Why is this work relevant for Brand Experience & Activation?

Amazon Prime Video India was launching a one-of-a-kind, mobile-only, budget-friendly service for their fence-sitting customers: Prime Video Mobile Edition aka ME. The campaign was conceptualised in a bid to grab eyeballs, bring the service to the mass audience and create a shift in how the users experience the video streaming platform. Hence, we activated the campaign in a strategic manner, channeling it through different communication pillars such as social media aggregators, digital media publishers, meme pages and influencers. The goal with each was to spread the word about the new service launch, which was effectively achieved.

Background

Amazon Prime Video (APV), one of India's leading OTT players, wanted to tap the fence sitting audiences who acknowledge the good quality content of Prime Video but don't find merit in purchasing a membership at a conceivably higher price. Also, with India registering a rapid increase in smartphone and internet user base, the former became the preferred device for entertainment for a significant section of the users. Therefore, APV in partnership with Airtel (leading Indian telecommunication company) decided to launch a stand alone service, Prime Video Mobile Edition aka ME. The brief was simply to create a hype around it. Therefore the objectives included expanding the reach of the service and creating a change in perception, followed by sales.

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

Leveraging the fact that the new service's initials 'ME' matched the ME in Amazon Pri'me' Video's logo, we innovatively played around by making 'ME' disappear from the logo at various places on the internet for a couple of days . The logo now said "Amazon Pri Video" instead. Soon after, it was noticed by many netizens, along with some renowned people of the media & entertainment industry and also influencers. We got the social media buzzing with conversations pertaining to the question "Where is ME?", why is it missing, is it a new logo...you get the drill. We then timed the launch of the Mobile Edition in accordance with the netizen's curiosity peaking around the conversation, and brought ME back. It was a first-of-its-kind activity executed to launch a new service on social media.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

Amazon Prime Video's Original shows feature a lot of renowned names from the Indian entertainment industry, who the fans ardently follow on social media. We leveraged the power of these personalities, along with other influencers, to get the audience talking about the missing 'ME', consequentially hyping up the launch of the new service and its benefits. The idea was also to get the audience engaged in the social media activity, sharing their versions of missing 'ME', inspired by the influencers posts and stories. As this was a new service launched for the entire country, our target audience was quite broad, comprising 4G smartphone users in the age group 18-34 year old, falling in the NCCS A3/B1 category.

Describe the execution (30% of vote)

By removing the letters 'ME' from the brand's logo, we built the narrative that 'ME' was missing, which quickly caught the attention of netizens - influencers, renowned personalities of media & entertainment industry and their fans, alike. The conversations effortlessly flowed and for further amplification, we reached out to media houses and publishers with huge readerships on their respective digital portals. The intriguing word play resulted in people making memes, while 50+ brands engaged by creating their own content based on our idea. The influencers then amped up the buzz by creating posts showing that they have the missing letters, in creative ways, via the trending 'Dude with a Sign' format on Instagram. They also put up posts showcasing how to use the new service. Just when curiosity reached a boiling point, we brought back the missing letters and announced the launch of Amazon Prime Video Mobile Edition.

List the results (30% of vote)

Our idea of removing the words M E from social media caught everyone’s attention, so much so that the digital platforms were abuzz with curious netizens asking ME's whereabouts, some even sharing their theories around the activity. It created a spike in conversations with 3.6K+ User Generated (UGC) posts on Instagram. The overall reach crossed over 30.7 million, making #WhereIsME trend on Twitter.