The Brief

The objective of the campaign was to reach out to the Sri Lankan public and connect at a deeper emotional level. We wanted to strengthen our bond with our existing customers and make a heartfelt connection with potential customers. The strategy was to go beyond making just an impression. We wanted to imprint brand AIA. The thinking was born out of this objective.

Creative Execution

This was a fresh approach to the category and something novel to the occasion. This type of execution has not been done before. So there was originality. Given AIA is an insurance company that called itself the ‘the real life company’, this creative execution showed how much we understood "a need that nobody had thought" of before. It simply made a profound impact on this very special and spiritual occasion.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Our creative solution was to do something that would go beyond the medium. So we chose newsprint and we did an ad that didn't say much. It didn't say much because it was not meant to be read. The double spread was meant to be removed from the newspaper and taken to the place of worship (temple) and used as a temporary floor cover.

Results

The chosen newspaper, Lankadeepa has a weekday circulation of 385,000. The Sri Lankan population is around 21 million and the Buddhist population is around 14 million. On a total scale the newspaper reaches around 2% of the population. During Vesak an average of 3 persons from a family would visit the temple although the newspaper serves as the space for one person, the exposure of the newspaper is much higher and dip stick studies indicated that in neighbourhoods with closer ties, non-Buddhists handed the ‘space to pray’ page to the Buddhists who were in need of it.