Reviving the art of story-telling, digital agency What’s Your Problem creates #GiftAStory for Vodafone, bringing together grandparents and children in a heart-warming campaign
Story-telling plays a pivotal role in making advertising and brand communication compelling and effective. Everyone loves a good story, children in particular. Leveraging the occasion of Children’s Day, digital agency What’s Your Problem (WYP) created the #GiftAStory campaign for Vodafone, using the best story-tellers there are – grandparents. With nuclear families becoming the norm, grandparents are no longer there to narrate stories to their grandchildren, widening the gap between the generations. The #GiftAStory initiative, an on-ground and digital content property, brought back the stories of elderly people across the country and shared them with the current generation of children.
The purpose behind the campaign was to connect the two generations – the elderly story-tellers and the young children eager to listen to them. The #GiftAStory campaign originated from the Vodafone Content Day that was organized last year by long term agency partners Maxus (now Wavemaker) and O&M. WYP executed the campaign on this idea, roping in Storywallahs – a company dedicated to reviving the art of story-telling, founded by Ameen Haque. Auditions were held at old age homes and housing societies with the objective of finding the best story-tellers, who are grandparents. They were then trained by Storywallahs to narrate these stories to children via Vodafone’s network and video-calling features. Among the elders enlisted as story-tellers were a 91-year-old Gujarati freedom-fighter, a retired school teacher and a former Odissi dancer. The initiative was promoted via a digital campaign with influencers spreading the word.
Talking about the campaign, Siddharth Banerjee, EVP - Marketing, Vodafone India, said, “We found that urban families are time-stressed and thus, sometimes ‘quality-of-relationship’ stressed. With too much pressure on the parents’ time especially in nuclear families, an important aspect of a child’s holistic development that perhaps gets neglected is the exposure to story-telling. As a story-teller brand that connects people, our initiative is a humble attempt to strengthen the art of story-telling so that our children can imbibe learning from some fabulous Indian stories. Vodafone & WYP as a content partner thus conceptualized #GiftAStory for this generation of kids on the occasion of Children’s Day. We are happy to revive the special bond between grandparents and children, bringing back some lovely Indian folklore and stories that we grew up on, of course enabled by Vodafone technology.” Huzefa Roowala, Director, Content & Creative, WYP adds, “Some of them (the seniors) had never performed for others before, but were determined to share their stories with kids. They trained hard, a few even made their own puppets and finally floored the kids and us as well. This was a tough six-month project, identifying storytelling experts, travelling to old age homes and societies, unearthing stories, training story-tellers and finally performing it live in schools.”
Amit Akali, Managing Partner & Creative Head, WYP says, “A project like #GiftAStory goes much beyond the scope of work as it is satisfying on a very personal level. At the heart of the idea was the one most important question ‘What does this brand do?’ The answer was ‘Connect’. The other part of the idea was to find the right story-tellers and the elder generation was just the right fit as they are the best storytellers. As this campaign was not only a video, but more of an activation and had an experiential touch to it, the satisfaction is incredible. The brand message and Vodafone being the enabler of connectivity was brought out well too.”
