Circles.Life beats stay-home blues with ticketed online comedy show

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Laughter is the best medicine, they say. To ensure Singaporeans are beating stay-home blues, Circles.Life’s Discover will be launching three new online comedy shows in June. While the circuit breaker measures have been lifted, it is not entirely business as usual yet with many companies urging their employees to work from home. Consumers are also not yet permitted to patronise malls and food places. As such, the telco has invited comics from neighbouring countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, and Philippines to battle it out with other local comedians.

The show will be hosted by local stand-up comedian Sam See. The telco’s Discover team are the brains behind launching an online comedy show, and went into the space on virtual shows first in April. In a statement to Marketing, Benjamin Choo, head of Discover said the team hosted its first online show with five music buskers in April to support local buskers that were affected by the COVID-19 situation. The team then decided to launch its first online stand-up comedy show in May with the same objective of helping local performers through paid online events.

The initiatives to support local were well received, Choo said, adding that more than 100 tickets were sold for its first online comedy show in May. The tickets were priced at SG$10 and is open to both telco and non-telco users. “Many livelihoods have been affected and the Discover team wanted to find ways to continue to support local performers and create opportunities for them to get paid for their online gigs. Many of these performers had turned to perform online but not many of them can get paid doing so,” Choo said. In addition, the Discover team too saw that Singaporeans (including its users), were turning to online events/activities to stay engaged.

“This is also a good opportunity for Discover to expand into the online experiences category,” he added. The online comedy shows will be marketed to both telco and non-users users. It will also be circulated on Circles.Life and Discovers' social media channels. The Discover team will also be setting aside a small budget to run Facebook ads for the shows, while the comedians will also tap on their channels for coverage.

Circles.Life has recently been pushing for the growth of its Discover feature, and launched a new category called Discover Food. The new category is aimed at supporting food & beverage outlets that are affected by the COVID-19 situation, as well as those wanting to avoid paying additional commission fees to existing food delivery platforms.

Discover was launched by Circles.Life in November 2018, and is aimed at offering users a personalised experience to explore and book events, movies, local activities, and food in Singapore. To promote the feature then, the telco placed an invite on a billboard along Raffles Place asking Crazy Rich Asians' star Henry Golding out on a date for The Weeknd concert. While it initially appeared as though this was done by a fan, the billboard was later confirmed by the telco to be its own stunt.

Sticking to its cheeky personality, Circles.Life took a dig at StarHub and M1's major WiFi blackouts during the WFH period and introduced a “National Hotspot Day”. Taking advantage of the situation, Circles.Life decided to position itself as a ‘saviour’ amidst the chaos, providing total protection against WiFi outages with its 100GB of 4G data plan.

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