How do you get 50 Million Eyeballs at Zero Cost?

Crocin, a heritage fever and pain OTC medicine wanted to build a stronger connect on efficacy with modern-day Indians. Our real time listening revealed an opportunity when a controversial candidate was sworn in as the new Chief-Minister of Delhi. On his Oath-taking ceremony, Arvind Kejriwal's first words were:

“I had fever. I took Crocin so I could be here.”

Unlike other brands, paid or direct PR association was not an option because it could result in negative PR. So we used invisible influence by leveraging a time-sensitive programming genre – the news!

We engineered multiple-repeats of the Chief-Minister’s oath-taking speech including Crocin’s endorsement as a “headline” across news channels.

This automatically fueled chatter on TV, Radio & social media as well.

The result - Crocin earned free media mileage worth USD $625000 and spontaneous links with speed & efficacy.

All TV News channels- Aaj Tak, India News and NDTV, maximized repeats of Crocin’s endorsement as headlines, resulting in 63 mentions in just 7 hours.

In a matter of hours, 44 million unique eyeballs were reached.

Twitter handles of news networks like TIMESOFINDIA, NDTV, HTTWEETS ABPNEWSTV, IBNLIVE,

INDIA TODAY and celebrity influencers were abuzz with the ‘headline’ and resulted in over 34 million+ impressions.

2 days. Zero Cost. 50 million unique eyeballs and spontaneous links with brand attributes of fever, trust, safety and instancy.

We changed the rules of culture-jacking with adaptive data planning and earned Crocin free media mileage worth USD 625,000. For us, being invisible was invaluable!

While the nation rejoiced at Arvind Kejriwal’s humble admission as a mark of a trusted leader. Our aim was to position Crocin as the ‘speedy’ enabler that helped the Chief- Minister get back to the things that matter the most.

But, how do you culture-jack when any direct association with a personality is counter-productive for a brand?

By changing the rules of the game and once again, data showed us the path.

We saw that 65% of social interactions with brands happen in the first 72 hours of any campaign or conversation launch [Source: Unruly Data, 2014].

So whatever, we did, had to create a big impact in the next 48 hours to maximize social interactions around this real-time event.

Building on these data points, our answer was an agile approach: A ‘Time Sensitive Echo Bomb Strategy.’

We used invisible influence rather than paid advertising by leveraging a programming genre that is time sensitive - the news!

The news uses repeats to build reach and ensure awareness for time-bound headlines.

Therefore, over the next 48 hours, we engineered multiple repeats of the CM’s oath taking statement with Crocin’s endorsement as the “headline” across every news channel.

This organically fueled conversations for Crocin across TV, Radio and digital.

Therefore, our data techniques helped identify a real-time programming insight & showed behavioral cues on when and where it would create most impact to build a story that

• Tapped into a ‘Real-time’ event

• Used ‘Invisible Influence rather than a paid push’

• Leveraged ‘Time sensitive’ programming – news

• Amplified the endorsement and built positive associations for Crocin

All of this, at absolute zero cost.