The Brief

Objective: To ask people to stop smoking in an 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. And almost all cigarette shops in India are fitted with public lighter boxes. Also 80% of Indian smokers don't stock cigarettes but light them using the lighter box, right after purchase. We thought why not make these lighters the very medium and deliver a surprising message here.

Describe how the promotion developed from concept to implementation

Execution: 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 doubled 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.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

Results: The video uploaded on YouTube by CPAA instantly became a rage. Shared on Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc, the video has over 3,00,000 views. World's leading websites such as dailymail.co.uk, CBSnews.com & abcactionnews.com published this video. Plus, India's leading business TV channel NDTV Profit hailed it as truly impactful. Others like leading Indian daily Hindustan Times and local newspapers covered it too. Creating millions of rupees of free press coverage in India and across the world. But the most heartwarming result is that CPAA now plans to take this unique chanting lighter to hundreds of other centres in India.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

Executional 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.