NCADA’s “What’s Your Fix?” Media Campaign: Tackling Substance Abuse in Singapore

Amid a global climate in which people have adopted a more permissive stance towards substance abuse, Singapore’s National Council Against Drug Abuse (NCADA) found that it had an uphill task trying to convince the country’s impressionable youth not to abuse drugs. Its 2022-23 media campaign titled ‘What’s Your Fix (WYF)’ however managed to tap on social media effectively to convey its anti-drug message. The campaign spanned three phases: Finding Juliana, a TikTok series which positioned drug abuse as a top-of-mind social concern for Singapore youth; On The Mend, a docu-series that sparked nuanced conversations on drug abuse; and the Youth Film Programme, which aimed to get youth to develop short films championing the anti-drug cause, thereby recruiting them to build a community of advocates. Despite the success of the WYF campaign, a nagging question remained for NCADA: should it conduct more of such campaigns or should it consider deploying other types of communication efforts?

The case discussion should enable the students to achieve the following learning objectives: assess whether the WYF campaign was conceptualised to persuade through central or peripheral routes; evaluate the success of the campaign at addressing the different attitudes, motivations, and levels of exposure of NCADA’s various target audience segments; assess the extent to which the campaign created engagement among youth; and analyse the effects of NCADA’s livestream delay.

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