Daily Times

Red Chillies Entertainment bagged two awards for Dear Zindagi’s brilliantly executed digital marketing campaign at the CMO Asia’s Social Media Marketing Awards.

The marketing team won two titles for the film that included ‘Best Viral Marketing Campaign’ and ‘Best Use of social media in Entertainment Industry’.

The film released on November 25, 2016 and was very well received by the audience across the world. Starring Alia Bhatt and Shahrukh Khan, the film tracks the story of a 20s something girl trying to figure out her life. It reflects the mind space of today’s youngsters and they formed the target audience of the film. The digital medium became a preferred marketing platform to reach out and appeal to the young, urban millennial.

Red Chillies is always known to break the paradigm of movie marketing and the makers of the film decided to do away with releasing a single trailer and launched ‘Dear Zindagi’ takes – five short teasers which give unique insights about the movie. These were named very uniquely to capture the essence of each video and main protagonist’s life aspects.

Talking about the win at CMO Asia awards, Red Chillies Entertainment Marketing Head Binda Dey said, “The strategy was to focus on building a more casual and relatable communication to engage the digital natives. The proposition was communicated through narratives and storytelling instead of in-your-face promotions across all innovations and integrations, that led to organic share-ability and word of mouth.”

Red Chillies Entertainment, along with their digital agency, Flarepath made use of various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tinder and YouTube to generate awareness and buzz among the target audience and amplified it with a blogger outreach programme.

‘Dear Zindagi’ was the first Bollywood film ever to collaborate with the popular dating platform Tinder where the main protagonist’s profile was launched and users who matched were given a chance to party with Alia Bhatt.

Since the consumption of video content on the Internet is huge amongst Indian millennials; the marketing team associated with different content creators including TVF, Culture Machine, Scoop Whoop, Tinder and Miss Malini to launch multiple promotional videos.

Overall, the campaign created 2.6 billion + impressions only across various social platforms. In the campaign period of 49 days, there were a total of 29 Twitter trends including India and Worldwide. These numbers and the awards certainly prove that content and creative experimentation can change the dynamics of any given campaign.