The campaign objective was to relaunch AXE in Asia and to communicate that AXE has improved with a NEW fragrance and a NEW pack. In order to achieve this, we needed something with a big impact, something that would get people talking. So we decided to supplement our advertising campaign with something that consumers would really connect with and talk about. We created a fictional Bollywood popstar called " Silky Kumar". We made it seem like Silky Kumar had shot to superstardom due to his huge appeal to woman, despite the fact that he had absolutely no talent.

This was executed as a collaboration with MTV. We shot a music video for a song, ‘Scent of Desire’ and aired this on the channel. VJs talked about the massive female support for the song.Silky Kumar became ‘artist of the month’ and we aired interview segments with him, his friends and with female fans. Then we ran a ‘breaking news’ segment in which ‘hidden camera footage’ revealed Silky stealing Axe. Silky made an on-air apology and a we ran a 30 minute documentary about him.As the story unfolded each clip was uploaded to Youtube. Silky Kumar also had a Myspace page and did PR interviews.

This media solution genuinely made people talk – literally hundreds of blogs, forum posts and youtube comments were made about the campaign. Our aim was to get talked about and thus make our consumers feel more connected to the brand, which we succeeded in doing. This thinking is worthy of an award because it is a very new way of thinking about media – as part of creative, not separate from it. We started from the idea of creating a pop star and came up with a media approach that made the idea seem real.