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.

Describe how the promotion developed from concept to implementation

Our solution to the challenge of finding a way for Ada to help bridge the gap between two communities who speak completely different languages, was to reach out to both of them by creating Sri Lanka’s first bilingual newspaper. 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.

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

On Facebook , the two letter symbols we created to promote the 'Unity Paper' 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.

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

Despite Sri Lanka 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.