Smash the $100K Burden
Singapore is the most expensive place on Earth to own a car. A Certificate of Entitlement grants only the right to own one for 10 years. By July 2026, a Category ‘A’ COE reached roughly S$129,000, a paper permit bought before a single dollar goes toward the car itself. Add the vehicle, fuel and maintenance, and the full ownership cost across those 10-years climbs well past S$200,000. Two in three Singaporean households don't own a car at all.
Every carsharing brand in the category was running the same rational, price led ads. GetGo partnered with The Fragment Room, Singapore's only rage room experts, to host the country's first physical car smash event. We took a real car already due for the scrapyard, spray painted every line item of ownership onto its panels (COE, depreciation, insurance, downpayment, repairs), and handed Singaporeans a bat.
The idea
Singaporeans didn't need telling that car ownership is expensive. That frustration already lived on Reddit threads, in comment sections and at dinner tables. The COE auction sits entirely outside public control, and that made traditional advertising a weak instrument for the moment. What people needed wasn't another ad about high prices. They needed somewhere to put the anger.
We gave Singaporeans the one thing the COE system never gives them: the chance to do something about it. We sourced a real car with an expired COE, already booked for the scrapyard, and spray painted every cost of ownership onto its panels. Then we armed people with an array of tools, featuring a custom bat branded "The $100K Burden Smasher." Each swing physically destroyed a line item cost, tying directly to the campaign line: Smash the $100k Burden, reclaim your freedom to drive.
Ahead of the main activation, we released a run of teaser videos, each one smashing a symbolic cost of car ownership, to seed the story across social channels before the main event broke.
The activation was built to generate conversations and content, not just a moment. One event, many points of view on what owning a car in Singapore actually costs. We set the stage. Singaporeans wrote the story.
We didn’t just make an ad about frustration, we created a platform that rallied Singaporeans to spark a nation-wide conversation on car ownership.
The results:
Zero paid social spend
Organic fan-made content (UGC) surged +550%
Captured 55% of category's total reach, more than every competitor combined on a fifth of its mentions.
Positive sentiment climbed from 38% to 88%
GetGo's estimated reach rose 50x higher to 696,000 views, >10M combined views
> 30K combined engagements
Organic media coverage by local independent news