The Brief

Objective & task: The business, marketing and communications objective was to launch the new 3GPLUS mobile network from MTS a Telecom major in India. To communicate this they created a rather unusual 70 sec spot set in a labour room that showed a new born baby take charge of his own birth and how he put the word out using the internet and social media. Our task was to market this content to digital natives and evoke a direct response by sharing and recommending this brand message to their peers. And increase sales and social presence of MTS.

Creative Execution

We figured the creative execution of using the BitTorrent platform was the ideal direct response channel for the digital natives. Not-to-mention, a never before used media. To make the content look more intriguing, we named it 'Internet Baby Cuts His Own Umbilical Cord - Leaked HD Commercial'. At midnight, when the downloaders were most active, we uploaded the Torrent. The official launch of the TVC on MTS' official social channels was kept on hold (10 hours) till the Torrent gained traction. Soon, the digital community responded and 1000s of anonymous torrent downloads and seeding had begun. Peer sharing started.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Creative solution & Idea: Since the product and the launch film was meant for the digital natives, to launch the film we took it to a place where no advertiser had ventured before. Instead of using a conventional digital media framework with banners, pre-rolls and social media posts, we launched the 70sec spot as a ‘BitTorrent’. The back- channel of internet that the data hungry spend their time in is still devoid of advertising clutter. From one single file upload to the torrent community started a snowballing chain reaction of responses that super-seeded our desired outcome.

Results

Spot seen in 206 countries, hosted on 4400+ websites, shared 200,000+ times, blogged in 11+ languages. Written in 55+ national-dailies/news-portals globally. Spot viewed 30 million+ times with 73.3% watching the whole video. 250,000 social shares. A very high CTR of 7.6% to MTS-homepage. In less than a quarter our TOM-score up by 11% Awareness-to-Consideration up by 8.5% on a high base-value of 71 Brand recommendation in the category from 4th to 2nd 10% rise in the MTS-3GPLUS connection sales. All this started with single torrent file and a never-before used medium to launch a film.