Social media platform Facebook recently launched its first ever-high decibel campaign in the Asia Pacific Region and rolled out the first leg of the campaign for the Indian market, titled ‘More Together’. Now who must have thought that a giant like Facebook would ever have to create a marketing campaign?
The campaign for India has been conceptualized and executed by Taproot Dentsu, the creative agency from the house of Dentsu Aegis Network (DAN) India. It’sa series of multiple campaigns over the next few weeks across 8 languages.
Medianews4u caught up with Pallavi Chakravarti, Executive Creative Director, Taproot Dentsu for a brief chat on the campaign and more.
Read on.
How would you describe the campaign More Together in 100 words or so?
The Holi spot is just one of the manifestations of ‘More Together’. It is aimed at showcasing how people across the country stand to gain from harnessing the power of their connections on the platform.
It stems from the core belief that people can do more together, than alone. A festival like Holi provided a great opportunity to launch, but that’s not the only ‘More Together’ story you will see. Going forward, there will be multiple campaigns going on air, all bringing to light the different ways in which this philosophy can work for different people.
What was the brief from Facebook for the More Together campaign?
I think what Facebook expected of us was to truly delve into this global philosophy, understand it and shape it for our country, contextually and emotionally. As the weeks go by, I hope you will be able to see that we have managed to depict the essence of ‘More Together’ in a myriad of forms – all of which, we hope, will be relevant to (and embraced by) Indians young and old.
What according to you was the need for Facebook to create a high decibel campaign?
Quite serendipitously, I believe that the mind space of India today is exactly where the essence of “More Together” lies – we are poised to do more than ever before, connect more, be more and dream of more – so it is quite fitting that this campaign should make its way into the world now.
In fact, through the films, we’re not telling stories that we hope are true. We’re actually showing ways in which the Facebook app in India is used everyday. So I guess the time was right to mirror that reality through a campaign.
What were some of the insights that were used while conceptualizing the campaign?
For this particular campaign, ideation wasn’t as much about “creation” as it was about “observation”. Sometimes, in advertising, one has to make a product or service seem appealing. We have to try hard to make it memorable and relevant. Luckily, we didn’t have any such problem. Simply put: we didn’t have to make up how Facebook works. We just had to tell it like it is. All the stories we plan to put out there are derived from things that can happen to people, arguably have happened to them in some shape or form.
On the Holi piece in particular: It’s not so much a Holi story as it is a power-of-connections story, to my mind. Facebook is beyond boundaries, geographical or otherwise. So we said to ourselves, if our biggest strength lies in the fact that it can bring people from all over the world together then why can’t it take a small part of our culture to the world as well? The story pretty much wrote itself after that. It is human, we have all felt alone at times, far away from our roots and it’s almost too much to bear to think of everyone back home celebrating and making merry when we can’t join them. What we’ve all needed at times like these, is a little magic. Enter Facebook.
How was the experience to have worked on a campaign for Facebook? Would you want to share a few interesting anecdotes from ‘behind the scenes’ of the campaign?
Execution of this entire campaign was both, back-breaking and delightful. It was a pleasure for team Taproot Dentsu to work on a series of cinematic projects such as these. While we can only speak of the Holi piece now, there are many more delights in store, human stories which look and feel authentic.
During filming, Neeraj Kanitkar (our creative director who wrote and held the campaign together) literally travelled the length and breadth of the country [and Romania] with different members of the Taproot team piecing together stories that are as diverse as they are visually rich. I think the decision to work with different directors for different films has also enriched the campaign and rendered each piece as unique, while keeping the core united.
