India: Lowe Lintas India; Result For Rural Radio

Despite both having been at Lowe Lintas for their entire 20-year careers, president Deepa Geethakrishnan and executive director Anaheeta Goenka haven’t had a minute to get restless, they’ve been too busy responding to India’s changing ad scene, targeting myriad local cultures and cleaning up at Cannes with their innovative mobile phone radio project

People in some of the most rural areas of India now have access to music and entertainment thanks to a unique on-demand radio station. These listeners live in places that see no more than 20 per cent of traditional media coverage and are in the dark when it comes to the latest news, music and current affairs.

Lowe Lintas and Partners Mumbai scooped three golds at this year’s Cannes Lions, two for Media and one in the Mobile category, for Kan Khajura Tesan, which translates as ‘the earworm channel’. The campaign, for Hindustan Unilever, saw the creation of a station activated by consumers calling a number on their phones and hanging up in order to receive a call back which provided 15 minutes of free radio entertainment.

Bringing light to media-dark regions

Deepa Geethakrishnan and Anaheeta Goenka, president and executive director respectively at Lowe Lintas, are the spokespeople for the campaign. “It was like being in a start-up. It was never done, never tried, and so it was a journey of learning and mistakes all the way,” says Goenka. “The big challenge was that, unlike other mediums where you push through your content and communication, here, the consumer had to call. Our strategy was to create a brand where people remember the number and to create content that was worth dialling in for every week.”

Geethakrishnan adds: “The other challenge was the entire communication design, which had to be culturally rooted and relevant, as we were talking to people in rural Bihar and Jharkhand. The biggest joy was seeing the results of our efforts,” she goes on, “we’d attempted to solve a long-term problem and it was rewarding to know we had paved the way for a new medium and changed how people in media-dark places can be reached.” The station gained eight million subscribers in six months and has become the region’s biggest media channel. It’s the first time a mobile phone has been used as an entertainment portal in India, so it’s not surprising that it struck gold at Cannes.

Geethakrishnan and Goenka are rightly proud of Lowe’s recent success, especially as they have both been with the agency for their entire careers. Geethakrishnan’s first job was a role in Lowe’s creative department in Mumbai 20 years ago and she went on to head creative in Chennai and Bangalore before returning to Mumbai in 2010. “What I love about Lowe Lintas, she says, “is the dominant culture of pursuing clarity of thought and purpose at every step. It’s a great every day mental and emotional workout.”

Goenka has also been in the industry for 20 years. She started in account management, on Unilever, then did a stint in planning, before coming back to account management. Goenka describes Lowe Lintas as “more like a person with a strong value system” than a place of work. She adds: “It has always had a strong point of view on creativity that works in the real world for real impact. It’s an agency where you can make mistakes, which is great as then you learn to be brave and reinvent yourself.”

During their time at Lowe, the pair have worked on numerous projects. For Goenka though, working on a Clinic Plus campaign, Happy Mother’s Day to My Best Friend, was a highlight as well as spots for Axe, including Boat Party. “I worked on many brands where I’ve got a female point of view across where there had been none, such as the ICICI Prudential Life Insurance ad series, for which I won the agency a national award  (Effies, 2013). That felt good.”

Geethakrishnan prefers to only reflect on the past 12 months so that she is “resting in a recent past rather than a distant one”. She particularly enjoyed working on Axe commercials and Unilever’s Fair & Lovely brand, on the spot Self-reliance Before Marriage. She says: “For Axe, it was about energising and getting the buzz back on the brand. For Fair & Lovely, it was about reviving the emotional stature of the brand.”

The challenge of cultural diversity

Both creatives enjoy the challenges of advertising in India. There is now more pressure than ever as the industry is changing fast. “India is made up of many cultures and so is its advertising. Some is good, some effective, some creative, some wasted. But we are evolving to create our own type of deep and culturally relevant work that strikes a chord and therefore succeeds,” says Goenka. “I think the big challenge is always our diverse cultural diaspora and the diversity of advertising acuity with the audience. Indian advertising will, I think, grow to be more multichannel and experiential than it is today.”

Geethakrishnan adds: “The big change in India is that we are surely and steadily moving towards work that’s getting more targeted and rooted in local culture and creating content that’s relevant and engaging. Our pace of work has seen the most dramatic change. When I started we had a lot more time and experimentation. Now we’re surer and faster. I’m not too sure though, if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”