The Brief

Objective: To ask people to stop smoking in a fresh and innovative way. Challenge: Daunting task because the world has already been delivered the anti smoking message in thousands of ways and smokers don't pay much heed to such messaging anymore. Concept: Cigarettes are sold loose in India unlike other countries. Almost all cigarette shops in India are fitted with public lighter boxes. Also 80% of Indian smokers don't stock cigarettes but instead buy them loose and light them using these lighter boxes. We thought why not make these lighter boxes the very medium and deliver a surprising message here.

Creative Execution

Creative Execution Relevance: We delivered a message of death right in the face of the smoker. Literally. We played a death chant when he leaned his face forward to light the cigarette. And the fact that we used a death chant - an idiom so totally synonymous with death in India - increased the relevance of our messaging more and more. Plus cigarette shops with these lighters being the places of chatting and catching up that they are, only helped us deliver this critical message to not one, but many.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Creative Solution: We turned existing lighter boxes into 'Chanting Lighters'. Every time a smoker tried to light a cigarette from it, it played 'Raam Naam Satya Hai' - a chant which is sung when someone's corpse is carried to the funeral pyre in India. What aided the impact was the fact that these lighter boxes are a vantage point around which most smokers chat and catch up - so it turned out to be the ideal place to ambush the smoker.

Results

Results: This message was as direct as it gets. At USD $ 500 investment across 25 sites, it delivered the message at less than USD $ 1 per person. Its video uploaded by CPAA got over 300,000 views on YouTube. Leading Indian business TV channel NDTV Profit, leading Indian daily Hindustan Times, many local newspapers and world's leading websites such as dailymail.co.uk, CBSnews.com and abcactionnews.com covered it too. Creating millions of rupees of free press coverage. But the most heartwarming result is CPAA now plans to take this unique chanting lighter to hundreds of other centers in India.