Mandai Wildlife Group Bets on Adventure to Launch Singapore's Fifth Wildlife Park

Why TBWA\Singapore Designed Choose Your Wild Around the Psychology of Personalised Adventure

Mandai Wildlife Group entered the campaign with a clear strategic challenge. Rainforest Wild ASIA is not a conventional zoo, and conventional zoo marketing would fail to communicate its differentiated offer. Sandy Lee, Vice President of Marketing at Mandai Wildlife Group, stated that the park is unlike a typical zoo experience and that the Choose Your Wild campaign embodies that bold reimagining, as quoted by Little Black Book. The strategic imperative was therefore to reframe the category entirely — positioning the park not as a place to observe wildlife but as a destination for configurable outdoor adventure within a Southeast Asian rainforest setting.

In Singapore, tourism remains a structurally important economic pillar. The Singapore Tourism Board has consistently identified nature-based and experiential tourism as growth priorities for the city-state's visitor economy, reflecting a broader shift in travel behaviour toward active, immersive experiences rather than passive sightseeing. That shift created fertile ground for Rainforest Wild ASIA's positioning. The global theme and amusement park sector itself is substantial and expanding, with Grand View Research projecting the market at approximately US$67.9 billion with a compound annual growth rate of 6.4 percent between 2026 and 2033. Competition in the Singapore leisure market is meaningful: Universal Studios Singapore at Resorts World Sentosa and the Singapore Zoo — also part of the Mandai precinct — both represent adjacent alternatives commanding significant visitor attention. Choose Your Wild needed to establish Rainforest Wild ASIA as a distinct category rather than a fourth iteration of a familiar format. The strategy of segmenting the audience by adventuring appetite, rather than by demographic, gave the campaign an inclusivity that neither directly comparable local competitor had deployed in the same way.

The Game-Inspired Film Series That Brought Rainforest Wild ASIA's Layers to Life

The creative execution for Choose Your Wild takes its structural logic from video game design. Rather than producing a single broadcast film, TBWA\Singapore developed a three-part launch film series in which each film follows a distinct character archetype representing a different adventuring style — from the physically bold to the casually curious. Audiences are invited to identify with a character and, by extension, self-select the experience level they wish to pursue in the park. The game mechanic is not superficial branding language; it directly mirrors the park's own design, in which visitors choose routes and intensities rather than following a fixed path.

Loo Yong Ping, Executive Creative Director at TBWA\Singapore, stated that the team had a wild time putting the campaign together to launch Asia's first adventure-based zoological park, as quoted by lbbonline.com. His framing positions the creative process as experiential in its own right — an alignment between maker and material that shapes the campaign's tone. The films were directed by Roslee Yusof of Freeflow Productions, who noted that shooting inside Rainforest Wild ASIA transported him to a far-away wild place and brought out the explorer in him, as quoted by lbbonline.com. That on-set response speaks to the park's environmental authenticity and the production team's ability to capture it cinematically.

The integrated campaign incorporated out-of-home advertising alongside the film series, a choice that proved significant. The campaign's out-of-home component was executed in Singapore and recognised at the Singapore Marketing Excellence Awards 2025, where it earned Gold in Excellence in Out-of-Home Advertising, as reported by marketing-interactive.com. Media planning and buying was handled by SPARK Foundry, whose involvement ensured the campaign's international rollout across six markets was coordinated with the creative ambition.

Choose Your Wild Wins Gold at Singapore Marketing Excellence Awards 2025

Choose Your Wild generated verified award recognition across multiple categories at the Singapore Marketing Excellence Awards 2025. The campaign received Gold in Excellence in Out-of-Home Advertising, Silver in Excellence in Launch Marketing, and Bronze in Excellence in Integrated Marketing, as reported by marketing-interactive.com. This triple recognition across distinct disciplines — ambient media, launch strategy, and cross-channel integration — signals that judges evaluated the campaign as coherent and effective on several levels simultaneously, rather than excelling narrowly in a single area.

No verified wins for Choose Your Wild have been recorded at Cannes Lions, the Effies, One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or WARC, based on publicly available records. That absence does not diminish the Singapore Marketing Excellence Awards result but does indicate the campaign has not yet been assessed by the full breadth of the global creative and effectiveness awards circuit.

Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness case rests on several observable strengths. The six-market rollout — spanning Singapore, Korea, Australia, Japan, China, and India, according to marketech-apac.com — demonstrates that Mandai and SPARK Foundry treated the launch as an internationally competitive tourism proposition rather than a domestic communications exercise. The three-film game-inspired format created replay value and audience segmentation that a single hero film could not achieve. The out-of-home Gold award in Singapore specifically suggests strong contextual impact in the campaign's home market, where physical media density and commuter dwell time make the format particularly measurable. Taken together, the creative architecture, media ambition, and awards recognition support Clapboard's assessment of 71 out of 100.