The Campaign

Growing ‘remote’ penetration & DTH players that give an option to record favorite programs and viewing them later by fast-forwarding the commercials, has become a challenge for most advertisers. This situation is not too happy for brands like Cornetto who believe in vanilla advertising and advertise only during the “season" i.e summers! The key was to move away from tweaked content and force-fit integrations and deeply engage with the consumer that so that the brand becomes part of the regular content they consume.

Results

Objective: Cornetto (Unilever Ice-cream brand) with a limited budget wanted to create something which could reach and engage Indian youth. Strategy: For a teenager in India working in the movie industry is synonymous to fame, money and a glamorous lifestyle. Cornetto gave these teenagers an opportunity of a life time to be script writer, casting director, music director, song writer or actor. We invited all starry-eyed teenagers to script, direct, act in, and write the music for a series of short, romantic films. Teenagers took total control of content generation and selection by voting for it online. The writers, musicians and actors with the most votes auditioned for parts in the top three romantic movies, working with the famous Kunal Kohli Productions. Three winning films were aired on MTV (India’s leading youth channel) and YouTube to bring their dreams of Bollywood fame to reality.

We issued a call for entries on Cornetto’s website, MTV and through online ads on popular teen websites. Over 193,000 teenagers uploaded more than 136,000 videos, songs, and audition videos to the Cornetto site or via mobile phone apps. We then seeded comments on social networking sites and blogs to start conversations and boost participation. The short films were aired in top teenage media, YouTube and MTV and then later released in theatres.

Cornetto got its big break: sales went up 36% in value and 26% in volume. The brand reconnected with teenagers, gaining more than 400,000 Facebook fans with over 60,000 interactions every week. Our great talent search gained us major media attention, with over 795,000 online articles. On TV we reached 1.4 million viewers through our short films. The teenagers who had their 15 seconds through our campaign were snapped up by Bollywood. Some are now on the road to fame with their Bollywood career.