Brief Explanation

The key challenge was that both communities involved spoke completely different languages with different scripts. This meant promoting a bilingual newspaper required us to create a bilingual campaign but one that captured the spirit of bringing two communities together.

The Brief

In 2009, Sri Lanka’s brutal 30-year civil war finally came to an end. Four years on, and though progress had been made, the process of reconciliation was still not complete. With the traditional New Year coming up, the one event celebrated by both the communities involved, Ada, a mass-market daily newspaper, wanted us to find a way for it to contribute to the reconciliation process and promote it.

How the final design was conceived

For our promotional campaign, 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.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

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.