Why Grandparents Beat Influencers: Lessons From Producing Klook’s Bucket List

In 2024 we worked with The Smalls to produce a campaign that rejected the entire default playbook of destination marketing. It won Gold at The Drum Awards for Marketing APAC, and it outsold Klook’s previous influencer campaigns ten times over.

The campaign was created by The Smalls, who strategised and conceptualised. We were their production partner in Singapore. This piece is about what we learned executing it, because “make it feel authentic” is one of the hardest briefs a production team can be handed, and most people underestimate it.

The problem: Singapore was “done”

Klook’s Travel Pulse survey put it bluntly: fewer than 20% of young travellers had Singapore on their wish lists. Gen Z wanted the unbeaten path — Seoul, Tokyo, anywhere that felt discovered rather than packaged. Singapore read as finished, sanitised, your parents’ stopover.

The obvious response would be to hire travel influencers to make Singapore look cool. That runs head-first into the second problem: Gen Z has learned to read sponsored content as advertising, and treats it accordingly. The standard playbook would spend heavily to produce content the audience was primed to discount.

The idea that changed the brief

The Smalls’ concept came from three insights: authenticity beats polish as a trust signal, not an aesthetic; the trips Gen Z values most are shared with people they love; and the internet had quietly fallen for old people — disarming, unfiltered, impossible to fake.

Hence The Bucket List: five real grandparent–grandchild pairs, picked from Klook’s micro-influencer community for their family dynamics rather than follower counts, exploring Singapore together.

What that means on the day (our bit)

Here’s the thing about a brief built on authenticity: every production instinct you have is now working against you.

Normally you control the frame. You cast people who hit marks, you light for consistency, you shoot coverage you know will cut. On this job, all of that had to be dialled back or it would have killed the premise. Some hard-won lessons:

Cast for chemistry, then get out of the way. Real families aren’t talent. They don’t repeat a moment identically, they talk over each other, they wander. The job shifts from directing performances to creating conditions where good moments are likely — then having the camera ready when one lands.

Shoot much more than you think you need. Unscripted warmth arrives unannounced. Our ratio here was far higher than on a scripted piece, because the gold was in the unplanned aside, not the planned beat.

Vertical is a discipline, not a crop. Shooting for TikTok and Reels natively — composing for a 9:16 frame with faces large enough to read on a phone — is different from shooting wide and hoping. Retrofitted horizontal footage always looks retrofitted.

Let it be imperfect on purpose. A slightly soft handheld shot of a grandmother genuinely laughing beats a locked-off, perfectly exposed version of her doing it for the fourth time. Knowing which imperfections to protect is the actual skill.

Protect the schedule around energy, not efficiency. Older participants and long shoot days don’t mix. We planned around when people would be at their best — which is a production decision that directly shaped the creative outcome.

The results

• 7× higher engagement than industry average
• Watch time doubled on ads featuring grandparents; cost-per-click fell by a third
• +34% campaign sales and +10% searches for Singapore activities
• 10× the ROI of Klook’s previous big-budget influencer campaigns
• Gold, The Drum Awards for Marketing APAC 2024; two Silvers at Hashtag Asia 2025

The full case study, with credits, is here.

The transferable lesson

“Authentic” content is not cheaper or easier to make than polished content. It’s often harder, because you’re chasing something you can’t stage and can’t reshoot. What it buys you is attention from an audience that has learned to skip everything else.

If you’re an agency with an idea like this and you need a production partner in Singapore or across APAC who understands why the rough edges matter — that’s a conversation we enjoy.