The Campaign

World Environment Day seemed the perfect opportunity for Ola Cabs, India’s largest transport aggregator, to counter this indifferent attitude with a powerful campaign that mirrored the everyday plight of the Indian commuters and satirically put across the point. Ola urged people to adopt ride-sharing as a habit. This would help remove congestion, reduce pollution and in turn save the environment. #FarakPadtaHai (Makes a difference).

Creative Execution

We roped in world-famous cricketer Virendra Sehwag for a twitter stunt where he sent a callous tweet about the environment. The provocative tweet stirred up quite a few and people started unleashing their fury. We followed with an apology that the stunt was only meant to bring attention to the growing problem of congestion. The message was carried forward with a satirical web film that mirrored the plight of the Indian commuter which ended in #farakpadtahai (Makes a difference). Further, we offered a share pass at just Re.1 to encourage mass adoption of Ola shared cabs.

The film clocked in over 256,709 YouTube views and over 3,826,104 Facebook views, 1,970,280 likes and 2,616 shares, gathering strong social media sentiment in its favour all in just one weekend. More than half a million share passes were sold in less than 48 hours and shared-rides spiked by 26% in just a week’s time.

Environment awareness is the issue of the hour. People would talk about it on several forums, do endless debates, even give solutions and a few even adopt it. But to create a change at a national level, we took this indifferent attitude to task. We took up two main steps to do this. We wanted to first start a conversation about the problem and then initiate a behavioral change.