Why is this work relevant for Entertainment?

It's a short film based on a true story and was launched primarily for the entertainment of our rural community / key customers i.e. mainly farmers. It is a re-enactment of true events by professional actors and has been produced for digital media. It is freely available online for viewers to see and discuss.

Background

After launching our digital assets, Sarsabz Fertilizer has been continuously looking for content to feature on our Youtube channel. Targeting rural based audience, we have from day one tried to tailor our content for them. We quickly realized that there was a clear dearth of decent content for the rural community in Pakistan - decent because either the content currently being produced was condescending (made by urban folks with no insights on rural communities) or just plain negative. The brief was to celebrate and bring forward true stories of farmers and people from rural community. Stories that are in-line with our brand values of: 1) Being voice of farmers - fearless and bold. 2) Being caring and empathetic towards farmers; protecting their hard work. 3) Helping farmers prosper which leads to prosperity of our country - Sarsabz Pakistan. Objective was to increase reach of our channel to rural community.

Describe the creative idea

Naz Darejo, a.k.a. Nazo, is a true story of a lady who defended her right to inheritance and her land from people who wanted to forcefully evacuate her. She successfully managed to fight of the dacoits who invaded her land until help arrived. We packaged the story as a short film under the banner of "Sarsabz Kahani" (Sarsabz Stories) where true stories are being produced and shown to audience online.

Describe the strategy

Thanks to mobile phone penetration, digital media is fast becoming accessible in rural areas of Pakistan. As a fertilizer brand, we wanted to ensure our presence in all major digital assets especially Youtube. So for the video streaming platform we made the strategy of producing content in form of shortfilm showcasing stories from rural Pakistan intended for rural community. It was like watching your local hero on on your smart phone; a local hero who was not being given the limelight he/she deserved. By showcasing such stories we wanted to get viewership, subscriptions and engagement.

Describe the execution

The first story we chose was of 'Nazo' - a brave lady from province of Sindh in Pakistan. We hired some of the best talent and production team to re-create the story by keeping it as real as possible. We created the film poster using traditional hand painted poster artists who used to make film billboards for local movies in Pakistan. We used that artwork throughout our marketing plan. We created a 360 degree marketing plan for the film by focusing on print, PR, OOH and TV (where the trailer was showcased). We launched the story in December 2020 with a week long pre-hype. We continued to build it up for at least a month by using PR and endorsements on social media. We engaged our 3000+ dealer network by pasting our film posters with QR code leading to the Youtube link all over the country. We pushed the trailer's

Describe the outcome

We managed to achieve 10M views in first 2 months of release. We achieved 30,000 likes on the video and over 1200 comments.