<FONT COLOR="#FF0033"><B>Emvies 2006:</B></FONT> Marathon of innovations for Hutch

‘Karol Bagh daudega’, ‘Inspector Happy Singh daudega’, ‘Rickshaw stand daudega’ will remind you of the Hutch Delhi Half Marathon television commercial. This TVC certainly made a major contribution to the success of the Hutch Delhi Half Marathon, but the credit also goes to Ogilvy One’s efforts to go beyond just TVC and print.

Ogilvy One has been nominated for the Best Integrated Campaign at the Emvies 2006 for the Hutch Delhi Half Marathon campaign,.

To encourage the entire population of Delhi to run on the day of the marathon, the agency got the music group, Colonial Cousins, to sing for the Delhites, egging them on to participate in the marathon. Ads on bus shelters, hoardings and airport translights were just some of the other things used to get Delhi running.

What really made it a 360-degree campaign were the direct mailers sent to CEOs. Usually, in a direct mailer, one expects a personalised letter with an RSVP request. Sending a shoe to each CEO in Delhi would seem bizarre beyond belief. But that’s just what Ogilvy One did. After finding out the CEO’s shoe size by putting dedicated people on the job, a shoe was sent along with the mailer.

The idea was to help the CEOs prepare for the marathon and request their participation in the noble cause. If the CEOs responded to the mailer saying they wished to participate, the other shoe was sent across.

The outcome was formidable. Twenty-two thousand Delhiites ran in the marathon; 38 of them were CEOs and along with them ran their senior managers and subordinates. About Rs 70 lakh were raised for charity.

The number of hits on Hutch’s home page rose to 242. Top of mind recall for the brand went up from 24 to 32. The subscriber base increased by 20 per cent.

Hutch faced another challenge when the colour of its logo changed from orange to pink. To make a brand such as Hutch go pink despite its strong association with the colour orange, Maxus, the media agency for Hutch, came up with an innovation on radio.

It seemed equally bizarre to use radio, which is a verbal medium, to communicate a change in logo colour. But Maxus achieved its goal successfully. The first task at hand was to create suspense around the colour pink and intrigue the audience. To do this, Maxus built up an association of Radio Mirchi with pink from the station’s earlier red. The first four days were spent just unveiling the colour pink and sustaining it by changing the radio station’s jingle from ‘Radio Mirchi is Hot’ to ‘Radio Mirchi is Pink’.

The suspense was further heightened by statements such as ‘Lal Quila will be pink’. There were teasers on radio wherein radio jockeys posed questions to consumers about what the buzz was about and shared their opinions.

Finally, after extensive radio curiosity was built up, the Hutch logo was launched on radio. ‘Mumbai aur Hutch ki dosti ka rang’ and ‘Hutch comes to Mumbai’ were the ads that helped establish the brand and the colour. In some film songs, the word ‘pink’ was incorporated and a show on Radio Mirchi was titled ‘Hello Pink’.

As a result of this, 95 per cent awareness was created about Hutch turning pink in the first week of the launch. This campaign has been short-listed at the Emvies this year in the Best Media Innovation—Radio category.

© 2006 agencyfaqs!