My best campaign is 'Zee5 Rangbaaz': Laqshya Media Group's Atul Shrivastava

Which do you consider your best campaign and why? 

While all campaigns that we do are equally challenging and memorable, my best pick is the massive out-of-home (OOH) campaign that we executed recently for Zee5 Rangbaaz. The project is special because the client trusted us completely with the strategy driving the promotion of their second original series for their app-based viewers. Zee5 gave us a free hand in the planning and execution of the campaign.

What was the brief from client?

It was the client’s second original series offering (after Karenjeet Kaur) and they were quite upbeat about the show. The story is based on a real life gangster from Uttar Pradesh. The client wanted to make a lot of noise to overshadow campaigns running parallel to theirs.

So during the planning stage, we picked up all possible outdoor sites that were available and created pockets of dominance along the key arterial routes. So if you were on BandraRoB (road overbridge), chances were that you will only notice Rangbaaz or nothing. This way, we created enough buzz for everyone to take notice of the series. So, for hoardings and billboards, we used news clippings to recount and recreate the life story of the protagonist. 

My Take: We piqued the audiences’ curiosity and successfully drowned out all the noise created by other players. Brand: Zee5 Rangbaaz, Year of launch: 2018, Agency: Laqshya Media Group

What did the campaign achieve for the brand?

Zee5 comes from the Zee stable which has a rich heritage in content creation with a focus on entertaining audiences with unique/original content. Following the campaign, Zee5 downloads increased by more than 15 per cent in just a month with the show Rangbaaz receiving good reviews. Further, ZEE5’s monthly user count went up by 36 per cent to reach 56.3 million in the third quarter of FY 2019. Users on an average spent 31 minutes per day on the platform. 

Did you conduct any research that helped you come up with the idea?

When a campaign of this stature is being planned, you have to put in research and local know-how to use. In this case, we used our proprietary tool “SHARP” to analyse the consumer congregation points, high traffic routes, relevant socio economic classification (pockets) and prevalent competition (brands/communication messages in and around the targeted area). We leveraged all these inputs and information available to us for creating dominance zones and placing creatives strategically to gain maximum mileage. We picked up a few billboards in a series to build up the story. The team used dialogues to intrigue travellers. We split the entire stretch (road) in clusters and put up different creatives on different routes. 

What were the execution challenges?  

The short timeline to execute the project coupled with two rounds of changing the creatives did prove challenging. We had to be careful while creating roadblocks using smart creative allocation to ensure there was no or little duplication. We had the challenge of encouraging downloads by ensuring that the core brand message reaches the audience. 

Given a chance, is there anything that you would like to change about the campaign?

Not really. Apart from the final idea that went into the making of the campaign, we did discuss a lot of other innovative ideas that could not be taken up and executed due to the lack of permissions from competent authorities. However, the final campaign turned out memorable given the large scale of the project and the speed of planning and execution.