Creative Execution

The campaign was started by briefing the idea to a few influential social media users, within just 5 days over 700 creative lyric lines were submitted from over 200 contributors. The message was creatively incorporated within the song where the song ended with a pre-seeded lyric tweet by a Tweep who shouts his data is finished, a reply to that tweet by Etisalat’s twitter profile was shown on the video saying: “Don’t worry, call 2211 to activate 50% more data plans on Etisalat”. In addition, a YouTube overlay ad was also placed with the message directing traffic to Etisalat website.

The song was an instant hit among the social media community in Sri Lanka. Within just 18 days of the launch over 30,000 people had watched the video. Etisalat was able to create awareness among each and every one who watched the video generating a positive social media buzz. During this period Etisalat Twitter share of voice increased from 13% to 52%, the campaign was also picked up and featured by many community pages and local websites. #ApeSinduwa became a generic hashtag in Sri Lanka.

A key concern of heavy social media users in Sri Lanka is that most often data plans that they have activated on their mobile gets consumed sooner than they expect. Etisalat identified this problem and came up with a special mobile data plan which gave social media users 50% bonus data, however in a cluttered market where all the competitors are claiming they have the cheapest plans, Etisalat wanted to create buzz and communicate the message “Get 50% more data with Etisalat Internet” in a very subtle and creative way among the heavy social media users. Idea – Create “Sri Lanka’s First Crowd-sourced Song” by collecting creative social media related lyric lines from the social media users via tweets and Facebook updates with a localized hashtag and creatively incorporate the message into the song and make use of the viral reach of the song to communicate the message.