The Campaign

In India, branded entertainment is currently growing at great pace. Till now brands most brands have made invested on movies. Apart from this aspirational world another relatable world (to the viewer) of TV is gaining prominence. A Study by Chicago University on “Role of Indian Soaps in women emancipation” found that TV soaps have inspired women to make positive change in their life. Similarly, another study on women & TV soaps by Duke University suggested that the attitude of women towards modernism, gender equality and greater freedom has changed in line with the portrayal of women characters in the soaps. Indian TV Soaps have been shaping society with strong female characters since decades. Our campaign was based on the insight – “Indian women consider the REEL life strong women protagonists on TV as their “alter egos” and emulate them in their real life”. But the biggest problem with TV is Scale. Top TV networks in India are highly competitive and usually a branded-content initiative is active on a single network. Thus compromising scale and impact. For the first time in the history of Indian television, we brought 5 leading protagonists from 3 rival TV networks together for a brand campaign.

Results

With aggressive price promotions, doubled media spends and multi-celebrity endorsements, Unilever was determined to wrest back tea category leadership from Tata Tea. Making matters tough was Tata Tea’s decision to deviate from category norm of functional advertising to social cause marketing. Challenge was to protect turf by making a real difference to Indian women bombarded with cause-related campaigns. While Tata tea launched the “Power of 49” (PO49) television campaign educating women about the importance of their collective vote; women’s non-participation in electoral process was a deeper social issue. A TVC wasn’t enough to effect large scale change. We change the vision to “Empowering 100mn women to make an informed vote in the 2014 Indian general elections” and followed 5 Steps to bring it alive - 1.Segmenting the Indian Women Voter, 2.Identifying the key influencers for each segments, 3.Arriving at a powerful yet actionable insight, 4.Campaign planning to achieve the realisation of 100Mn vision, 5.Large Scale Execution that ensures last mile conversion. Working on the well-researched insight that reel-life TV protagonists are the real-life influencers for women; the campaign was realigned from TV ads to India’s biggest content marketing initiative.50+ content forms, 40+ cause endorsers (including 5 leading reel-life protagonists from top three rival networks, 4 news anchors), a first-of-its-kind crowd-sourced women manifesto, supported by social, mobile & real time data management changed the way 100 million women voted in 2014 elections. Scale was the key for the success of the campaign. Media partner scale – 3 of India’s largest TV networks joining hands for the first time and made them own the PO49, Influencer Scale – Biggest celeb endorsement, People connect scale , Data management scale – using biggest online platforms, IVRS, mobile, social media, and brand website.

We segmented the Indian women voter in to two classes – Women from Bharat (Lower middle class, rural, marginally literate/illiterate) and Women from India (Upper middle class, educated, urban). Content for Bharat women–vignettes featuring all protagonists, real-life issue adoption by protagonists, campaign story woven in to story-line etc. Content for India women – Editorial content on prime time news, politician bytes, film and social celebrity support, creation and hand-over of world’s first crowd-sourced manifesto to top political parties etc. The success of content discovery was attributed to the balancing act between creating platform specific & platform neutral content.

Reached 102mn women. Received >8 lacs issues from 504/543 parliamentary constituencies in India. > 5Mn interactions = ~1 phone ringing continuously for >20 months. 14 experts created “VOICE OF 49” Women’s Manifesto. Manifesto presented to ALL 3 leading parties. Unprecedented social buzz on twitter, facebook and brand website. Generated PR worth 4.62mn USD (highest ever in the history of Tata Tea by a single campaign). Politicians took note and consequently women issues featured in the manifestos of political parties. Brand track showed that faith and desire of women to participate in the elections were up by 50-70%. Upswing of 300% in FEMALE VOTER INTENTION as compared to the previous elections.24% of cabinet ministers in the new government are women - the highest ever in the Indian Parliament history Results for Brand: Tata Tea was able to maintain its market leadership with 22.3% of value share. (During the financial year there was no drastic change in other marketing inputs) .In a highly competitive scenario, Tata Tea increased its market share by 10 basis points. Tata Tea Gold, the lead brand of PO49, grew double than the category. Preference for the brand grew by 50%.