Why Congress chose Naresh Arora's DesignBoxed to manage its social media

Earlier this week, with less than three weeks left for the first phase of polling, the Indian National Congress finally picked three agencies to handle its digital marketing and social media campaigns. Along with biggies like SilverPush and Nixon Advertising, the Congress publicity committee selected the lesser known DesignBoxed, which is run by Chandigarh-based Naresh Arora.

Arora founded DesignBoxed, with another partner, in 2011 as a digital media marketing company. Its rise as an election consultant has been meteoric. Arora, 38, and his team forayed into election management in 2016, handling the management of the constituencies of some key Congress leaders for the Punjab Assembly polls held on February 4, 2017.

While the Prashant Kishor-led Indian Political Action Committee handled the larger Congress campaign for both the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, DesignBoxed focused on 22 individual constituencies. While the Uttar Pradesh campaign bombed, Amarinder Singh, the Congress’s chief ministerial candidate for Punjab, took charge of it in his state after disagreements on strategy with Kishor and his team.

After its 2014 Lok Sabha poll debacle, there were recriminations within the Congress with leaders accusing Dentsu, the Indian arm of the Japanese advertising and public relations giant that the party had hired, for the election failures. The Congress’s efforts to hire agencies for its social media, digital and outdoor campaign for the 2019 Lok Sabha election has been no different.

The meetings of the Congress publicity committee, which party leader Anand Sharma heads, have witnessed disagreements. At one meeting, members of the committee complained to Congress president Rahul Gandhi that they were neither consulted nor kept in the loop. Gandhi first brought in senior leader Jairam Ramesh and later Sam Pitroda to break the stalemate. Gandhi also rejected the initial themes and slogans for the campaign that the committee had forwarded to him and asked the agencies to rethink.

This is when the Arora-led DesignBoxed, despite being a smaller company, impressed the Congress publicity committee with its suggestions. 

Arora grew up in a political family in Punjab. He helped several of his friends who had joined politics to build their brand. Armed with this on-ground experience, which he had early in life, he helped in proposing a sharper political social media campaign, particularly in Hindi. 

Arora is unwilling to give away the details of the campaign he suggested to the Congress publicity committee, but is more forthcoming about the reasons that might have helped him land the contract, including his company’s 100 per cent record in ensuring the Congress party’s wins in Assembly polls.

DesignBoxed managed constituency specific and social media campaigns of 22 Congress candidates in the Punjab Assembly polls of 2017, and subsequently the Gurdaspur Lok Sabha by-poll. Arora claims the Congress won all those 22 seats. It also won the Gurdaspur by-poll.

Later that year, DesignBoxed handled the election management of four seats during the Himachal Pradesh Assembly polls in November 2017. The Congress lost the elections, but Arora says it won four seats. It helped that key state Congress leaders represented these seats, including Vikramaditya Singh, the son of then chief minister Virbhadra Singh, Mukesh Agnihotri and Asha Kumari.

DesignBoxed managed the Congress campaigns for the Punjab civic polls in 2018, for the Shahkot Assembly by-poll (again in Punjab) and for the crucial Assembly elections in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan in December 2018. In Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, the agency helped give shape to the party’s manifesto by organising meetings with stakeholders. It assisted T S Singh Deo and Harish Chaudhary, heads of the Congress manifesto drafting committee in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, respectively.

In Rajasthan, where current Deputy Chief Minister Sachin Pilot had engaged DesignBoxed, the agency came up with strong campaigns such as “Rajasthan ka report card”, “Vijay Bhava Rajasthan” and “Jhooth pe chot, sach pe vote”.

Arora says his agency spent nine months in shaping the Chhattisgarh campaign, which included social media offensives such as “15 saal kai sawal” to highlight what the Congress described as the failures of the 15-year Bharatiya Janata Party rule in the state. He was also behind the Congress battle cry of “Jeetbo Chhattisgarh”.

According to Arora, the “Jeetbo Chhattisgarh” and Congress janghoshanapatra (manifesto) campaigns together garnered nearly 2.2 million engagements on social media, while BJP’s social media engagements, he claims, were a meagre 627,683 during November 2018. In Rajasthan, the BJP and Congress social media campaigns were neck and neck. The BJP social media campaign notched up nearly 6.8 million engagements, while the Congress campaign garnered a little over 7 million.

Over the past few years, DesignBoxed has handled the campaigns of various Congress leaders: Deo, Kiran Choudhary (Haryana), Harish Choudhary (Rajasthan), Jitin Prasada (Uttar Pradesh), Sanjay Sinh (the Congress’s Lok Sabha candidate from Sultanpur in Uttar Pradesh) and Bhanwar Jitendra Singh (Rajasthan). 

For the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, DesignBoxed is set to help individual Congress candidates in Punjab, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana.

It has helped that Arora’s uncle, Sewa Ram Arora, was a multiple-term Congress MLA in Punjab and is known for having defeated legendary Communist Party of India leader Satyapal Dang in an Assembly election in 1980. 

Arora studied textile design from New Delhi’s National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), but instead of joining his father’s textile business, he started a content writing and digital marketing company.

Apart from the political work DesignBoxed is doing, it is part of the Punjab government’s efforts to spread awareness about the drug menace in the state. The Punjab government has launched a Drug Abuse Prevention Officer Programme, or DAPO, and subsequently Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh has introduced the “Tu Mera Buddy” programme on August 15, 2018, to reach out to school and college students. Arora says for this his team studied several anti-drugs campaign in the world. He says the campaign has reached some four million students aged 12 and above.

Currently, the company, which is headquartered in Surat, Gujarat, and has its corporate office in Chandigarh and a branch office in Amritsar, has a strength of more than 200 people. 

DesignBoxed pegs its turnover at $2 million and aims to touch the $10-million mark in the current calendar year. A successful Congress social media campaign could go a long way in helping DesignBoxed achieve that target.