ARCHIVEDate-Driven Bespoke Café - UCC | Clapboard Ad Archive
UCC's Date-Driven Bespoke Café campaign, created by I&S BBDO, addresses a significant challenge in...
Carousell Turns Real User Reviews Into Musical OOH and Digital Ads
Carousell's "Real User Reviews" campaign is a 2022 digital and out-of-home awareness initiative created by UltraSuperNew Singapore that transforms genuine customer reviews of the platform's Home Services category into word-for-word musical performances, running across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and OOH placements in Singapore.
Carousell launched the campaign in July 2022 to draw attention to a part of its platform that many users had overlooked. Well established across the Greater Southeast Asian region as a leading classifieds marketplace for both secondhand and new goods, Carousell had built a Home Services category connecting customers directly with service providers, cutting out the intermediary companies that dominate the traditional home services booking experience. The challenge was straightforward: awareness of the category in Singapore remained low despite the product's clear utility.
Independent creative agency UltraSuperNew Singapore answered that challenge with a concept rooted in the reviews already sitting on the platform. Rather than constructing a conventional advertising narrative, the agency sourced the most compelling testimonials from satisfied customers and reproduced them verbatim as songs. Two executions were produced, covering home services as specific as toilet cleaning and floor repair, and the results are theatrical in the most literal sense. The campaign carries a Clapboard Score of 59 out of 100, reflecting a concept that is genuinely differentiated but limited in scale.
The films feature Andrew Marko and Zulfiqar Izzudin, performers from Singapore theatre collective Patch and Punnet, who act and sing the reviews with full theatrical commitment. That casting choice grounds the campaign's light-hearted tone in credible performance craft. Distribution spanned YouTube and Facebook as primary digital channels, with Instagram and OOH placements extending reach across the Singapore market. The campaign was submitted to industry record by Zoe Brooks and was publicly reported on 15 July 2022, according to marketech-apac.com.
Carousell operates in a fiercely contested eCommerce and classifieds environment across Southeast Asia. In Singapore, the platform competes directly with Shopee and Lazada in broader marketplace terms, while Facebook Marketplace, Mudah, and eBay represent overlapping competitive pressure in peer-to-peer and classified listings. Within the home services vertical specifically, the competitive field extends to aggregator platforms and intermediary booking services that sit between customers and tradespeople — precisely the model Carousell's Home Services category is designed to displace.
The strategic rationale for "Real User Reviews" sits at the intersection of category education and trust-building. Haziq Hussain, Senior Account Manager at UltraSuperNew, described the brief as telling Singaporeans that Carousell, beyond being an online marketplace, had an outstanding Home Services offering that not many people knew about, adding that the solution was, in his words, right in front of them in the form of the actual reviews, as reported by marketech-apac.com. That observation captures the core strategic move: rather than claim trustworthiness through conventional advertising language, the campaign uses the trust already deposited in the platform's own review ecosystem.
The global eCommerce market provided a large tailwind for this kind of category-expansion thinking in 2022. According to WPP Media's 2022 forecast, global eCommerce represented approximately nineteen percent of global retail sales that year. Within Singapore specifically, digital commerce adoption accelerated sharply in the years following 2020, making the country one of the more digitally mature markets in Southeast Asia for service-based online transactions. Reaching Singaporean consumers through YouTube, Facebook, and OOH simultaneously reflects a media strategy calibrated to a population with high smartphone penetration and commuter-facing out-of-home exposure. The decision to anchor the campaign in real user language rather than produced copy is a direct response to the increasing scepticism that digitally native Singaporean consumers bring to conventional advertising claims.
UltraSuperNew Singapore chose a theatrical execution framework that is unusual in the eCommerce category. The agency sourced genuine reviews from Carousell's Home Services platform and reproduced them without alteration as song lyrics, then cast performers capable of delivering that material with both comic precision and genuine musicality. The result is a campaign whose creative integrity rests entirely on the authenticity of its source material and the quality of its performance.
Andrew Marko and Zulfiqar Izzudin, members of Singapore theatre collective Patch and Punnet, front both executions. Their casting is deliberate. Theatre performers trained in physical and vocal disciplines bring a register to advertising that conventional on-screen talent rarely achieves — particularly for a concept that depends on the audience simultaneously believing the reviews are real and finding the presentation delightfully absurd. The two spots cover toilet cleaning services and floor repair, categories that carry inherent comedic potential when elevated to musical form, and the executions lean into that potential without undermining the credibility of the underlying testimonials.
Heng Xiao Qi, Singapore Country Marketing Manager at Carousell, stated that when UltraSuperNew suggested using reviews as a creative concept, the team was instantly sold, noting that it really does not get more authentic than hearing straight from users' mouths, as quoted by marketech-apac.com. That client-side endorsement reflects alignment between the creative concept and the brand's broader positioning around direct, unmediated connections. The light-hearted theatrical tone threads a specific needle: it makes the Home Services category approachable and memorable without trivialising the practical value of the service or the sincerity of the original reviewers. Distribution across YouTube and Facebook allowed the full performance format to land, while OOH executions extended the campaign's visual identity into Singapore's physical media environment.
Verified performance data for the "Real User Reviews" campaign is limited in public record. One YouTube execution titled "A real Carousell home services review: Toilet Transformer" accumulated over one million views on the platform, a figure drawn from the video's own public metrics. No independently verified data on campaign-level reach, conversion, or brand lift for the Singapore market is publicly available beyond that single platform figure.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several properties that correlate with effectiveness in awareness-stage digital advertising. The use of real, unaltered reviews removes a layer of creative risk: the content is pre-validated by actual customers, which reduces the probability of the campaign being read as inauthentic. The musical format increases memorability and encourages completion of the video unit, which is particularly relevant for YouTube placements where view-through behaviour is tracked. The pairing of OOH and digital channels in Singapore creates a frequency architecture that reinforces recall across different consumption contexts.
The Clapboard Score of 59 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its concept with genuine craft but operates at a scale and media investment level that limits its measurable market impact. The concept is replicable across any category on the Carousell platform that carries a sufficient volume of strong reviews, suggesting the "Real User Reviews" framework has strategic longevity beyond its two initial executions. Its primary structural limitation is the absence of a direct performance mechanism: the campaign builds category awareness without an integrated conversion pathway visible in the public-facing assets.
Carousell's Real User Reviews is a 2022 awareness campaign created by UltraSuperNew Singapore. It transforms genuine customer reviews of Carousell's Home Services category into word-for-word musical performances. Two spots were produced, featuring performers from Singapore theatre collective Patch and Punnet, and distributed across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and OOH in Singapore.
UltraSuperNew Singapore created the campaign. The independent creative agency sourced real reviews from Carousell's platform and reproduced them verbatim as songs. Performers Andrew Marko and Zulfiqar Izzudin of theatre collective Patch and Punnet delivered the musical executions, with the campaign launching in Singapore in July 2022.
Carousell's Home Services category connects customers directly with service providers, removing intermediary booking companies. The 2022 Real User Reviews campaign targeted this category because awareness among Singapore users was low despite strong customer satisfaction. The campaign used existing reviews to demonstrate the quality of service providers already active on the platform.
The campaign ran across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and out-of-home placements in Singapore. YouTube was a primary digital channel, with one execution accumulating over one million views. The OOH component extended the campaign's reach into Singapore's physical media environment, creating a cross-channel awareness architecture alongside the digital placements.
The Carousell Real User Reviews campaign holds a Clapboard Score of 59 out of 100. This reflects a campaign with a genuinely differentiated concept and credible craft execution, offset by limited scale and media investment. The score indicates solid creative thinking without the broader market impact of a higher-budget awareness campaign.
Andrew Marko and Zulfiqar Izzudin, both members of Singapore theatre collective Patch and Punnet, performed in the two campaign spots. Their theatrical training made them well suited to deliver the verbatim customer reviews as songs with both comedic timing and genuine musicality, anchoring the campaign's light-hearted but authentic tone.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
