Diving deeper into the world of creativity and advertising
One of this semester’s greatest surprises was Ms. Betty’s Tsakarestou class “Introduction to Advertising and Public Relations” (Ad Discovery & Creativity Lab) where we explored some of the most important challenges that the advertising agencies/campaigns have to face in order to reach the exclusive creativity and innovation which are necessary elements for success in this field.
A specific assignment that helped us examine innovative and successful efforts in the advertising industry was one that required a research in the award-winning ( 2018 ) Ads of the Cannes International Festival of Creativity. It’s of paramount importance to notice that this Festival is considered one of the largest global events for experts working in the advertising field or other creative communications and takes place each June in Cannes, France. The purpose of that team-assignment was to choose one of the award-winning Ads and then analyse it in detail (Campaign, Cultural background, Key issues/elements, challenges). Frankly speaking, despite the fact that our team adored most of the award-winning Ads, we were sure of our choice when we came across Savlon’s impressive advertisement “Healthy Hands Chalk Sticks” .
In this Ad we see an utterly innovative idea of ITC Savlon — a new entrant in the Indian fast Moving Consumer Goods in hygiene industry — that provides a solution to one of the most serious problems in schools of rural India, that one of poor hygiene. More specifically Savlon introduced chalk sticks infused with a kind of cleanser that can be used, of course, for writing on slates, but can also work as “hand-soap” when coming in contact with water. It goes without saying that this compels kids to wash their hands, thereby teaching them an important lesson on handwashing. The Healthy Hands Chalk Sticks activity had a positive impact on the attitude of kids towards handwashing and as a result hygiene problems have decreased a lot.
Our team, excited and thrilled by the idea of this company, continued the detailed research on the story behind this initiative. Thankfuly, there were lots of information on the web because of the Ad’s massive global success. Apparently, Savlon took into consideration the fundamental problem of poor sanitation of schoolchildren in parts of rural India — that unfortunately leads to several health problems — and under its ongoing school outreach initiative “Healthy India Mission” , the brand wanted to give an efficient solution to it.
It is also important to highlight that this campaign is more a solution lay in behavioural engineering than just an advertising. The exclusiveness and uniqueness of Savlon’s advertisement managed to draw the attention of a vast audience, giving the Ad an international success. The initiative spread to 22 cities, 100 rural schools across India (that were identified based on health data analysis) and attracted more than 70 local newspaper and television news coverage, 4.3 million tweets and 3.2 million facebook posts in four days. As more schools, large NGOs and Akshaya Pātra, a supplier of nutritious lunches, joined in, a plan was formed to distribute 1m pieces of chalk a day to schoolchildren.
In conclusion, while doing our research for this campaign we understood deeply the elements and aspects that a successful Ad campaign should have and we managed to learn more about the challenges of this industry. The journey into the world of creative communications and advertising has been a great pleasure!
My team: Maria- Eleni Kapota Ashley Zhu Maria Revi
