Singtel's 'From Ma, With Love,' produced by Akanga Films in Singapore, earned more than 19 million views during Chinese New Year 2019 by telling a story of
Singtel Turns a Mother's Letter Into a Chinese New Year Film Moment
"From Ma, With Love" is a 2019 Chinese New Year film campaign created by Singtel in partnership with Akanga Films, released in Singapore in February 2019, following three Singaporean undergraduates studying abroad who reconnect with their families after receiving a handwritten letter and handmade gifts from home.
Singtel distributed the film across Singtel TV, social media channels, television, and cinemas in Singapore from January 4 to February 19, 2019, according to reporting by The Drum. The campaign sits within the electronics and technology category and centres on a single film asset — a narrative short that uses the occasion of Chinese New Year to explore what it means to be present for the people who matter most. That singular focus gives the work a clarity of purpose that distinguishes it from the broader category of festive advertising, where brands frequently spread their message across multiple touchpoints and formats.
The story follows three young Singaporeans living in Melbourne who initially resist returning home for the Lunar New Year. A letter written by one of their mothers, accompanied by handmade gifts, becomes the catalyst for them to call their families and reconsider what the season actually means. The film uses this intimate domestic object — a letter from a mother — as the emotional engine of the entire narrative, translating a universal feeling of guilt, love, and reconnection into a specifically Singaporean context. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 73 out of 100, reflecting the film's strong emotional craft and cultural specificity, balanced against the absence of broader multi-platform execution. In Singapore, where Chinese New Year remains one of the most commercially and culturally significant periods of the year, the film arrived as part of Singtel's sustained mid-to-late-2010s strategy of using emotionally resonant storytelling to connect its brand with family and human relationships rather than product features alone.
Singtel built "From Ma, With Love" on a consumer insight that sits at the heart of modern festive tension in Singapore: that the preparations and social rituals surrounding Chinese New Year can overwhelm the emotional purpose of the occasion itself. Lian Pek, Vice President of Group Strategic Communications and Brand at Singtel, articulated this directly, as reported by The Drum: "Sometimes we get too caught up in the preparations for Chinese New Year that we miss what truly matters — being present for our loved ones." That insight is not simply a campaign thought; it is a strategic repositioning of a telecommunications brand away from connectivity as a technical feature and toward connectivity as a human value.
Singtel had been developing this strategic direction since at least 2017, when a Christmas campaign encouraged Singapore families to switch off their devices and be present with one another, per reporting archived on Ads of the World. A separate 2017 Singtel campaign, created by BBH with production company Freeflow, used celebrity couple Kimberley Wang and Shawn Pow to approach similar themes through humour, according to Singapore Business Review. "From Ma, With Love" marks a maturation of this approach: the humour is stripped away, the register becomes earnest, and the emotional stakes are raised considerably by setting the story across international distance.
In the broader telecommunications landscape, Singtel operates in Singapore alongside competitors including StarHub and M1, while managing major international affiliates including Optus in Australia and Bharti Airtel in India, with an aggregate customer base exceeding 690 million in 2019, according to Singtel's own corporate disclosures and data aggregated by Wikipedia. The global telecommunications services market grew at a compound annual growth rate of 1.6 percent between 2019 and 2024, according to ResearchAndMarkets.com, indicating that growth pressure across the sector has made brand differentiation through emotional storytelling an increasingly rational strategic investment. In Singapore specifically, where market saturation among major telcos makes product-level differentiation difficult, campaigns like "From Ma, With Love" serve a retention and affinity function that pure product advertising cannot replicate.
Akanga Films produced "From Ma, With Love" with a restraint that is itself a creative statement. The film does not rely on visual spectacle or the kind of compressed melodrama that characterises many festive advertising films in Asia. Instead, it builds emotional weight through accumulation — small gestures, domestic objects, the texture of a handwritten letter, and the specific loneliness of being abroad during a holiday that is inseparable from the idea of home.
Akanga Film Asia, the production company responsible for the work, is one of Singapore's most prominent independent film production houses, with a track record spanning commercial work and festival-circuit narrative film, as documented across its public production history. The decision to assign this campaign to Akanga rather than a conventional advertising production company reflects Singtel's intention to make something that reads as cinema rather than advertising — a creative choice consistent with the film's distribution across Singapore cinemas as well as television and digital platforms, as confirmed by The Drum.
The central formal device — a mother's letter, read in voice-over as the film cuts between the students in Melbourne and the domestic world they left behind in Singapore — is a classically literary construction applied to an advertising context. It creates a structure of address that feels personal rather than broadcast, as if the audience is overhearing something private rather than being spoken to by a brand. This is precisely the kind of craft decision that separates emotionally effective festive films from those that generate sentiment through score and montage alone. Production credits beyond the Akanga Films production company attribution are not fully publicly documented for this campaign, though journalist Shawn Lim's review published by The Drum on January 4, 2019 remains the most substantial contemporaneous critical account of the film's creative approach and intent.
"From Ma, With Love" generated more than 19 million views during the Chinese New Year period, as reported by Ads of the World. For a single-asset film campaign distributed primarily in Singapore — a city-state with a resident population of approximately 5.7 million at the time of release, according to the Singapore Department of Statistics — that figure represents a reach that substantially exceeded the domestic market, indicating significant organic sharing across the Singaporean diaspora and regional audiences.
No additional verified performance metrics — including platform-specific engagement rates, earned media valuations, or brand lift data — are publicly available for this campaign. What the viewership figure does confirm is that the film achieved distribution at a scale that few Singapore-market festive campaigns reach, and that its subject matter — Singaporeans living abroad — functioned as a natural amplifier, giving the film relevance to audiences well beyond the island.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on several compounding factors. The choice of a single film asset concentrates creative investment rather than diluting it across formats. The international setting in Melbourne activates an audience segment — Singaporeans studying or working abroad — that is emotionally primed for exactly the kind of homesickness the film dramatises. The distribution window from January 4 to February 19, 2019, as confirmed by The Drum, gave the film time to accumulate views through the full Lunar New Year build-up and into the festival itself. Together, these structural choices created the conditions for a campaign that performed well beyond what its single-asset format might have predicted.
"From Ma, With Love" is a 2019 Chinese New Year film by Singtel, produced by Akanga Films in Singapore. It follows three Singaporean undergraduates in Melbourne who reconnect with their families after receiving a handwritten letter and handmade gifts from one of their mothers, exploring themes of distance, longing, and being present during Lunar New Year.
Akanga Film Asia produced the campaign for Singtel. Akanga Film Asia is one of Singapore's most prominent independent production companies, known for work spanning both commercial campaigns and narrative cinema. The film was reviewed by journalist Shawn Lim in The Drum upon its release on January 4, 2019, as the most detailed contemporaneous account.
"From Ma, With Love" received more than 19 million views during the Chinese New Year period, according to Ads of the World. Given Singapore's resident population at the time, this figure indicates the film reached well beyond the domestic market, suggesting significant organic sharing among the Singaporean diaspora and regional audiences across Asia.
Singtel distributed the film across Singtel TV, social media, television, and cinemas in Singapore from January 4 to February 19, 2019, according to The Drum. The extended distribution window spanning the full Lunar New Year build-up period gave the film sustained visibility through both the pre-festival anticipation phase and the celebration itself.
The film extends Singtel's mid-to-late-2010s shift toward emotionally resonant storytelling, as documented across Ads of the World and The Drum. A 2017 Singtel Christmas campaign similarly encouraged families to be present rather than distracted by devices. "From Ma, With Love" deepened that strategic direction by removing humour and raising the emotional stakes through an international setting.
Singtel's "From Ma, With Love" received a Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100. The score reflects the film's strong emotional craft, cultural specificity to the Singapore Chinese New Year context, and its achieved viewership scale, balanced against the campaign's relatively contained single-asset format and the absence of a broader multi-platform creative execution.
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