Why Amyn Ghadiali finds #BhulaDeDarr campaign for Star Bharat as his best

To take the campaign in the second phase, celebrities such as M S Dhoni, Ajay Devgn, Mithali Raj and Siddharth Malhotra shared their stories urging the audience to burn their fear, says Ghadiali

Which do you consider your best campaign and why? When was the campaign launched?

I believe that while every campaign is meaningful, the lens I have taken to answer this question is the learning opportunity, the impact of the campaign and importance of it in the industry it exists in. Considering all of that, I can say that the revamp of the channel Life OK to Star Bharat through a campaign called #BhulaDeDarr is my best campaign till date. I rate it above even the Mumbai Police Twitter launch which was enriching and got me massive recognition. A channel goes through a philosophy refresh once in every five-seven years and a complete revamp is even rarer. But with the #BhulaDeDarr campaign, I had the opportunity to do exactly that for a channel that was gearing to disrupt the space. The channel and the campaign were launched last year. Though it is my best so far, I hope the next I come up with turns out even better.  

What did the campaign achieve for the brand? Could you also share some numbers to corroborate your claim?

As this was a launch or rather a re-launch, the objective of the integrated campaign was to create awareness and make the brand philosophy engaging plus inclusive. The overall outcome of the campaign was over 410 million digital impressions. It registered over 250 million video views across social media plus an engagement of half a million. Besides the gigantic above the line blast, over 100 million people from Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh were reached through outbound dialing calls in two days.

Amyn Ghadiali, Director (strategy) Gozoop

What was the key idea behind the campaign?

The insight was that "fear is what stops us from doing many things" and with our environment changing so quickly people are all the more apprehensive. Capturing the pulse of the nation, the brand communication crafted was “Bhula de darr, kuch alag kar (Let go of your fears, do something different).”

There were two phases of the campaign: The first was the ‘Mat kar’ or ‘don't do it’ which was created so that the audience would take a step back and think of all the instances and times that this fear was ingrained.

To take the campaign in the second phase, celebrities such as M S Dhoni, Ajay Devgn, Mithali Raj and Siddharth Malhotra shared their stories urging the audience to burn their fear just like they did and cut the noise.  

To boost the confidence of the audience, we launched an inspiring anthem which was composed by A R Rahman that beautifully captured the essence of the new communication. To bring closure to the complete campaign, we seamlessly integrated offline-online activity during Diwali called ‘Darr Ka Dehen’ where in we placed ballot boxes for people to burn their fear and burnt a 121-feet Ravana effigy to showcase the brand philosophy along with digital innovations and extensions to reinforce the message.

What were the execution challenges?

There were many. To begin with, such a massive campaign has multiple stakeholders. Everyone works independently and yet in an interconnected manner. Certain situations are unexpected and one has to tackle it in real-time due to multiple dependencies but the most challenging yet memorable one was the one when it was decided that being a Hindi channel our communication will be in Devanagari especially on digital and social media. This was a big add-on to the existing challenge of migrating our digital community of Life OK to Star Bharat. At the end of it, I did feel I should have practised written Hindi more in school.

MY TAKE

We had to make the brand message both engaging and inclusive

Brand: Star Bharat 

Year of launch: 2017 

Agency: Gozoop