Singapore Tourism Board takes a cheeky swipe at Samsung's new smartphone

Singapore Tourism Board (STB) has taken a cheeky swipe at the launch of Samsung's new foldable smartphone, Galaxy Fold. In a Facebook post, STB featured a childhood snack, ice cream wrapped with bread, calling it the "Ice Cream Fold", which costs SG$1.The post read, "Taste good no matter how you fold it. Behold #VisitSingapore's ice cream sandwich. #GalaxyFold". In a statement to Marketing, Terrence Voon, director of digital and content over at STB said that its key marketing strategy is connecting with fans, through storytelling."To do that on social media, we need to be agile and creative. The Facebook post in response to Samsung’s Galaxy Fold phone is an example of that. This post – as well as other content that we create at speed – was enabled by our Destination Newsroom, a social media command centre which helps us to mine the latest trends and conversations for real-time insights and content ideas," he added.This is not the first time STB’s digital content team has responded swiftly and smartly. STB took a swipe at Time Out’s survey which singled out Singapore as a “boring” country compared to others in the survey. Singapore was ranked 31 out of 32 for its “most exciting cities” survey. In a Facebook video, STB took various statements from the findings of the survey which referred to Singapore as boring and intertwined it with clips showcasing the opposite of that statement.These statements include “Boring”, “There is nothing exciting to do”, “Nightlife is underwhelming”, “Everything is concrete”, “There is no art and culture” and “Everything is so expensive”, ending off with a passive aggressive line, “Could we be anymore boring?”. The caption of the video even tagged Time Out London.Being tongue-in-cheek is not a new move for STB, especially when it comes to rescuing the Singapore brand name. In 2017, the board made a stand for Singapore after the airing of a factually-inaccurate and controversial episode of CBS’ Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders made its rounds on the internet. Shooting back at show creators, STB published a series of photographs on its Facebook page which debunked most of the geographical and factual inaccuracies of Singapore portrayed in the Criminal Minds episode.