The Campaign

Riding on India’s largest festival, Ganesh Chaturthi (the festival of India’s favorite elephant headed God) we built the world’s first ever idol ever made for the blind. An idol of god Ganesh. An idol called Sparsh Vinayak – The touch & feel elephant god. An idol made with special tactile sensory aid (of nylon thread treated with special wax to exaggerate the sense of touch for the blind). An idol was based on the insight that the blind have forever stayed devoid of experiencing their favorite God Ganesh. And the insight that the sighted have forever stayed devoid of the realization of what it is to be blind and not be able to enjoy everyday things like the visual of your favorite god.

The Brief

Overall Budget: 5,49,000 Indian Rupees Breakdown of Costs: Creative Cost: 3,58,000 Indian Rupees Production Cost: 1,27,000 India Rupees Technical Cost: 34,000 Miscellaneous Expenses: 30,000

Creative Execution

It took over 30 days for one of Mumbai’s leading idol sculpture artist to finally give shape to the Sparsh Vinayak idol. A first of its kind material using nylon thread treated with wax was used to drape the idol giving it pronounced definition for the blind to touch, feel and visualize the idol or rather their favorite elephant god. Finally, the Sparsh idol hosted inside a pandal (temporary pop-up temple installation) was up for display at one of Mumbai’s most popular malls leveraging the malls organic footfall of over .7 million during the course of the 11 festival days.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

The campaign was only executed at one touch point but the thought behind the campaign left an everlasting impression on the audiences. The campaign was more than just an idol, but a message for humanity which the country needed to live on. The campaign reached 7.5millon people out of which 5 million were devotees of Lord Ganesha. 86% of the devotees that visited the pandal were the sight gifted audience. The campaign created a large impression being the 3rd most trending topic on twitter with 32% engagements on social media and 28x earned media. With over 2,21,000 people pledging to donate their eyes SPARSH VINAYAK saw a surge of 4320% breaking the stereotype for good.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

The campaign was responsible for eliciting a direct response from its set of consumer audiences, who were reached out directly through a tactfully designed pandal (temporary pop-up installation) that leveraged one of the most popular location and timing possible, ensuring maximum direct interactions from the consumer audiences

Against a need of 2.5Lac eyes per year, Eye Bank receives a mere 28000 due to blind faith in religion. If ‘faith’ in the religion was inhibiting Indians from donating eyes, we used ‘devotion’ of the religion to encourage people. Every Ganapati festival, the news, social media and people’s word of mouth would talk about the most unique idol of ‘Ganesh’. We wanted to break into these conversations. We wanted the non-blind audience to witness and experience the blind visualizing the Sparsh idol. The experience would act as an aperture into the everyday struggles of the blind. We wanted to strike an emotional empathetic chord, directly triggering an instinct to overrule the religiously driven excuses and contribute to the blind’s cause by pledging to donate their eyes. Being India’s most celebrated festival, celebrated by over 200 mn. Indian’s the timing of the Sparsh Vinayak idol couldn’t be more spot on!