Social Media Case Study: How Philips India Establish the Magic of its LED Lights Online Before the Launch of TV Ads

Brand Name

Philips India

Agency Name

Ogilvy One

Introduction

LED, the technology has been around for a while, but the strongest associations were with television or a laptop and mobile screen. LED lights have also been there in the market, best perceived as Chinese festival lights or torches. In home luminaires, even though LED technology is available with Havells, Osram and even Philips, there’s almost no awareness. The price points are also almost thrice the existing solutions resulting is no strong need.

Coupled to this, no big player has taken the initiative to move the category, unveiling LED as the most futuristic form of lighting with endless possibilities. So, with this, they had an opportunity and a dual task at hand.

Objectives

Philips, the existing leader in lighting technology and the only brand currently to have evolutionary high-end LED products (vis-à-vis everyday LED offered by all others) can be the first brand and thus the thought leader to open up the market for LED.

Task 1: Create a strong need for customers to move to this new futuristic technology in lighting.

Task 2: Use this edge of technology to move from lighting veterans to a dynamic, modern, young and vibrant techie.

Communication Strategy

The task was simple. Show the possibilities that light can do and do this in an interesting and engaging manner. Instead of creating plain vanilla product-related TVCs, they decided to leverage both content and viral marketing techniques to showcase the usage of the product and generate buzz and curiosity around the brand.

Execution

The core of the idea was a 2 minute music video that featured today’s biggest superstar Ranbir Kapoor recreating the magic of the popular Bollywood number “Saara Zamana” by Amitabh Bachchan. In the music video Ranbir Kapoor was featured in a suit of LED lights to exaggerate the concept of “See what light can do.”

To make sure that the song and as a result the message got enough traction, they decided to build buzz by employing viral marketing tactics around the song, even before releasing it officially. They did this in a three step process.

They first leaked the&list=TLNuJE62O17xTjfyiOhmTTLMrS-okn7Paz" target="_blank"> making of the video shot tackily through a hand held device to get people to wonder what Ranbir Kapoor was upto in a suit of lights. Within hours the leaked video gained the attention of entertainment bloggers, the Twitterati, leading newspapers and portals.

They then posted &list=TLJ84c_0gaJoQaBP7INhJIvC1wvRHaiUig" target="_blank">another Video after 7 days wherein Ranbir is shown getting angry that his project has been leaked. This was followed up with a third video which was a 20” teaser of the music video leading people to a landing page wherein they could join the conversation. All the above was seeded and leaked through influencers without any brand mention.

Finally the music video was released in full glory after the press conference on the official campaign microsite.

Results

The '" target="_blank">Saara Zamana' music video on YouTube got 1.6 million views within the first 20 days along with trending on the YouTube home page. During this period, the Philips India YouTube channel has had a higher growth rate (309.2%) than the average Consumer Electronics YouTube channel (3.3%). It managed to gain 535 new subscribers, taking the total subscriber count to 700+.

The first leaked video got about a million views in 15 days, without any paid media support. The buzz about the leaked video was covered by The Times Of India, Miss Mallini and Yahoo! Movies along with many other top bloggers and news portals. The conversations linked to this leaked video with #RanbirLeakedVideo hashtag received a reach of 1.4 million within 24 hours and trended on Twitter and YouTube for 48 hours after it was leaked.

The second leaked video got more than three lakh views. The third video (20 sec teaser) got 0.8 million views on YouTube and the SaaraZamana.com microsite got 0.5 lakh unique visitors in 3 days.

In addition the campaign was extensively covered by the media and leading social media bloggers. The campaign got covered as the lead story on afaqs.com on November 7. Post that it became the 2nd most read story on afaqs.com for about 10 days. Bollywood bloggers also covered the campaign.