In one of the rare instances during the annual Madras Advertising Club Awards- MADDYS 2017, acknowledgement was accorded to a statutory body that had used the power of social media to try and make an impact in getting 100% of the State population to vote in the recent election. For the ad agency that worked on it, there was a bonanza of awards, catapulting it to the Agency of the Year award.
OPN Advertising won the Gold award in the Integrated Campaign, Digital Integrated Campaign, Digital Social Media Campaign, and Posters categories. It also bagged silver and bronze awards in other categories. Overall, OPN won 10 awards at this year’s event.
It began with the Chief Electoral Officer Rajesh Lakhoni’s idea to use social media to get more youngsters to enrol for voting and also achieve a 100 percent turnout during the 2016 Assembly Elections. .
After winning the bid, OPN Advertising, which manages social media for the Chennai Super Kings and had created the legendary “Whistle Podu” theme, met Mr.Lakhoni in December 2015, where a key message given to them was to ensure that youngsters in the age group of 18-29 who weren’t enrolled, should be on the electoral rolls.
“We did some research, primarily on Facebook. We found a lot of discussion on memes, cinema, cricket, but sadly nothing on elections,” Bala Manian, Director, OPN Advertising, recalls. She said the team came up with a plan to “Make elections cool.” From the “Be like Bill” campaign, to using film dialogues and celebrities, the campaign hit home with the voters.
In an interesting incident, actor Suriya, who shot a dubsmash with a dialogue from Rajnikanth’s film “Muthu” for the EC’s “TN 100%” campaign was initially reluctant to record it as he had never done a dubsmash before. But after watching the video, he was so excited that he had uploaded it from his own Twitter handle. The campaign went viral. Such innovative campaigns kept the buzz around the “TN 100 percent” campaign alive till the elections.
“In terms of reach, the campaign was quite successful. Voter registration also saw a dramatic increase. The EC’s enrolment process, which was simple, also helped,” Ms. Bala said.
The ad campaign with the sporting couple Dinesh Karthik and Dipika Pallikal, and cricketer Ashwin bagged silver and bronze respectively at the event. In fact, the clickbait video of Ashwin asking “Dhoni or Virat” became a big hit with cricketing websites using the video, Ms. Bala said.
Mr. Lakhoni said, “We have used social media for election awareness for the first time on this scale. The innovative and bold campaign was talked for its youth specific content and short videos”.
