HOW MTV SENT YOUTH IN INDIA TO POLLING BOOTHS-#TWITTER TOWNHALL

Short List
TitleHOW MTV SENT YOUTH IN INDIA TO POLLING BOOTHS-#TWITTER TOWNHALL
BrandMTV INDIA
Product / ServiceTV CHANNEL
CategoryA08. Use of Social in a Media Campaign
EntrantVIZEUM Mumbai, INDIA
Media Agency 2 VIZEUM Mumbai, INDIA
Entrant Company VIZEUM Mumbai, INDIA
Media Agency VIZEUM Mumbai, INDIA

Credits

Name Position
Team Vizeum India
Team Mtv India

Results and Effectiveness

The initiative delivered 80Million impressions on digital media assets, activating 27million on Facebook with an outreach of 15.6million on Twitter, 30million on television and 2million live interactions on-ground. Built on an intersection of pop-culture-Bollywood-Music-Humour, the movement received appreciation - with over 16Million Indian Youth participating in #MTVRockTheVote. #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 A new record for voter turnout, especially youth with 8.2%Growth 50% Growth in MTV's viewership during Jan-Jul2014 Gold Winner at Promax 2014; Sabre Awards South Asia; Appies Asia.

Creative Execution

A very large, apolitical social movement urging the youth to vote through a multi-pronged social approach. Twitter became the platform for the youth to interact with Political parties through a first of its kind live #TwitterTownhall. In association with Twitter, we also launched a unique-mobile-feature called “Dial-the-Hashtag” that allowed participation in #rockthevote discussions through a missed-call, first time in the world. Socially relevant short-films were released on Facebook, Youtube and other digital assets, For further buzz, launched a humor series on MTV.com and comic strips series on leading newspaper portals, with fun but serious messages leveraging humor as an excellent drug to break the hesitation. Voter registration camps were set up at colleges across 10 cities. Launched a powerful music anthem celebrating the youth power on social media. 10 leading Bollywood actors appeared across digital platforms, urging youngsters to vote. To glamourize, we launched a series of videos ‘Dot is sexy’ that announced the dot (voting mark) as the ‘sexiest’ thing.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

MTV creates a social phenomenon in India to wake up the unwilling youth to participate in the nation building process by casting their votes. The idea #MTVRocktheVote was conceptualized with the aim to make youth aware of their power and their right 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.