No more clowning around: Speaker of Parliament urges tuition centre to stop with the “viral marketing nonsense”

Just this week, Singaporeans were on high alert over sightings of clowns outside schools in the districts of Marine Parade, Katong and Tampines. 

It turns out that this circus act had been orchestrated by local enrichment centre Speech Academy Asia, with the clowns being spokespersons for their roadshow campaign to entice parents to sign their children up for the centre’s public speaking classes.

This bid to attract potential tutees garnered the centre more attention than they asked for, with police investigations now underway in response to multiple reports lodged by concerned parents and members of public about persons dressed as clowns approaching children at various primary schools.

Madam Shawalati, a parent who had been approached (and startled) by a clown while picking up her daughter from school, voiced her concern that “if such behaviour is normalised, it may encourage those with ill intentions to dress up and wait outside schools.”

Speaker of Parliament Tan Chuan Jin also took to Facebook to implore the centre to stop, stating that he was in no way amused by the distasteful and “plainly dangerous” PR stunt, and urged parents to remind their children to steer clear of strangers.

It is unclear how the campaign even managed to get as far as it did, but the enrichment centre has since halted all roadshow promotions. Mr Kelvin Tan, director of Speech Academy Asia, has issued a public apology stating that as a parent himself, he understood the concerns raised and that their roadshow team “would use the incident as a learning opportunity for future campaigns”.

Read more (and check out the viral clown photo that caused quite a stir online) here.