Social Media Campaign Review: Graphic India's 18 Days

The entertainment firm Graphic India, in partnership with Grant Morrison, has created a web series based on the Indian epic 'Mahabharata,' titled 18 Days. It is specifically created to be aired on YouTube. The initiative has received a good response and has been on air since August 2.

Objective:

This series was created to promote the latest work with Graphic India with Grant Morrison's. Two episodes of the series are already on air on YouTube, and they plan to release the other episodes on a weekly basis.

Execution:

A massive promotion was done on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and Morrison's involvement with the series gave them an added push through various other platforms. Hashtags like #WarIsComing #SDCC2013 #18Days were used to create further interest and promote the series.

The famous Indian band " target="_blank">Pentagram has sung for the promotional video of the series, which is already a hit. All the episodes of this series are available in three languages: English, Hindi and Tamil.

Positives:

18 Days updates and retells the timeless stories of the Mahabharata for a new audience on a whole new platform. The videos have been received very well in India.

The series was launched as part of YouTube’s global “Geek Week” event, with the subsequent episodes to be launched exclusively on YouTube in weekly installments throughout the year. YouTube is a great platform to enable this story to engage with audiences around the world!

An exclusive trailer for the series was posted last week to coincide with a over-packed panel at the San Diego Comic Con, global pop-culture event: and exceeded over 150,000 views within a few days of release.

Within weeks after the video upload, the videos have hit a huge number of views and has gained immense popularity. They have shown their talent of Graphic Designing throughout the promotion of this campaign. A brilliant showcase of pictures can be viewed on their Facebook timeline.

Influencers have also been tweeting about it which gave a momentum to the series. Here are some tweets:

This is so cool. please share: Graphic India presents Grant Morrison's 18 Days #sdcc http://t.co/5GWLU1ro9W

— Gotham Chopra (@gothamchopra) July 19, 2013

Brilliant! RT @gothamchopra: Launching 18 DAYS - Ep1: The Tale of the Four Ages: http://t.co/gaXuioAhjM via by @GrantMorrison. Check it! — Deepak Chopra (@DeepakChopra) August 5, 2013

My friend @gothamchopra and @GraphicIndia just launched #18Days motion Comic. Watch this. An epic re-imagined! http://t.co/xthzCRuZLB — Rahul Bose (@RahulBose1) August 6, 2013

Scope of Improvement

Although the series has been promoted by influencers, and Graphic India being pretty active on social media, I felt that they could have handled their social media in a better way. Use of hashtags on both on Twitter and Facebook was not well planned, since they used number of hashtags instead of sticking to one.

When you search Twitter with their initiated hashtags like:  #WarIsComing #SDCC2013, you will hardly find user interaction.

Graphic India could have done a lot to capture the attention of the many comic book lovers on Twitter, but they weren't able to integrate their efforts.

Conclusion:

Launch of an original animated web-series in association with YouTube is such a fresh concept, but the proper use of social networking sites would have made it more popular. The theme relates to the Indian audience on a greater level, so if it would have been promoted well on social networks people would have loved to watch the series. It was a hit due to its association with Youtube and the leading comic man Grant Morrisson who also made famous for Fantastic Four and Batman.