Not every corporate communications campaign comes with a splashy launch event or a ministerial announcement. Sometimes the brief is leaner and the stakes are higher. When Stroke Services Institute (SSI) approached Mad Hat Asia to drive awareness for Singapore's National Stroke Awareness Campaign 2025, the challenge was immediate: no new data, no event, no hook. Just a cause that mattered and a media landscape that needed a compelling reason to cover it.
SSI faces the same wall every year. Without fresh statistics or a headline moment to anchor coverage, stroke awareness stories risk being passed over in favour of harder news. Our answer was to go back to what corporate PR does best when everything else is stripped away: strategy, storytelling, and the right voices. We developed a fresh suite of human-centred media angles and profiled credible spokespeople across different races and backgrounds, giving editors and producers something they could genuinely connect their audiences to rather than another awareness campaign that felt like a press release.
The results were Tier 1 across the board and entirely earned. Coverage landed in Channel News Asia, The Straits Times, Lianhe Zaobao, 96.3FM, Berita Harian, Tamil Murasu and MediaCorp Suria News, reaching Singapore's communities in four languages. Total PR value hit S$732,000, secured purely through compelling pitching and meaningful narratives with no paid media, no event budget, and no ministerial peg to lean on.
For us this was one of the most meaningful campaigns of the year and a reminder of what good corporate communications can do when it is built on substance over spectacle. If you need a PR partner in Singapore who knows how to find the story when there isn't an obvious one, we would love to help. Get in touch at hatters@madhat.asia