Results and Effectiveness

The campaign was a success with many celebrities and individuals commenting resulting in over 220,000 likes, shares and views, which adds up to 15% of all Sri Lankan Facebook users. Free publicity was given on news programmes and the front covers for four leading dailies. 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.

Creative Execution

With the client being a media brand, the role of the media team was crucial and it was their job to convince Ada to turn itself into a bilingual newspaper. They also facilitated the sharing of ideas between editors and journalists of Ada and the creative team so content could be created for the 'Unity Paper' that would help strengthen the message of the idea. The media team also assisted in getting other media outlets like TV, outdoor and other publications to promote the newspaper.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

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. Our solution to the challenge of finding a way for Ada to help bridge the gap between two communities who spoke completely different languages was to reach out to both of them by creating Sri Lanka’s first bilingual newspaper. Despite Sri Lanka being ethnically diverse, the country never had a newspaper that was in more than one language. We believed that by doing this we would get people talking about the issues related to reconciliation, increase the profile of the paper and boost sales.