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STB's **78%** consideration lift in Shanghai isolates creative effectiveness from price stimulus, resetting the case for high-production outdoor in short-cycle travel markets.
78%
lift in destination consideration among Shanghai residents who recalled…
1,847
Shanghai respondents aged 25-54 with annual household income above…
300,000
Among the
412
who recalled seeing STB creative in the past 30…
Singapore Tourism Board deployed 3D billboard installations across five Chinese cities in Q2 2025, achieving a 78% lift in destination consideration among Shanghai residents who recalled the campaign, according to YouGov brand tracking data released this week. The outdoor push marks STB's first scaled dimensional creative deployment in mainland China since 2019, when the board last ran category-defining work in tier-one markets.
The billboards ran in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Chengdu between April and June. YouGov measured 1,847 Shanghai respondents aged 25-54 with annual household income above RMB 300,000. Among the 412 who recalled seeing STB creative in the past 30 days, 64% listed Singapore as a top-three international destination for their next leisure trip, against 36% in the control group. The campaign did not include promotional pricing, package discounts, or airline partnerships. STB spent the awareness budget on production quality and site selection, not media tonnage.
The result matters because it isolates creative effectiveness from price stimulus in a category where most national tourism organizations conflate the two. Chinese outbound travel recovered to 87% of 2019 volumes by March 2025, per China Tourism Academy figures, but average booking windows collapsed from 63 days pre-pandemic to 28 days now. Shorter windows reduce the value of traditional brand-building and increase reliance on last-click performance marketing. STB's 78% consideration lift suggests that dimensional outdoor—executed well, placed precisely—can still move preference in a mobile-first, short-cycle environment.
The five-city selection reflects updated allocator logic. Shanghai and Beijing remain mandatory for reach, but Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Chengdu now account for 41% of Chinese luxury travel spend on Southeast Asian destinations, per McKinsey's April 2025 China luxury travel report. Chengdu alone generated RMB 47 billion in outbound travel spend in 2024, passing Hangzhou and Nanjing. STB placed its highest-density billboard rotation in Chengdu's Taikoo Li district, where foot traffic skews toward the 28-42 age band with disposable income above the national 92nd percentile.
The campaign's production approach avoided the volumetric-display fatigue now visible in Seoul, Tokyo, and Bangkok, where 3D billboards have become background texture. STB worked with Singapore-based Lefty Studio to design four vignettes—Gardens by the Bay at dusk, hawker-center smoke drift, Singapore River layered depth, Jewel Changi's indoor rain—each running 18-22 seconds with no voiceover, no tagline, no URL. The absence of calls-to-action appears intentional. YouGov's ad-recall scores were highest (73% unaided recall among ad-aware respondents) for the hawker-smoke creative, which featured no landmark, no brand lock-up until the final two seconds, and no human figures.
Operators and allocators should monitor STB's July-September media calendar for evidence of conversion tactics layered onto the awareness base. The board typically follows high-production outdoor with programmatic retargeting and WeChat Moments placements designed to compress the 28-day booking window identified earlier. If conversion campaigns begin in mid-July, that would indicate STB is playing the full funnel, not just building soft preference. Singapore hotel ADR rose 11% year-over-year in May, per STR, suggesting the city has room to absorb incremental Chinese demand without steep discounting. If STB holds pricing discipline through peak season, the consideration lift becomes a margin story, not just a volume story.
The 78% figure will recalibrate how allocators value dimensional outdoor in mobile-dominant markets, assuming the result holds when YouGov releases its next wave in August.
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