The case study film tells us how the campaign became a nationwide movement and features tweets from sports stars, media stalwarts, film & TV celebrities, entertainers et al. The tweets mention how every one of them has witnessed this kind of language bias at least once in their life.

The film also has a song about linguistic equality that asks the ambitious Indian youth why they should be hesitant just because they can’t speak English, and subtly refers to the British rule.

71 years after India’s independence from British rule, a vestige of our colonial past remains: we aspire to and adulate English fluency, while shunning our own languages as ‘vernacular’, the languages of slaves. New India, with its resurgent pride, still does this.

The idea stems from the insight that 'In India, people take you more seriously when you say something in English versus saying the same thing in your mother tongue/local language.'

Our idea is to 'Address the bias that all Indian languages come across vis-à-vis English.'

The new India, still sees English as aspirational and up-market. Local languages have been demoted to ‘Vernacular’.

We knew this was true in the metros, who weren’t our primary audience. Our focus was on the smartphone-toting youngsters in Tier I & II cities.

Consumers we met in 4 key cities (Patna, Agra, Kochi & Coimbatore) proved our assumption wrong. They were comfortable with their local language and used it for quick updates/urgent information. Yet, they were checking wider, less critical news in English to promote fluency.

In India, people take you more seriously when you say something in English than when you say it in local language.

This is the sad truth. And we are all guilty of this bias.

This was a conversation that needed expression. We wanted Dailyhunt to fire the first bullet in this war, to restore respect to our regional languages and people who speak them.

We brought the idea to life with a social experiment. Rather than waiting for people to join the conversation, we took the conversation to them.

Before we released the video, we identified and prepared our top 150 partners and publishers. After release, we direct-messaged them on Facebook/Twitter handles, thanking for their efforts in fighting this bias.

We innovated with ‘THE FIRST UNPAID INFLUENCER MARKETING CAMPAIGN’, directly-messaging key online influencers including editors, journalists, politicians, celebrities, even the PM of India, his personal and official handles. Our message reached their audiences even if they didn’t respond.

We let go of some tracking KPIs to allow genuine participation, making memes with shorter versions of the video, which did not link back to the brand. These memes were seeded to 20 influencers and into over 1,000 WhatsApp groups.

We shared our PR note with our top publishers who then featured the campaign as news.

The intent was to earn Brand-Love. We got a lot of it, which was measured, through the public response and a Brand Matrix research.

1. Campaign Awareness & Engagement Metrics:

a) The video garnered over 30 million views across various platforms which was MORE THAN 20X OUR TARGET. 51% views came from the 18-34 year olds.

b) The campaign generated 5X the conversations we aimed for out of which over 1500 CONVERSATIONS WERE IN INDIAN LANGUAGES, bringing influencers like Anand Mahindra, Lara Dutta, Mahesh Bhupati etc.

2. Brand Metrics: Brand awareness lift was slightly below our benchmark of 10% but all the other brand parameters exceeded the benchmark many times over. BRAND INTEREST WENT UP BY 1043% which was huge.

3. Monthly Active Users(MAU) went up by 33%* and Daily Active Users(DAU) went up by 41%*. The average app downloads went up by 13000 downloads a day.

*Indexed numbers