The brief was to relaunch the Axe range in India and Philippines so we wanted to do something that the brand had never done before, and something big and talkable. We wanted to create the impression that the new range was even better at attracting girls – that it gave you “More than before”. Pop stars have hordes of screaming female fans, so our media solution was to collaborate with MTV and create a fictional pop star using branded content broadcast on MTV and on radio, then leveraged online to create viral, participative effects.

This media solution genuinely made people talk – literally hundreds of blogs, forum posts and youtube comments were made about the campaign. 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. 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. Silky Kumar became ‘artist of the month’ and we aired interview segments with him, his friends and with female fans. As the story unfolded each clip was uploaded to Youtube. Silky Kumar also had a Myspace page and did PR interviews.