The Campaign

Though there are many newspapers in Sri Lanka, the medium is in a slow decline due to the high cost of newsprint as well as people moving to TV and the internet for their news. In addition to this, despite the country being very ethnically diverse and having three official languages, the country had never had a newspaper that was in more than one language. Part of the reason for this was that the country had been caught up in a brutal 30 year civil war so there was a great distance between the communities involved.

Results

The campaign started with the idea of turning Ada into Sri Lanka's first bilingual newspaper. The first step we took was to work with the editors and journalists of the paper to create content, which included articles that allowed each community to learn the other's perspective on different subjects like the upcoming traditional New Year as well as what peace means. We also helped design a masthead and had input on the front page. The next step we took was to design a promotional campaign for the bilingual newspaper. This was created by joining letters from the alphabets of the two languages based sound. The campaign was run on Facebook (where people could use the symbols we created as profile pictures as well as comment) and on print and outdoor. The final step was to get publicity for the 'Unity Paper' through other mainstream media like TV news programmes and other newspapers.

To promote Sri Lanka's first bilingual newspaper, we wanted convey the idea of two communities coming together while at the same time educating each community on the other's language. To fulfill these criteria, we came up with a simple idea where we united the letters of each language based on sound. This way a member of one community would know the sound of a letter from the other community's alphabet. These 'united letters' were shared on social media and also turned into print and outdoor ads.

On Facebook , the two letter symbols were used by people as profile pictures and the campaign got over 220,000 likes, shares and views, which adds up to 15% of all Sri Lankan Facebook users. The Ada Unity Paper, on the day of publication, saw a 20% increase in sales which resulted in the paper being sold out and led to the paper being the second most consistently read newspaper in the country.