Increasing ST Engineering's Aura Among Gen Z

Project Highlights

We partnered with ST Engineering Defence Aerospace to solve a specific puzzle: how do you get young engineering talent genuinely interested in a massive, established industrial brand? By moving away from the traditional corporate recruitment reel, we mapped out a targeted video strategy designed to engage different profiles of candidates based on what actually drives their career choices.

What we mapped out and delivered:

• The Blueprint: A 3-pronged messaging architecture built directly from qualitative interviews into Gen Z career psychology.
• Persona-Matched Video Series: Custom narrative videos tailored to real human motivations.
• The Content Funnel: A media pipeline that used short, curiosity-inducing teasers to hook attention before routing candidates to deeper, unscripted peer stories.

The Challenge: Decoding the “Grandpa Company” Variable

Founded in 1967 to anchor Singapore’s national defense, ST Engineering is an established global powerhouse. However, this massive scale creates a unique problem for its defense aerospace sector, which is actively looking to attract a fresh wave of engineering talent.

Here is the reality we had to parse: modern Singaporean Gen Zs grew up long after the country’s early, nation-building eras. To them, institutional history doesn’t automatically read as an incentive. In fact, our qualitative research hit an authentic, funny truth—many younger candidates simply viewed ST Engineering as “the place where my dad or grandpa used to work.”

The core challenge was solving for this image barrier. To pull in fresh talent, we had to dismantle the formal corporate facade and uncover a voice that felt genuinely authentic, peer-to-peer, and relevant to modern career logic.

Extra Considerations: How Young Engineering Minds Actually Tick

To solve this puzzle, we had to look past the standard HR metrics and get genuinely curious about how the relationship between young grads and massive companies is shifting on a broader level:

• The Evolution of the Career Goalpost: For previous generations, corporate scale and long-term stability were the ultimate goals. Today’s grads look at work through a completely different lens. They care deeply about day-to-day team dynamics, flat structures, and feeling supported by the people around them. If a company only brags about its massive size and history, it misses what this audience is actually searching for.
• The Craving for Complex Puzzles: Young engineers are intensely focused on their personal skill trajectories. They don’t just want a seat at a stable table; they want to know they will be handed complex, high-stakes technical problems to solve. A standard recruitment pitch fails because it hides the cool, hands-on engineering work behind a wall of corporate text.
• The Rehearsal Filter: This generation has a highly accurate, built-in radar for anything that feels forced, overly polished, or scripted. They instantly tune out formal, top-down monologues. We knew that to genuinely get their attention, we had to speak horizontally—using raw, peer-to-peer stories from real employees that match how they naturally gather information in their daily lives.

Solution: Project Glow Up

To turn ST Engineering Defence Aerospace into a destination that young engineers actually want to look at, we focused on replacing institutional coldness with human truth. We didn’t guess what this generation wanted; we ran secondary market research and conducted deep qualitative interviews with grads to map out their actual career anxieties and motivations.

This data inspired a highly targeted, 3-pronged messaging strategy designed to speak directly to three very distinct personas:

• For ‘Aces’ (The Passion & Progression Track): For the high-performers, we skipped the empty clichés about corporate ladders. Instead, we focused the messaging on autonomy and complex engineering puzzles. We proved this track was real by tracking the unscripted journey of a young engineer fast-tracked to a Mechanical Lead role—showing that raw capability beats out old-school seniority every time.
• For ‘Teamplayers’ (The Peer Support Track): We realized a massive portion of graduates value community over corporate hierarchy. For this group, we centered the narrative entirely on flat communication, mutual support, and unpretentious teamwork. We wanted them to see that they would be entering a supportive environment, not a rigid, intimidating institution.
• For ‘Explorers’ (The Endless Horizon Track): For the candidates driven by continuous self-education and a craving for new experiences, we framed ST Engineering as a massive global sandbox. The messaging highlighted the unique, rare technical skills they could acquire both locally and through overseas opportunities.

How everything came together with Content Choreography

Shifting how a younger generation looks at a large industrial icon required a bit of reverse-engineering. We couldn’t just film standard corporate clips and hope for the best. Instead, we used content choreography to treat the unscripted human stories and the video release plan like pieces of a larger puzzle that needed to click perfectly together.

Here is how we mapped it out:

• Trading Scripts for Unscripted Truths: We completely dropped formal corporate scripts because they make real people sound robotic. By letting actual employees share their real experiences in their own words, the videos felt like a genuine conversation with a peer rather than a rehearsed advertisement.
• Matching the Narrative to the Motivation: We avoided the trap of making one generic video for everyone. Using our interview insights, we tailored the visual style to fit the Aces, Teamplayers, and Explorers individually. This meant different candidates could immediately see a reflection of their own career values on screen.
• Designing the Attention Funnel: We built a step-by-step pipeline to match modern viewing habits. At the top of the funnel, we used quick, high-energy teaser videos designed to snap candidates out of the old-school stereotype and spark instant curiosity. Once we had their attention, we smoothly guided them to the deeper, unscripted peer stories.

Results

Project Glow Up successfully reimagined how a foundational titan introduces its most complex engineering sectors to a new generation. By trading rigid corporate templates for an authentic, track-based approach, the campaign delivered a complete transformation in creative execution:

• Shattering the Legacy Mold: The campaign successfully introduced a fast-paced, high-energy visual tone and a choreographed content flow that completely departed from traditional recruitment formats, proving that established institutions can speak the language of modern creators.
• A Validated Creative Blueprint: The project set a new benchmark for the sector’s talent attraction, providing a distinct, unscripted storytelling template built explicitly around what actually drives young engineering minds today.

What the Client Said

“We needed to change how we spoke to the next generation of aerospace engineers. Mediashock helped us better understand our target audience by bringing a genuine curiosity to our recruitment efforts. They helped us create authentic, relatable stories that brought a fresh take to corporate recruitment content.”

— ST Engineering Defence Aerospace