Godrej Aer Spreads Awareness Against Pollution : A Tree, A Pigeon and A Dog Speak Up On National Pollution Control Day

It is quite a daunting task when asked to keep Mumbai pollution free. Godrej Aer was at the forefront of this and on National Pollution Control Day (2nd December) launched a campaign that had animals and trees speak to you who would leave a message or two. The message was followed by a penalty for non-adherence.

Objective

The objective of the campaign is simple. For the brand it stands for, Godrej Aer does its best to keep the insides of your car fresh and pleasant to smell. It asks these very same people to do their bit and keep the air outside fresh and pleasant thereby fulfilling the objective of a clean ‘inside the car’ atmosphere and manages the ‘outside the car’ environment through the campaign.

Sustainability of the campaign was another objective and through multiple facets this too was taken care of.

Execution

It all began with the inception of a microsite. This microsite was the hub for disseminating multiple ways in which Mumbaikars could contribute to reduce the pollution in the environment; giving the age old environmental hazard a digital edge.

The microsite had 3 characters Sunny the Tree, Pinto the Dog and Tara the Pigeon, Each of these three had a message to tell.

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With penalties like being chased by dogs, having pigeon poop on your car, having a tree block the road and worst of all having it fallen on your car the videos were all about sending a message to the people of the city.

The campaign didn’t only do the talking; it walked their talk as well. The microsite enabled the user to take multiple measures with each different element between the dog, pigeon and the tree allowing you to do one thing or the other.

The Pigeon

The pigeon, synonymous to the president of the high flying royal society took matter into its own ‘wings’ and headed a reminder service that asked you for your details like date of purchase of the car, last date of PUC etc. and reminded you a few days before its time for you PUC expiry.

The Tree

The tree ran a missed call service and encouraged you to simply give in a missed call to that number, for each of the 10 missed calls of which Godrej Aer would plant a tree.

The Dog

The dog took matters into its own paws this time and educated the users on multiple ways to reduce the environment from PUC renewal to car services, car-pooling to cycling, hybrid cars to CNG kit installations.

Traffic was driven through the microsite through multiple ways and including Facebook posts, YouTube and Twitter.

Facebook posts

Generic posts did the trick here and these posts depended on the 160K + fans on the page to ensure there's traffic to the site.

Twitter contests

Godrej Aer steered a contest called #ChangeTheAir on Twitter and it ran into its second day riding on the back of the positive response it gathered. The participation was great and varied answers were seen on the twitter feed.

The gifts were all eco-friendly and thus was perfectly aligned to the message of the campaign.

The contest had the animals doing the talking and the tone and communication was through the voice of the dog and the pigeon and the tree.

The twitter contest was played in rounds as below.

And when the questions were asked through these animals you couldn’t expect the answers to be anything less.

Not surprisingly the campaign was hit on Twitter and contributed to quite a few hits on the website too. And even these replies from the tweeters and participants was reverted back to innovatively.

YouTube

The video driven platform was exploited efficiently with videos above putting across some hard hitting facts.

The views garnered on each video were an average of 200,000 above. Quite a good set of numbers for such a short span of time.

The site last checked stands at 44000+ pledges to reduce air pollution.

Positives

• The use of the microsite was the first positive, as it reached wider than just social media fans.

• YouTube was another prime source of traffic to the site. By leveraging video content, Godrej Aer creatively sent their message across on National Pollution Control Day, which makes the brand automatically come across as an environment-friendly one. With conscious efforts put forward, Godrej sends out the message towards the end of each video saying – Just like Aer can change the air inside your car, you can change the air outside. Good positioning of brand

• The use of direct stakeholders of the polluted environment viz. Pigeons, Dogs and Trees to speak out what they would if they could, was another solid example of an initiative driven campaign.

Scope for improvement

While Twitter and YouTube were well planned and a lot of traffic was taken to the site from these two, Facebook looked like it kind of missed the bus.

What did it lack?

A build towards the campaign! Posts were put up on D-Day directly and barely had any momentum building up to the day.

Even post that the updates were slow and in small numbers and a lot could have been exploited here given the large 160k+ fan base the page boasts of.

A microsite summed up for loss of a Facebook app/tab but not reason enough to exclude Facebook out of the pollution control bandwagon.

Conclusion

To sum up, the campaign enables the display of the CSR side of Godrej, a mandate that is advocated by the Indian government especially for companies that size. The campaign was highly successful in driving its point home through an amalgamation of a well-executed Twitter contest, YouTube videos with a message and coverage landing up to the door step of the microsite that rounded up Pollution Control Day for the air freshening brand Godrej Aer.