If Tom Cruise was an Indian traveller. Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation, releases today, what better way to celebrate, than creating content around it. (@ ixigo)
Category: Newsjacking
News-Jacking The Infamous Govt. Ban!
The news spread like wildfire, govt. without notice banned porn in India. Now that’s something a brand will never associate with, forget creating content around it. But then we thought, what would Amul do? Amul’s creatives have by far been the inspiration for topical content, the original king of news-jacking in India.
News-jacking is a fancy-schmancy marketing lingo for topical content, or easily put: Breaking news + Brand DNA, for creating content.
We racked our brains, until we hit the sweet spot, spot on, yet subtle. Since our brand DNA is all about celebrating travel, we merged the ‘ban’ with popular tourist destinations, and the idea was born.
Ban is the new ‘B’ word
Take a look at the entire album
When stuff like this happens, you got to become CNN for 2 hours, from brainstorming, to design, to post, super fast at execution. And results were great, and since it is in the news still, it’s growing :)
The Crazy Case of a Fool’s Day Campaign
It was a week before April, and we had to launch something fun, fake and fast! Last year, we had upped the game by launching a prank auto rickshaw service and this year we had to fake it again. April 1st is a day for pranks all over the trends, and every big and small brand is at the party with their best fake costumes.
The benchmarks from last year’s campaign were set, we had to ride the buzz for this annual ’newsjacking’ activity. The aha moment came about a fake App. The ixigo loo finder. Four days of crazy storyboarding, layouts and changes. Sometimes we stopped just to tell ourselves it was real branding for a fake app! With two days to produce a video, we found a brave volunteer in the team (you’ll know once you see the video). Making it a fun and crisp 30 seconder, from script, shooting and editing, it was crazy 48 hours!
The Game Day
Morning 11.30, we launch the video. Within hours, the feeds got chaotic with all big brands out with their clown hats. And then it started picking up, the video views started climbing and the mentions in blogs started pouring. The CEO even wrote the funniest press release ever! OurLoo Finder app and video were compared with other brand campaigns, including Ola, Google, Uber, Amazon and others.
The difference being, we pulled it off on a shoestring! ;)
Here’s what happened in first 24 hours
- Featured on YourStory (featured on top)
- Post on Next Big What
- Mentioned in a post on AFaqs
- Blog post on MySmartPrice
- Post on Lighthouse Insights
- Facebook: 30,000 views
- YouTube: 900 views
50k reach in 5 hours, Newsjacking of the day
Nothing better than Newsjacking* cricket in India. India vs Bangladesh, World Cup quarterfinal match was trending all over twitter. Released a snappy little funny photo just when India finished their innings, and it started climbing. It’s all the excitement in first few hours, riding a live event. Compared to all the posts on Facebook in the last week, this one little Newsjack hit the home run (sixer) beating all those posts in reach and engagement. Being topical, riding the news with a creative little newsjacks is now a best practice for viral content marketing.
* Newsjacking is the practice of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story and generating tons of social media coverage and engagement.