too hard to make the idea work. All my art director and I had to do was bring out the truth in an interesting way.
Here are some of the samples, (funny how the propositions are still relevant even now).
But what the client chose was not any of the ads you see here. Instead, what ran was a sappy, sugary picture of an ang mo (means 'white' in local lingo) family, with four words that said 'Work, Live, Play in Singapore'. Go figure.