Edelweiss's #IAmTeamIndia strives to standout with its Olympic campaign

The yearning to reach the medals is thriving and the entire world is in awe while being the spectators to this glorious global sporting event, where athletes are sprinting and shooting towards their goals despite all odds. Edelweiss, erects an open social stage titled #IAmTeamIndia for proud Indians to showcase admiration and support for the Olympic contingents.

Sending love all the way to Rio

Magnificent, is one adjective to describe the emotion behind the event but surpassing that, it has fumed immense patriotism in our hearts, exactly for which Edelweiss created a platform for all the like-mindedness to ooze out and celebrate our athletes up there on the digital stage.

For starters their social handles spoke volumes about the Olympics and it's participants, making it safe enough to call it the 'Rio Olympic Indian Diary.' Through their social media presence, the brand made their involvement in the Olympics trend plausibly undeniable.

"Through #IAmTeamIndia anthem and the ebook, we at Edelweiss have taken our association with Indian Olympic team to the next level. The main objective is to attract the interest of as many people as possible towards Olympics. This campaign is a beautiful way to motivate and promote the Indian contingent at the Olympics. It will re-energise the spirits of not only the Indian team but also the Indian audience who is going to watch it," said Shabnam Panjwani, CMO, Edelweiss Group.

Cheering audio-visually

Desi in its nature, the brand combined a thriving video which says 'Go fearless, entire India is with you' together comprising of their ambassador Saina Nehwal, who also happens to represent the country for Rio Olympics with her badminton racket.

Giving us aesthetic glimpses of the various sports that our country is participating in, like badminton, tennis, gymnastics, weight lifting, shooting, boxing, hockey, and more the video also squeezes out the Indian-ness from the visuals by showcasing the Indian streets, outfits, decorations, the overall setting of the film and then of course the anthem sung in Hindi.

Fast-paced in nature, the video conceptualised by Scarecrow communications summarises the Olympic Games within a minute to even reach out to people who aren't much aware of the biggest sporting event of the world.

Explaining the campaign Raghu Bhat, Founder Director, Scarecrow Communications said that, “Indian sport needs all the support it can get. Through this film, Edelweiss exhorts Indians to stand behind the national team. Our brief to the film maker (Naren Multani) and the music composers (Rohan & Vinayak) was to create a contemporary rendition of 'veer ras'. The final result has scale, visual drama and emotion. Something we are proud of.”

#IAmTeamIndia, self-explanatory through their hashtag the brand clearly creates an umbrella for the Indians to participate in unison to support the continents.

Rio Olympic digital Diary

Self appointed on the digital sphere to share the knowledge about the event, the brand became the medium to keep netizens updated with the current scores and status of the event. Making it an ideal platform for engagement and a one-stop destination for all Rio-related news updates.

Unfortunately, we reside in a country where Olympic participants are not celebrities but sportspeople for us. Keeping this in mind, the brand also took up the responsibility to introduce contingents and their game to us via their official handles. They did not selectively pick participants to publicise alike to some brands, but acknowledged them together.

The campaign also managed to garner support from current Olympians like Tintu Luka, Saardar Singh, Gagan Narang, Abhinav Bindra, with past Olympians like Geet Sethi, Prakash Padukone with celebs like Shilpa Shetty, Madhavan, and more.

They sure had the upper hand of having Olympic star Saina Nehwal as the face of their brand already, using her fame as the prime catalyst to run the campaign.

Cheer-O-Meter

Adding on to some zing to their campaign, the brand kept this factor as an embellishment to their video further continuing the #IAmTeamIndia phenomenon.

Finding the key to boost engagement, Cheer-O-Meter captured the digits of people supporting the Indian contingents which was calculated when people clicked a photo holding out placards that read #IAmTeamIndia and posted their picture on the social-verse.

According to Shabnam Panjwani, CMO, Edelweiss Group “Through the Cheer-O-Meter, we are trying to bring the patriotism within our people and ensuring for maximum support for the India team at Rio Olympics. The number of supporters mentioned on the meter shows the growing interest in sports beyond cricket."

The brand also claimed that in just two weeks, the ‘Cheer-o-meter’ has spiked from 40,000 wishes to close to 4.3 million by installing it on their Facebook page.

Social buzz

This BFSI brand managed to garner plenty of social media attention by building its identity and making itself aware to even the age group it least communicates with otherwise.

Having 88,111 followers on Facebook the brand managed to gather 69k reactions, 1K comments and 11k shares. If the digits are truly believed to be organic, the brand managed to make a mark through this campaign by reaching a large social media population after its release on July 26th.

Single-handedly a fairly known brand amongst varied age groups managed to divert the attention of a cricket-frenzy nation to Rio Olympics and raise the value and knowledge of other sports by actively participating through this campaign.

Apart from that, as mentioned above the brand was very dedicated in their efforts to cheer for Rio and further pass on those emotions to fellow Indians. Though the brand lacked in presenting creative, visually pleasing illustrations to beautify the campaign, we give them a benefit of the doubt for belonging to the brand family of BFSI which strictly believes in simplicity and sophistication.

On closing lines, we collectively scream #IAmTeamIndia and like any other Indian we're hoping to get some golds, silvers and bronzes back home. Let's keep the optimism, support and respect higher irrespective to the wins or losses.