The Campaign

This climate made it easy for politicians to say one thing prior to election and do another, resulting in many dubious figures getting into parliament through scam. One might assume Sri Lankans are generous & forgiving or just gullible. But no voter wants to accept they are vulnerable to scams in plain sight. Whether gullible or generous, a lot of Sri Lankans give donations despite the existence of fake beggars ripping off people at traffic junctions. It’s a well-known fact in Sri Lanka that a lot of beggars fake disabilities to scam money from unsuspecting passers-by. The idea was to emulate one scam to show people how easy it was to be scammed while encouraging them to visit manthri.lk to avoid getting scammed at the general election.

Creative Execution

We arranged for actors to pose as beggars at prominent intersections in central Colombo in a street theatre-style act and plead with motorists for a donation. As soon as a donation was made, the actors would return it, reveal that they had been scammed and told them they should avoid being hoodwinked at the election the same way by visiting manthri.lk, supplemented with a small card with the website address for later reference. The ‘Vote Scam’ street theatre event was uploaded to Facebook to extend its reach very quickly and launch manthri.lk’s ‘Election Hub’. The video emulated a ‘social experiment’ style to stand out amidst political parties and candidates shovelling their extensive budgets into Facebook adverts. The video was unveiled to a contingent of vernacular media at the launch of the ‘Election Hub’.

Against our KPI of 100,000 page views we almost tripled this impact to reach 280,000 views (source: Google Analytics, September 30th, 2015). Daily page engaged users – which tracks the number of people engaging with the page – saw an increase of 1,783%, rising from 2,000 to 36,000 and daily total impressions went up 422%, increasing from 110,000 to 465,000 (source: Facebook Insights, September 30th, 2015). We achieved 142% of our video views KPI reaching 64,111 (by August 31st, 2015). In addition to our impact with voters, some politicians even started including their rankings on Manthri.lk in their owned media channels. Overall, the Vote Scam helped ensure a cleaner and fairer election for the country by exposing politicians who were not working actively for their electorate. Manthri.lk’s new rankings of the current parliament made headlines, a year after the August 2015 general election.

Use one of the world’s oldest promotion mediums – street theatre – to drive traffic to one of its newest – Facebook. After the Sri Lankan Presidential Election on 8th January, 2015 many international watchdogs, government figures and think tanks lauded the use of extensive use of social media to reach voters. So Facebook would be an important medium during the August general election and manthri.lk which has a presence on it, just needed the eyeballs coming its way. The strategy was to create a shareable piece of content that would cut through the election clutter and lead people to peruse manthri.lk’s website to make more informed voting decisions on the candidates up for election. The execution of the creative idea would be done in a ‘social experiment’ style video documenting the street theatre act, to create an online video to be uploaded on manthri.lk’s facebook page.