Background

Arctic Fox is a lifestyle brand for the youth, offering a range of products, from backpacks to duffels, camera bags, and more. Ever since its inception, the brand has created ripples across the internet with its creative and unique marketing campaigns. The brand also became a category inventor by releasing India’s first backpack specifically designed for gamers. To launch this backpack, we collaborated with Asia’s #1 YouTube content creator and gamer, Ajey Nagar, aka CarryMinati. With our campaign, our aim was to introduce CarryMinati as Arctic Fox’s brand ambassador and launch the gaming backpack in a way that would break through the clutter and capture the attention of the discerning Indian youth.

Describe the strategy

CarryMinati is well known for his interest in gaming, and his brutally honest roasts. So instead of creating a typical brand ambassador launch campaign, we decided to create a campaign that was an authentic fit to CarryMinati’s YouTube personality – we conceptualised a roast. We co-opted the client and worked with CarryMinati to create an extremely bold roast that unflinchingly called out typical brand ambassador campaigns – the over-the-top claims, exaggerated glamour and inauthentic messaging. We even convinced Arctic Fox to roast itself! Discerning audiences today can sense a sale from a mile away, and aren’t easily swayed by overstated advertising campaigns. We created a concept that acknowledged this truth in a way that would surprise and delight our audience.

Describe the execution

Once the thought was sealed, we worked closely with CarryMinati to make sure all of our dialogues were authentic to him. The pre-production phase took almost 2 weeks, with the sets and crew being finalised even before the final draft of the script was locked. The shoot itself was executed in under 13 hours, with a cast and crew of over 80 members.

List the results

The film garnered over 12 Million hits on YouTube, with more than 30,000 comments, and a host of subsequent reaction videos - all without a rupee spent on media. #honestadvertising became a trending hashtag, with influencers like Tanmay Bhat, Ashish Chanchlani and Alisha Singh commenting on our campaign. This campaign led to a 550% boost in our monthly sales and the film became the first-ever advertisement to trend nationally at #2 on YouTube and the Arctic Fox YouTube channel gained more than 106k subscribers on the back of this campaign in under a week, earning us a silver play button from the platform.