VULTURE, BABY, BAG, WHALE

TitleVULTURE, BABY, BAG, WHALE
BrandTHE ECONOMIST
Product / ServiceMAGAZINE
CategoryA03. Best Use of Outdoor
EntrantOGILVY & MATHER Mumbai, INDIA
Entrant Company:OGILVY & MATHER Mumbai, INDIA
Advertising Agency:OGILVY & MATHER Mumbai, INDIA

Credits

Credits

Name Company Position
Abhijit Avasthi Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai National Creative Director
Rajiv Rao Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai National Creative Director
Sumanto Chattopadhyay Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai Executive Creative Director
Sukesh Kumar Nayak Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai Creative Director
Heeral Desai Akhaury Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai Creative Director
Sukesh Kumar Nayak Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai Copywriter
Heeral Desai Akhaury Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai Art Director
Vedashree Khambete Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai Copywriter
R. Pratheeb Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai Art Director
Soumen Nath Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai Art Director

Results and Effectiveness

11,194 SMS responses were received between 8th Nov and 1st Dec. Subscription registrations on www.economist.com went up by 44% during the campaign period. And the website www.interprettheworld.in registered 66,851 visitors and 1,34,431 page views in two weeks. By creating curiosity, the billboards achieved all this, apart from becoming a popular topic of conversation, and at times of heated debate, across the country.

Creative Execution

We sparked off curiosity within our target audience with a series of billboard ads. Each billboard bore three seemingly unrelated visuals placed within each other, which together told a set of inter-related, globally relevant stories. Each billboard also carried a code that people could text to a given number, after which they’d be texted the respective stories in return. People would see the three visuals and invariably wonder at the connection between them. Instinctively, they'd reach for their mobile phones, wanting to know what the ad meant.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

In India, The Economist is perceived primarily as a business magazine. Our task was to change that perception. We had to make our target audience (business executives between 25 to 45 years of age) see The Economist as a publication that not only reports world issues, but also interprets them for its readers. Our larger task was to come up with an advertising campaign that would also be like The Economist – thought-provoking, relevant, something that made people “interpret the world” so to speak. The insight we came up with was simple - the way to make people think, was to make them curious.