Why We Cast Grandparents Instead of Influencers — and Got 7× the Engagement

In 2024 we made a campaign where the most important creative decision was rejecting the entire default playbook of destination marketing. It won Gold at The Drum Awards for Marketing APAC, and more importantly, it outsold Klook’s previous influencer campaigns ten times over.

This is the thinking behind it — shared because the lesson generalises far beyond travel.

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 brief response: hire travel influencers to make Singapore look cool. Klook had done versions of that before, at big budgets. It’s what everyone does. It also runs head-first into the second problem: Gen Z has learned to see sponsored content as advertising, and they treat it accordingly.

So the standard playbook would spend heavily to produce content the audience was primed to discount.

Three insights that pointed elsewhere

Instead of starting with talent lists, we started with the audience. Three findings shaped everything:

1. Authenticity beats polish. Gen Z consistently engaged more with rough, genuine, UGC-style content than with produced promotion. Not as an aesthetic preference — as a trust signal.
2. Travel is social currency, but shared experience is the memory. The trips Gen Z valued most were with people they loved. Solo-influencer content misses the emotional register entirely.
3. The internet had fallen in love with old people. Senior citizens were quietly becoming social media’s most beloved figures — disarming, unfiltered, impossible to fake.

Put those together and the concept almost writes itself: The Bucket List — real grandparent-grandchild pairs exploring Singapore together, co-creating itineraries that mixed the grandkids’ adventure with the grandparents’ tradition.

The uncomfortable part

Concepts like this die in meetings, because they require giving up control. We selected five pairs from Klook’s micro-influencer community for their family dynamics, not their follower counts — some had tiny audiences. We shot reality-style, chasing genuine moments instead of scripted beats. Vertical, for TikTok and Reels, not for the campaign film nobody watches.

And we tied the whole thing to commerce without corrupting it: each pair carried unique promo codes embedded in their videos, compensated on revenue generated. Trackable, accountable — and invisible to the viewer experience.

Every one of those decisions traded production control for credibility. That trade is the campaign.

What happened

• 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 is here.

The transferable lesson

The win didn’t come from production quality — though the production had to be good enough to disappear. It came from a strategic insight the brief didn’t contain. If we’d operated as a pure production house, executing “influencer campaign for Singapore tourism,” every downstream decision would have been competently wrong.

That’s the argument for briefing an agency that also executes, rather than a crew that waits for a script: the highest-leverage decisions in any campaign happen before anyone touches a camera. Authenticity isn’t a filming style. It’s a strategy — and in a feed full of ads, it might be the last unfair advantage left.

Facing an audience that ignores your category’s advertising? That’s our favourite brief.