Background

In 2020, Covid-19 forced thousands of schools across India to close overnight. Children were isolated and had to adapt to full-time, online learning. That’s when Aristotle, a young, online, social learning app, decided to reach out to their target audience and give them what they missed most: a chance to reconnect with their classroom besties.

Describe the strategy

This is why we created Dosti Ki Paathshaala (The School of Friendship) – an application that allowed kids to engage with virtual avatars of their classmates. We started by identifying common classroom archetypes and shortlisted the 10 most relatable ones. We then created a microsite to host the game and promoted it across platforms for our target audience of kids aged 10 to15 years.

Describe the execution

Users could choose 6 of the 10 classmate archetypes and place them anywhere on the grid. Each box was uniquely coded so that the chosen characters sounded different depending on where you placed them. This ensured that the 6 character combination was always going to be unique and made the experience enjoyable repeatedly. Then the user had to choose a music genre and render it into a great sounding track. But it didn’t just stop there. The track created could then be converted into a fun, unique, animated video.

List the results

We encouraged users to share their creation on social media and tag their classmates; or download and share it via WhatsApp or email. The campaign received an overwhelming response of: 3+ Million Impressions 2+ Million Reach 800K+ Video Views It also enabled a young, challenger brand to get noticed in an extremely competitive landscape that was teeming with Ed-tech giants and massive media spends. And of course, it helped children put some much-needed classroom fun back into their lives.