Travel : Pilgrim in Paradise

Being driven around Singapore on the first day of a government-sponsored four-day guided tour of the island nation’s digital media businesses, the first thing a true-blue adman notices is the absence of billboards.
It’s a good look, too – thanks largely to immense state planting programmes that have produced a clean, leafy city framed in every direction with tropical flowers and trees.
It would never work in Auckland, with its gritty waterfront, narrow streets and concrete canyons where colourful billboards provide genuine relief, enhancing the city’s ‘metro’ vibe.
It helps, too, that much of Singapore’s tree & plant maintenance – not to mention its construction work, street & highway maintenance, hotel cleaning, and most other menial, dangerous or unpleasant jobs – is carried out by one million unskilled, limited-stay workers imported from other parts of Asia. That’s one clean-up guy for every five permanent residents!
The World Bank rates Singapore as the No 1 country in the world in which to do business (NZ ranks No 2), so it was no surprise to our small tour party (digital media academics, businesspeople and journalists from Australia & NZ) to learn it’s home to 50,000 skilled workers – many of them foreigners – who work in interactive and digital media.
Digital media in this context means ... games! Digital games – a fast-growing, multi-billion dollar industry in which Singapore is a regional hub. Outfits like Lucasfilm, Digipen, Ubisoft and Koei have very large facilities here. Lucasfilm is still mining its decades-old Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises to the max, and game design is where the action is.
There’s a global shortage of digital games programmers, artists and producers, and our visit was intended to aid the recruitment of Australasian graduates.
Sadly, we never got near any real advertising action. But – apart from the games biz – we did get to admire broadband as it should be (fast!), the Singaporean gift for euphemism (a casino is an “integrated resort”), Singaporean race relations (respectful) and Lucasfilm’s dress code (they don’t have one!). – david@admedia.co.nz

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