STREET PLAYS A NEW FORM OF 'EDUTAINMENT'

TitleSTREET PLAYS A NEW FORM OF 'EDUTAINMENT'
BrandHINDUSTAN UNILEVER
Product / ServiceTOOTHPASTE
CategoryA06. Best Use of Special Events And Stunt/Live Advertising
EntrantMINDSHARE Mumbai, INDIA
Entrant Company:MINDSHARE Mumbai, INDIA
Media Agency:MINDSHARE Mumbai, INDIA

Credits

Name Company Position
Nilanjan Bhattacharya Mindshare Director
Vinish Mathews Mindshare Director
Farah Siddiqui Mindshare Manager
Baljeet Singh Mindshare Manager

Results and Effectiveness

‘Amar Ujala’ – The state’s leading daily picked up this initiative giving daily coverage across the 32 days of the activity. Each act was covered as a daily feed in the local edition indicating the location of the next act. Earned free media in the state was worth USD 1,66,00 while the actual spend on this ground initiative was only USD 95,000. In addition to the people reached through a play a total of 5 million people were reached through the print activity. Supersalt was able to achieve a market share of 1% in launch month.

Creative Execution

To get our ‘Street Play’ act right, we roped in renowned stand up artists to script and enact the play. A hilarious script revolving around a typical Indian family, the local police inspector and a human representation of Pepsodent Supersalt was created. The script focussed on wife complaining to the inspector about her husband’s poor oral hygiene and how it was affecting their married life. The inspector traced the problem to husband’s method of cleaning his teeth using his finger and a local brand of Tooth powder. The inspector then convinces the husband to switch to using a Brush and Paste. Supersalt was seamlessly integrated into the play and hence became generic to ‘paste’. 3 teams of artists covered 70 towns in a span of 32 days with 3-4 plays in each catchment area.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Uttar Pradesh(UP) a state in India is on the road to progress. Despite this, large chunk of the semi urban population lacks knowledge of basic hygiene - Oral hygiene being one of them. People are stuck to the age old methods of cleaning their teeth using locally made toothpowders without realising their harmful effect on teeth and thus overall health. Pepsodent saw this as an opportunity and launched a discount variant called Supersalt. The brand took the education route of convincing consumers that toothpaste is better than local options. To break a habit is not easy and it certainly cannot be done with passive 30 sec creative’s on TV. We had to communicate the message through active engagement. The answer was -‘Street plays’ a concept very strong in UP, a huge crowd puller and a great attention grabber. We decided to use this medium to educate them about Oral Hygiene