The Campaign

In emerging India, Teenagers struggle between pursuing traditional ideas of success and embracing emerging ambitions. Mark sheet defines teens only instead of their hunger to discover their passion. In the context of a progressive narrative, our consumer immersions with teenagers revealed an antiquated parenting style where obsession with marks remained strong. An intervention was much needed as India has 2.5mn teenagers who give their exams every year. A few had even written letters to their parents expressing their fears and thoughts of suicide but were too afraid to share them. The creative idea borrowed from this insight. We created a platform for the teenagers to express - An Open Letter straight from the heart where they could pour out their fears – not just of exam failure, but fear of letting their parents down. Media acted like a megaphone that pricked parent’s conscience and forced them to listen.

Creative Execution

We launched the digital film with a YouTube masthead followed by TV for 3 days on news channels to increase reach. A missed-call number was used across channels for users to record their pledge. Facebook and YouTube were used extensively to create awareness. India’s leading radio station - Red FM was dominated for 2 weeks across 10 metro cities. RJ’s talked about the campaign and urged parents to take the pledge. We retargeted users who interacted with the video via Xaxis programmatic Campaign was also amplified via 1. Teen celebs, were chosen to write open letters 2. Other celebs/ parents from Sports and Bollywood like Malaika, Sehwag & Rana 3. mycity4kids was used to activate Mom bloggers community 4. Native articles were used extensively to create awareness On the day of the exams top newspapers carried tear away stickers with motivational messages which parents stuck on their kids exam boards.

Over 27.7 million views on the Short film. BestAd.in organically took our campaign which delivered 1 million views. The campaign has reached over 154 million people and delivered 649 million impressions. We received 1,578,915 pledge from parents to release the pressure. 99.9% positive conversations about Mirinda. PR value of more than 1.8 million dollars. (With investment of just 0.7 million dollars) The conversation around Mirinda was 138 times higher than the nearest beverage brand. India’s biggest cricket celebrity Virendra Sehwag and Fashionista Mom Malaika Arora Khan shared their picture with the bottle cap, generating support for campaign.

This was a 360 campaign that leveraged multiple media formats - Digital, TV, Print, Radio and Mobile platforms.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

To generate awareness of #ReleaseThePressure we needed to strike the cords of both parents and Kids. We launched the short film on YouTube masthead which delivers over 200 million impressions everyday so that we can start conversation amongst parents. It was a mass platform to build awareness and give quick reach to the campaign. To further amplify the communication, we brought on board credible, influential voices of authority including psychologists, Bollywood parents and teenagers to get people talking about this issue. We also introduced the microsite for the campaign along with a missed call number to take the pledge. We also introduced 120 million bottles in the market which will have open letters from kids and urge parents to miss call and take the pledge.