Of Remembering and Recovery

This campaign took everything in me.

Once in a while in a creative's life, we encounter projects that tilt our life's axis and we are never the same again. Moving to a PR agency, these are the types of brief that I wanted to take on -- huge in both scale and impact, tackling social issues that matter, making a difference not just in business but in people's lives.

But, boy, oh boy, did I get exactly what I wished for and more?

This brief was humongous with agencies fighting tooth and nail to have something like this in their portfolio -- the one that creatives would drop everything for if only for a chance to sink their teeth into something real and quite possibly life-changing. One that only comes once in a blue moon. One that challenged the most seasoned creative minds because of the sheer complexity of the brief.

THE PROBLEM: How might we discourage drug use by getting Singaporeans to remember the victims of drug abuse with empathy while reinforcing Singapore's strong stance against drugs?

Read that again one more time:

"Be empathetic but also be stern."

"Care but not condone."

"Be human but also be the strictest government in the world when it comes to drug abuse".

Imagine being the strategist receiving this brief for the first time.

So I said "no." Hard pass on this because how?!? Those objectives are literally worlds apart. But you know what they say, sometimes we don't get to have that choice. It is, after all, still a business and in this climate our business cannot afford to say no to an opportunity this big.

I bit the bullet and got to work in early February 2024. We were given a full month from research and strategy development to a fully integrated proposal. As a Filipino, "drugs" was not an unfamiliar territory. It was an everyday reality. I knew people whose lives were destroyed by it on a first-name basis. I have the contacts on my phone -- victims, therapists, rehab centers, government agencies, etc.

But, mind you, this is not in the Philippines. I have only been in Singapore less than 2 years when this brief landed on my desk. Essentially, I did not know where to begin. How to even find people to interview for the research and insighting bit of the proposal? It's not like influencers today would gladly label themselves as "former druggie extraordinaire".

Lesson: know what you don't know and when to ask for help. No matter how "seasoned" you think you are in your industry, there will always be things that you cannot do on your own. It's fine. Thank god for resourceful interns! She was brilliant. She watched CNA documentaries and found names in the credits, cold-called them, and got me meetings within 72 hours with former abusers, gang members, therapists, and rehab centers.

There was no excuse now. More than 15 years of interviewing people were tested in what I believe to be the hardest IDI's (In-Depth-Interviews) I've ever done. I had to get people to remember the darkest parts of their lives -- the ones they wished they could erase. Then, I had to ask them how it impacted not just themselves but their loved ones too, putting salt to old wounds. The sensitivity and gravitas of the conversation were not lost on me. I cannot thank them enough for their vulnerability. Their stories fuelled a solid strategy. Our teams got to work. Barely crossed the finish line. Pitched. Lost.

I got sick. It was burnout. It was also PTSD, because I didn’t even realize that what I saw as “normal” in the Philippines—having family members struggle with drug abuse at different points in my life—had actually made me a victim, too. I had just been going on with my life like it was nothing -- like there was no guilt, no fear, no pain because it was done and we've all moved on. We were okay now...right?

I was sent home for a long-ass break to rest and recuperate. The pitch was done. We live to fight another day.

A full month of rest later, I was back in Singapore and found the brief back on my desk. What the heck! But you know what they say, "the Universe works in mysterious ways" (like how I'm writing this from HK prison cos I rode the wrong ferry so now I'm stuck here in the visitors' lounge with no phone and internet access. The Universe really said, "jess, stop procrastinating and write this now").

In its second form, it was more manageable... or so I thought.

A chapter I thought we closed was re-opened, together with all my old wounds. If the first brief alerted me of their existence, the second one forced me to face them -- the painful part of recovery no one talks about.


OUR SOLUTION:
The strategy we, therefore, landed on was of duality -- of guilt and relief, of joy and pain, of survival and shame. Because, the truth is, recovering from drug abuse is not as straightforward as most "recovery stories" would like it to be.

There's recovery. But there's also real fear of relapse. There's reconciliation. But there's also loss of trust. There's gratefulness for a loved one's survival. But there's also guilt (a shit ton of it) for not being there when our loved one needed us the most.

Pitched. Woke up at 5am to practice. Still fucked up a statistic. Won.

This campaign challenged me beyond belief and I'll forever be grateful for it. I can now breathe easy.

Forever grateful for all the hardworking teams that brought our collective vision to life.


RESULTS:

The Minister showed up.

Media covered it.

Teenagers shed a tear.

My job here is done.


So from my heart to yours, I hope you heard our stories.