The Campaign

The creative idea was to do an online interactive video AMA, something never attempted in India before due to poor broadband connectivity, featuring two of our hosts to use their fans to make the channel launch go viral. Visit the microsite, get greeted by two celebrities, ask them any random question, then watch the ponder over a piece of paper with your question and your photo on it before responding to you. Doesn't that feel special?

Creative Execution

The #KuchBhiPoochhofy microsite allowed users to post their questions and they would receive a video that would show Chetan and Vicky pondering over the person's photo and question before giving a unique, funny and often completely irrelevant answer. The videos had been shot in advance and coded to incorporate the person's image and question inside the video in real time giving it a touch of personalisation. The microsite backend would identify the keywords and accordingly pick the appropriate response videos to show. Different questions generated different witty and sometimes outright hilarious responses including ones where the two of them sing or dance upon request. But what about the trolls? Wasn’t there a risk that they could hijack the campaign with their abusive questions? Well there was a video just for that. Thanks to keyword optimization, each and every troll received a funny yet fitting response from Chetan and Vicky!

It would be an understatement to say the AMA was a runaway success. Once the microsite went live, within an hour #KuchBhiPoochhofy started trending. Despite using the fastest available cloud servers, the sheer volume of videos being stitched real time nearly brought the server to a halt. The response was unexpected. The numbers will show why: Nationwide trending: over 5 hours Campaign reach (7 days): 8.34 million 7 days microsite visitors: 127,863 Videos generated: 30,259 Total Video View Time (Secs)- 1755022 i.e 487.5 Hrs which translates to more than 20 days of content consumption.

We decide to leverage the popularity of our two show hosts, Chetan Bhagat & Vicky Ratnani. Chetan Bhagat, a bestselling author, is also famous for his acerbic views on social media where he is ardently followed by millions of fans and also trolls who look for every opportunity to challenge his views. Meanwhile Vicky Ratnani is an avant-garde celebrity chef, known for his cookery shows and experimental cuisine with his own set of fans. So strategy was simple: use them in videos to leverage the fans and the trolls alike and amplify our reach.