The Campaign

The business, marketing and the communications objective was to launch the new 3G PLUS Network from MTS, a Russian telecom major in India. To create an integrated campaign that effectively utilises both the traditional and the digital medium to engage our audience and get them to share/recommend this brand message/content to their peers. STRATEGY & IDEA We created a rather unusual campaign around the MTS Baby led by a 70sec spot set in a hospital where a newborn baby takes charge of his own birth and puts the word out using the internet/social media. True to the digital native audience we launched the spot on BitTorrent - a platform where no advertiser had ventured before. Followed it up with an engaging Twitter and Facebook campaign. And a unique promotional campaign. Not to mention some tongue-in-cheek online advertising and contests to make this one of the most talked about and shared product service launches. Not just in India but globally.

Success of the Campaign

Our spot was seen in 206 countries, hosted on 4,400+ websites, shared 200,000+ times and blogged in 11+ languages. It was spoken about in 55+ national dailies/news portals globally. And it has been viewed 30 million+ times, with 73.3% watching the whole video. A very high CTR of 7.6% to MTS homepage. In less than a quarter, our TOM score was up by 11%. Awareness-to-Consideration was up by 8.5% on a high base value of 71. Brand recommendation in the category went from 4th to 2nd. And it resulted in 10% rise in the MTS 3G PLUS connection sales. All this started with a single torrent file and a never before used medium to launch a film.

Describe how the campaign/entry was launched and executed across each channel in the order of implementation.

We created an engaging 70 second spot targeted at digital natives. To begin with, we chose BitTorrent as the right launch platform for the spot. We named it 'Internet Baby Cuts His Own Umbilical Cord - Leaked HD Commercial' and waited 10 hours before seeding it on social media. Our spot got downloaded by thousands of web influencers and was shared and talked about even before we launched it 'officially'. As our spot left the confines of the deep web and entered mainstream internet, we ran a web banner campaign. The campaign, featuring the MTS Baby, was written in a unique first person MTS Baby tone. Engaging and original MTS Baby spoof posts, pics, shares and memes on Facebook/Twitter further compounded engagement. To celebrate the success of the launch month, we even gave free internet dongles to babies born on the 26th March, which coincided with the MTS Founding Day.