Why Now –
While PhillipCapital just celebrated their 50th anniversary in Singapore last year, its investment platform, POEMS (Phillip Online Electronic Mart System), commemorates its 30th. As a new generation of young professionals builds their financial habits with digital-first investment platforms, PhillipCapital saw an opportunity to reintroduce POEMS to a younger audience through a fresh creative lens.
Working with social media agency Epic Dialogue, the brand built its latest campaign around an unexpected creative parallel between poetry and investing.
Built around the campaign line “Invest in Something That Lasts,” the work explores the idea that a poem and an investment portfolio share more in common than most people realise. Both are built with intention, shaped over time, and reward patience rather than urgency.
Watch brand film here:
Why This – Reframing a trusted brand for first-time investors
Singapore’s investment platform market has become increasingly crowded, with brands competing on low fees, zero-commission trading and product features.
For PhillipCapital, the challenge was different.
While POEMS is backed by decades of institutional trust, more than 1,000 investment specialists and access to 26 global markets, those credentials mean little to younger investors choosing their first platform today. Many recognise the name but do not yet see it as a platform for their own investing journey.
“POEMS is not unknown. Its legacy has simply been underleveraged with a new generation of investors,” said Takako Masumura, Director of Marketing & Business Development. “The opportunity wasn’t to build credibility from scratch. It was to make the credibility we already have impossible to ignore.”
Why a poet, not a finance creator?
Rather than partnering with a finance Key Opinion Leader, PhillipCapital and Epic Dialogue cast Singapore typewriter poet Adam Tie, better known as @thenovelencounter, whose work centres on writing personalised poems for strangers using just a three-word prompt.
Tie was chosen not as a spokesperson, but because his own investing journey mirrors that of many first-time investors. Despite being an active investor today, he once found investing intimidating and delayed getting started.
The 90-second brand film opens with him playfully translating finance jargon through a poet’s lens. ETF becomes “Extremely Terrifying Fund” and DCA becomes “Don’t Cry Anymore”, reflecting the uncertainty many beginners feel before revealing how guidance from a human investment specialist gave him the confidence to begin investing.
“Adam isn’t there to endorse the platform,” said Eric Sim, Managing Director of Epic Dialogue. “He’s there because his story reflects how many people feel. We wanted audiences to think, ‘That’s exactly where I was,’ before showing them that investing doesn’t have to be overwhelming.”
Building a brand world through creators
Instead of treating creators as media placements, the campaign was built around Adam Tie’s existing creative identity.
His themes of patience, craftsmanship and meaning became the creative lens for the campaign, allowing the POEMS name to take on new relevance instead of simply serving as another product acronym. Rather than asking a creator to deliver a brand message, the brand stepped into a world the creator had already built.
Conceptualised by Epic Dialogue and produced by Behalf Co., the campaign centres on a 90-second hero film, supported by social cutdowns and Performance Max assets. The wider campaign also includes out-of-home executions by POEMS by PhillipCapital’s in-house team, targeting young professionals aged 25 to 35 who have yet to begin investing, and investors aged 30 to 45 seeking a trusted long-term platform.
A different way for heritage brands to stay relevant
For Epic Dialogue, the campaign demonstrates how heritage brands can remain culturally relevant without abandoning the trust they’ve spent decades building.
For POEMS by PhillipCapital, the campaign marks a beginning rather than a conclusion. The hero film establishes the platform’s new voice; investor testimony stories will follow, each adding a new chapter while keeping the same throughline. It reflects the brand’s own campaign line back at itself – that a brand, like an investment, only proves its worth if it’s built to last.
Instead of searching for a new campaign idea, the agency and client team looked inward, uncovering one that had been part of the brand for three decades: the POEMS name itself.
While most investment platforms are named for speed, technology or convenience, POEMS carries meaning. Originally an acronym, it also lends itself naturally to metaphor. The campaign built on that duality, positioning POEMS not just as a platform to trade, but as a companion through the investing journey, where markets move in rhythm and investing becomes a story shaped by both logic and life.
In doing so, the campaign shows that the strongest creative opportunities are not always invented. Sometimes, they have been embedded within the brand all along.
