Winners take it all

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Creativity, excellence and ingenuity were celebrated as the Industry picked its best media plans this year at the glittering Emvies 2011. Team impact profiles the gold winners

GRAND EMVIE

BEST MEDIA INNOVATION – PRINT

Mediacom Communications Pvt. Ltd.: Volkswagen Vento (Talking Newspaper)

Winner of the Grand Emvie, this is one great idea behind a campaign. It claimed, “People read newspapers. Till we made the newspaper talk!” Volkswagen was all set to launch its mass sedan, the new Volkswagen Vento, and the ambition was to make Vento the most desired car in India. That was a time when the auto category was in full swing with new brands. The challenge was to make Vento the most talked-about car. The execution spanned across two countries, multiple vendors, thousands of man-hours … Through 2.7 million custom-made chips stuck to pages in the September 21, 2010 editions of The Times of India and The Hindu, Volkswagen actually talked to 6.8 million readers! As readers opened the newspaper, a light-sensitive chip attached to the page announced the arrival of “a perfectly engineered car” – the Vento. The idea, based on musical greeting cards, apparently came from the 14-year-old niece of Lutz Kothe, head of Marketing & PR.

Amazingly, 12% of the annual target was booked on that day. Dealers went crazy as enquiries rose 200%. Earned media value was more than twice the cost of the innovation. The campaign even got international attention in the Washington Post and other global media and became a hot topic across social networks and the hottest search word on Google trends. Mumbai police actually had to pacify citizens that it wasn’t a terrorist attack!

BEST MEDIA STRATEGYCONSUMER PRODUCTS

Madison Media Infinity: Dairy Milk - Shubh Aarambh

Cadbury Dairy Milk (CDM) launched the “Shubh Aarambh” campaign in 2010. It is based on the Indian tradition of having something sweet before every auspicious occasion. It is driven by an effort to refresh the take on ‘Kuch Meetha Ho Jaye’, although there is a shift from the notion of celebrating happy occasions with chocolate to the concept of anticipating the occurrence of something good after consuming chocolate. Maintaining the universal appeal of the brand, the campaign is aimed at consumers across SECs and is supposed to have a balanced appeal across all tiers. The media mix for the campaign included television, radio, digital, outdoor and print. The campaign also includes significant point of purchase (POP) activities.

BEST MEDIA STRATEGYCONSUMER PRODUCTS

Lodestar UM: Amul - Amul takes the road less travelled …

Amul caters to a universal target audience, but has strict ad-spend restrictions. The company’s dilemma was how to do justice to 43 brands under Amul’s umbrella when budgets would suffice for only two-three brands. A single unified thought was needed that gave the brand larger-than-life aura and allowed for Amul to integrate its brands seamlessly. But most importantly the thought had to ensure that all brands got the required enough visibility to aid Amul to break clutter while adhering to budgets. Few of the key non-conventional media decisions that the agency took were to put 90 per cent of the ad budgets into impact property buys rather than spot buys with sponsorships thrown in. Lodestar also cutomised format shows for Amul in each of the priority markets. Results were beyond anyone could have predicted. Overall Brand Amul grew by 22 per cent in 2010- 2011. Sales for brands like ice cream, cheese and curd soared by approximately 30 per cent. The promo mileage that Amul got from these associations was worth Rs.32crores.

BEST MEDIA INNOVATION - OUT OF HOME

GroupM - Dialogue Factory: Mumbai District AIDS Control Society - Back Tagging

BEST MEDIA INNOVATION – PRINT

Madison Media Infinity: Parachute Advansed Ayurvedic Hair Oil - Turning Print into Social Media

Hair fall is the largest hair problem and this market already had over 70 brands claiming to control hair fall. During hair fall, more than brands, consumers look up to friends, trusting their suggestions blindly: recommendations worked stronger than Brand messaging in this category.The brand tied up with the Tamil Nadu’s most popular Magazine, “Kumudam”. Instead of a regular print Ad, a preaddressed envelope and a sample bottle were inserted with every copy, with a confident, clarion call: “Try this new product. If you like it, share your message with your friend using the Envelope. We’ll send her a sample with your personal message.” Once the envelope came back, a bottle was couriered to her friend with the recommendation in her handwriting; two more envelopes were attached for this friend to recommend further: the magazine became the new Facebook, creating real-life virals. It was able to establish a much deeper connect and building credibility for the brand, riding on a real-life relationship.

BEST MEDIA STRATEGY - MEDIA / MEDIA PROPERTY

Mudra Max: Big Cinemas - The Silent Revolution

In an environment where every brand is outshouting the other - Reliance Big Cinemas didn’t just want to stick to the foray of providing entertainment and advertising about the different services they provided. They wanted to take up a cause, which would fit in with their ideology of doing BIG rather than talking BIG therefore creating an emotional connect with the audiences pouring in their cinema’s for pure entertainment. They wanted to be recognized as an entertainment brand which is not just about entertainment. When we looked around, we observed that intolerance was spreading from religion to language. We then started thinking about the people for whom language didn’t matter. We found our brand ambassadors in the 60 million deaf and mute. Instead of resorting to a feel-sorry-for-thedeaf- mute tone, we flipped it to learn-from-the-deaf-mute story.

BEST MEDIA INNOVATION - DIGITAL (MOBILE)

Mindshare: Be Beautiful - Your Trusted Beauty Companion

The “Be Beautiful” campaign was launched as a multi-brand initiative comprising Sunsilk, Pond’s, Dove, Lakme and Vaseline to counter the challenge posed by other beauty brands in the market. The communication goal was to develop a platform and position it as an expert source for beauty requirements, create a community of beautyconscious women by recruiting them into the programme through a registration process and engage with the target group and build ongoing conversations with them. The “Be Beautiful” mobile application was developed, that allowed for offline browsing of content for the first time in India. This came with a unique SMS technology that activated the application every morning through a personalised “Beauty Tip of the Day”.

BEST MEDIA INNOVATION - DIGITAL (WEB)

Mindshare: Nike - India Bleeds Blue !

Every Indian regardless of their age, gender or background follow cricket. Nike being the official kit partner of the Indian cricket team aimed to harness this passion for cricket and the Indian cricket team. Hence, the objective was to increase awareness about this partnership and drive passion for blue. The brand wanted the Indian fans to wear the Indian jersey with pride. The Bleed Blue campaign started with the brand getting physical handprints from consumers as a sign of their pledge through on ground activation, but since this was time-consuming and expensive. The brand wanted an easier way to get consumers to pledge their support for Team India. The brand reached out to its target audience through online banners, social networks, customized brand zones on cricket sites, social networks, WAP sites, mobile applications and cyber café tie ups.

BEST INTEGRATED CAMPAIGN

Mediacom Communications Pvt. Ltd.: Volkswagen - From challenger to champion in just 365 days!

Volkswagen intensified its campaigns in 2009. The major challenge was to increase awareness among the consumers manifold. As mass launches were on the card in 2010, execution of planning had to be done in a year’s time. And, then emerged the idea- From challenger to champion in just 365 days! Massive campaigns followed in the first half of 2010 on television, print and digital media. Launch of Volkswagen Polo proved to be the first litmus test. The success of campaign became more evident after a handwritten font the Volkswagen advertisement in The Hindustan Times caught eyeballs. In the second phase of its corporate branding process, Volkswagen introduced the milestone campaign ‘Innovations for Everyone’ in August 2010 to strengthen the core value of the brand. The campaign received a whopping 5000 entries from across the world. The year ended for Volkswagen on an unprecedentedly successful note. By the end on 2010, the Volkswagen team could proudly claim, “From challenger to champion in just 365 days!”