How The Daily Star won 'Best digital advertising campaign' in South Asian Digital Media Awards 2017

A hangout to remember

It started in an unusual meet up in 2015.  

Two friends were hanging out after office, when they started talking about how a brand can engage the youth without traditional advertising.

Eventually, they came up with an idea.

After pitching it to Crown Cement, they formed a big campaign to promote the products of Crown Cement using a collaboration model.

The formulation

The core idea was pretty straight forward.

• As Crown Cement produces export-standard product, the brand will sponsor an export idea based competition
• The competition will be aimed at university students, who are the future customers
• Using The Daily Star's offline and online reach, the idea can be taken to reach a big audience
• Along with the winners, 3 distinguished Bangladeshis would be rewarded

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The execution

It was a grand project that required an integrated marketing strategy.

There needed to be a blend of online and offline activities to ensure maximum participation.

Key activities plan of the campaign included:

Here's the entire campaign on a flowchart:

On a personal note, I hadn't started working on the project when it had started.

I was working at WebAble, a digital marketing agency and The Daily Star was a client.

My career had just started and I was hungry for success.

I joined the project when the roadshows were going on. My task was to focus on making the competition viral on social media.

Notable contributions from my team to the campaign:

• Including video marketing for virality (one explainer video and 10 elevator pitch videos)
• Ensuring clear CTAs on the elevator pitches to ensure virality
• Gamify the competition further by including a live leaderboard for voting round
• Helping with UI/UX of the microsite so that a minimum number of interactions is required to vote and share

The voting begins

As planned, the top 10 teams pitched their ideas and recorded 30-second elevator pitches.

We incorporated the videos on our microsite and started the voting process.

When the voting round started, on the first night we got an overwhelming response, thanks to the competitive spirit of the participants!

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Each university's students wanted their team to win. The top spot at the live leaderboard became a matter of pride for them and more and more people kept voting.

In the first few days, the top 5 positions kept shifting slots every hour.

We reached 100K votes in the first few days.

Then 200K, then 300K, then 400K.

I remember the excitement in the WhatsApp group chat as we updated the new numbers.

When we stopped the voting round, more than 480,000 votes were cast. It was unprecedented for a digital campaign.

Votes had 30% weight on the marks, and the jury panel's scoring had 70% weight.

The three finalist teams were provided one mentor each to further develop their ideas for the gala night.

On the gala night, the 3 teams pitched again and the team named 'The Brains of Castamere' won the competition.

(From left, Osama Bin Noor, Rafiq Azam and Faizur Rahman Khan (on behalf of late architect Fazlur Rahman Khan)

The event was followed up with a newspaper supplement.

Some campaign highlights:

Towards the end of this year, I had joined the Daily Star's digital marketing team. I was lucky enough to work on this project again, this time submitting the PPT deck for the award submission at South Asian Digital Media Awards organized by WAN-IFRA and Google.

And we won Gold! The best in category!

This video, from next year's Rise High Bangladesh (Season 2), captures the essence of the entire event. Feel free to have a look and enjoy!