The makings of Mindshare’s campaign to prevent communicable diseases in rural India

The only Indian ad campaign to feature in the prestigious Warc 100 list is Lifebuoy, India’s number one soap brand from the Hindustan Unilever stable. Rated No 3 in the top 50, the campaign targets people in rural India, at most risk of infections preventable by good hand hygiene.

The campaign titled ‘The Adaptive Data Lighthouse’ was created by Mindshare Mumbai.

The agency created an Infection Alert System using government of India’s data on disease outbreaks, collected from 34,000 rural community health centres across 822 sub-districts and villages of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

“The challenge with this data was that it was unstructured, maintained in paper-forms, in local languages with no metadata standards,” MA Parthasarathy (Maps), CEO of Mindshare South Asia, told BusinessLine on the sidelines of a presentation in Mumbai. “Old paper records were digitised and then algorithms used to read and load data into a structured database of 21 communicable diseases.”

The agency then went ahead and modelled historical disease incidences to arrive at predictive incidence rates at a village level, using time-series models. “If the predicted severity of disease incidence for villages was above a certain threshold, then warning calls would be activated for those villages only, and not the entire state,” explained Maps.

Educating consumers on the benefits of hand-washing at the most relevant times was next on the agenda. The agency had identified 21 communicable diseases that could be reduced by hand-washing. Post this, it created a more personalised medium to reach out to the target audience.

The team realised “79 per cent of rural consumers use a basic feature phone which has no internet connectivity. This medium has six times higher reach than any other medium in rural areas. The solution was to create a data-led Infection Alert System that would act as a lighthouse to alert rural consumers when they were most vulnerable to fatal diseases,” the CEO added.

The agency tackled this by leveraging data and the reach of mobile phones in traditionally media-dark geographies. The agency only targeted audiences whenever the disease incidence rate went above government threshold limits in their respective districts, through mobile phones.

Over 6.4 crore Outbound Dialler (OBD) calls were made over a period of eight weeks to warn the locals on the outbreak of a particular communicable disease in their area and the necessary preventive measures that needed to be taken.

“The insight behind the campaign was that most Indians eat food and feed others using their hands and wash hands without soap. This practice is rampant in rural areas which makes them susceptible to various communicable diseases,” explained Maps.

A post campaign dipstick study in rural districts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar brought out an astounding statistics: 98 per cent of the listeners had Spontaneous Brand recall for Lifebuoy, while 65 per cent of the listeners had Spontaneous Message recall.

The overall approach helped the team deliver over 32 per cent business efficiency. Given the campaign success in the two states, the Adaptive Data Light House model was extended to six additional states to keep the momentum going.

Mindshare’s campaign was a bright example of purpose-driven marketing. As the CEO noted, the driving force behind the Lifebuoy brand “is an inspiring vision for a more hygienic, healthier environment and to create vital communities which the campaign embodied”.

Commenting on the sole Indian brand to feature in the Warc list, Maps said, “Creativity and media are inextricably linked, as the medium and the message have to work in perfect tandem to deliver business results. We are delighted the work we do, with data and creativity at the core, has been recognised in this global forum. It spurs on the passionate people at Mindshare to craft solutions that are provocative and purposeful.”