INTERVIEW

School invasions, TikTok for seniors, and Responsible AI: How Mediacorp is maintaining its close relationship with the audience

10 December 2025

In an interview, PMA speaks with Mediacorp on how they’re navigating the current disruption to the media landscape, while still remaining connected and relevant to the audience.  

2025 has been a special year for Singapore as the country marked its 60^th anniversary of independence from Malaya. For public media, as cultural and national cornerstones, these events and moments are hugely important, stimulating social cohesion and unity.

On a recent visit to Singapore, PMA’s Head of Content and Engagement, Harry Lock, visited the MediaCorp headquarters, and sat down with the company’s Chief Customer and Corporate Development Officer, Angeline Poh.

Mediacorp is the parent company for a host of different video, audio, and news brands, including Channel News Asia.

In the interview, they focussed on how, amid the turmoil and disruption to the media market – both in Singapore and internationally – the public broadcaster is striving to retain a close relationship with the audience, and how Mediacorp is innovating to stay relevant.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Harry Lock: Let’s begin with the milestone that Singapore reached this year: 60 years since independence. What does that mean for a public media organisation?

Angeline Poh: This year, given that it’s SG60, the 60th anniversary of our independence, it’s been a whole year of celebration and commemoration of what we’ve achieved over the last 60 years, and also at the same time, it’s a little bit looking ahead and speaking to the aspirations of what we hope to achieve going into the future.

So we’ve had programs launch through the year not just in August but peppered across the year in the calendar where we are celebrating our history through tentpole dramas like Emerald Hill – which is a spin-off from a very big IP that we had launched a long time ago – and that series celebrates our Peranakan heritage and culture and that was wildly successful when we launched it. It also had a day-and-date release on Netflix in the region. So that’s an example of something big that we did to celebrate with the nation.

We’ve also done documentaries like Separation De:classified, which looks at declassified documents around the events and the decisions leading to Singapore’s separation from Malaya, leading to our independence. We’re also doing a series on documenting things and objects in Singapore that define us. That’s a collaboration with our National Heritage Board called the Museum of U and Me.

But every year in August, we also do a very big celebratory picnic night out at Gardens by the Bay with our partners there. And this year, we drew 35,000 people that night, where we had a massive concert and fireworks. So that was a very big celebration as well.

HL: As AI technologies develop and new products come on the market, what process does Mediacorp have in terms of implementing new AI products?

AP: So our policy document outlines principles rather than specific prescriptive rules because AI moves so quickly that your rule book will be irrelevant the minute it’s published, right? So it’s more important that we set out clear principles of how we will use AI or how we will not use AI. And our employees are clear about those principles as well.

And then when it comes to specific tools and use-cases, we have a process where teams, they can experiment, but if they want to deploy AI in their workflow, then they need to write up the use-case. Our tech and cybersecurity teams need to look at the tools to make sure that they’re good and they work with our IT system. And then once they’re given the green light, then they’re free to deploy it.

HL: Do you have any examples of where you’ve found a product or you’ve used a bit of AI that has then been rolled out across the organisation?

AP: Our newsroom has been very adventurous in looking at AI solutions. They are really the front runners in the company at experimenting and adopting AI. And they have deployed an AI editing tool called SmartCut, which automates editing of news bulletins into individual stories and short form content. So in the past, you have a half-hour bulletin and then at the end of the bulletin, somebody needs to go snip out each story for us to post it on social media or on our website. And that was a very manual process – it would be maybe an hour or two after the bulletin before the first video comes out.

But today with SmartCut, immediately when the bulletin ends, the stories are all out on socials and on our platforms. So that has actually helped save 1,200 hours annually in editing time. It got Best Use of AI in the Newsroom at the WAN-IFRA 2024, and also Best Innovation in Newsroom Transformation at INMA Global 2023.

So that’s an example of really thinking about a very mundane process and then really leveraging AI to help with productivity. It’s a very simple use case, but finding the right tool that could be trained to understand the visual and audio cues on when a story starts and stops.

HL: What is MediaCorp’s approach to working with third-party platforms, and to what extent you’re using them to then ultimately bring audiences back to your own owned-and-operated platforms?

AP: For us, I would say about seven years ago, we pivoted our thinking so we don’t see ourselves as the national broadcaster. We see ourselves as the national media network so that change in thinking means that we’re not so hung up about having people consume our content only on our platforms, right? For us, our network extends into third-party platforms like YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and Spotify and all of that. So it’s more about making our content accessible and discoverable on all these third-party platforms so that we can maintain that high reach and engagement with the audience.

And how do we then create content that’s relevant and native on some of those platforms? Because we can’t just take what we produce for our own linear channels or stations, websites and kind of reverse-engineer them for social media. It doesn’t work. We all know that. So it does make life a lot more complicated and also more exhausting for the teams involved, but it’s necessary, right? Because as users, when we go onto TikTok, we expect to see content that’s TikTok content, right? Not something else. And I think that investment in understanding the platforms and audience expectations on these platforms has paid off. On TikTok, for example, over the last two years, we have seen a growth, a 3x growth in the video views that we get per month.

That’s coming from an increase in volume of content, for sure. So we’re 1.5x in terms of volume from two years ago. But what’s interesting also is that the views per video has grown 1.8 times, so almost two times, right? So we’re getting better at producing content on those platforms that people want to watch and engage with.

“Our newsroom has been very adventurous in looking at AI solutions. They are really the front runners in the company at experimenting and adopting AI.” – Angeline Poh, Chief Customer and Development Officer, Mediacorp

HL: What sort of content is that?

AP: So with TikTok, for example, if we stay on that platform for a bit, it’s live streams. Our youth audio brands we know that demographic has moved to digital and social more so than FM radio. So we’ve pivoted a lot of our programming to be also on TikTok Live. And it’s not just about the DJs live streaming as they’re doing their shift, but it’s also the DJs doing a walk in a park and having a conversation with their fans and their viewers.

They also do what we call “school invasions”. So they go into the schools and they have assembly talks with kids who are in secondary school. So that would be 13-to-16 year-olds in Singapore and engaging, having in-person engagements with the students in the school, but then also posting content about these school visits on social media. And students from the other schools will then go, “Oh, please come visit us. We wanna host you as well.”

We also create IPs and series on TikTok that could be around skits and gags and pranking people to microdramas. We also produce micro dramas that are doing very well. The most recent one we did was a 10-parter. It was in partnership with our border checkpoints authority called ICA. And over 10 parts, it’s already garnered 13 million views in the last couple of months. So these are sort of the new frontiers of content on social media that we’ve been pushing out into.

HL: And for Singapore, where you have such a digitally-connected and online population across all ages, how does that impact your social strategy?

AP:  So when we look at audience data, it clearly shows that we always think that TikTok’s for the young people. Actually, it’s not in Singapore. TikTok is mainstream. Everyone, including seniors are on TikTok. All seniors use WhatsApp, right? So we have audience interactions and opportunities to engage with them on these platforms as well.

We have a WhatsApp group that we just launched this year, where it’s really targeting seniors and engaging with them and saying good morning to them, because that’s a thing in Singapore – they like to wish each other good morning via WhatsApp, right? So we have a group that’s specifically designed to engage with them in that way and then share with them useful information and tips and tricks about healthy lifestyle and cooking and information about our celebrities and our content.

We also started a TikTok handle specifically for seniors and active seniors. It’s helmed by three of our most veteran artists, three gentlemen who are very well loved in Singapore. So when they broke out on TikTok, they went viral instantly. And I mean instantly. It took us by surprise. But it shows that there is an audience for content like this, that even the seniors are embracing technology.

HL: I presume for those three seniors, that their audience also wasn’t just people their own age bracket.

AP: Yes, because they are so well loved by the audience, right, so yes their audience is not just seniors. We can gauge from some of the audience data but also from the comments that clearly there are multiple generations watching and engaging with them.

HL: There is such a dependence now by public media on these third-party platforms as the gatekeepers to these audiences that we’re trying to connect with. I wonder what challenges you’re still facing from them?

AP: I think one thing that we grapple with is how much is enough, right? In fact, we’re having conversations around what’s the optimum output and posting schedule for the different platforms, right? Because at some point, marginal utility is going to be zero with each incremental post.

The one thing that I feel companies like Mediacorp have as an edge is the fact that we are still broadcasters. I know it’s not trendy to say that, but I think it’s inescapable that broadcast platforms are still the most cost-efficient way to reach the audience. And it’s been proven before that when we push something out on the FTA, whether it’s radio or television, the social media side of the house gets an uplift as well. And that really differentiates us on social media. So it’s because we are able to think and act as a network that I think gives us that edge over publishers that maybe are just operating in one domain and not across the board.