Results and Effectiveness

A new record for voter turnout, especially youth with 8.2%Growth 50% Growth in MTV's viewership during Jan-Jul2014 30million viewers on television, 80Million impressions on digital media assets, activating 27million on Facebook with an outreach of 15.6million on Twitter and 2 million live interactions on-ground. #MTVRockTheVote received a whopping US$1million coverage on media through PR and mentioned as one of the most effective election based campaign by BBC,CNBC,Financial Express,TOI Built on an intersection of pop-culture-Bollywood-Music-Humour, the movement received appreciation - with over 16Million Indian Youth participating in #MTVRockTheVote. Gold Winner at Promax 2014; Sabre Awards South Asia; Appies Asia.

Creative Execution

A groundswell integrated-media consisting of TV, digital, mobile radio, print, cinema and events through a Bought+Owned+Earned media-approach. Among the various initiatives, highlight worthy are the country’s “first” youth-targeted voter registration camps across 200 colleges in 10 cities with Music concerts by leading artists to generate higher participation, socially relevant short films on TV, Cinema and Digital, a humor series on MTV & MTV.com and comic strips series on leading newspapers & portals, with fun but serious messages, leveraging humor as an excellent drug to break the hesitation. A large youth-entertainment platform #TwitterTownhall for live interactions with spokesperson of the parties. Launched a unique-mobile-feature called “Dial-the-Hashtag” that allowed participation in #rockthevote discussions through a missed-call, first-time in the world. We also launched a powerful music anthem with 2 leading Bollywood singers. 10 leading Bollywood actors participated in the campaign urging the youngsters to vote. In order to create glamour quotient, we launched a series of videos ‘Dot is sexy’ that announced the dot (voting mark) as the ‘sexiest’ thing.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

A well-integrated mass-media campaign that not only became the social buzz but sent the unwilling youth to the polling booths. The idea #MTVRocktheVote was conceptualized as a movement with the aim to make the youth, to be heard. India hold its elections to the parliament every 5 years. In 2014, 120 million first time voters aged between 18-25 years were eligible to vote. This was greater than the winning margin of the last election. The task at hand-to mobilize and motivate the youngsters to vote. Unique insights that shaped the idea are: Less than 15% of the youth actually voted in the last elections. Youth are hyper aware. But they simply didn't want to vote. Inertia mixed with reluctance to discuss critical issues that are affecting the youth were the root cause. Youth friendly live platform allowing them to interact with the political parties participating in elections were also missing.