How 'StopAllerG' ad campaign woke India up to air pollution issues

The link between environmental and public health concerns is strong, and the campaign also sought to appeal to this more deep-seated issue as well

Prasad Shejale, co-founder & chief executive officer, Logicserve Digital on his best campaign

Which do you consider your best campaign and why? When was the campaign launched?

In retrospect, our best work in terms of impact and outcome is reflected in our campaign for Piramal Healthcare’s StopAllerG. Providing a creative rendition to an OTC product to cure nasal allergy was no joke. We delivered this piece of work in March 2017 and consider it sharp since it involved focused problem solving, precise targeting and ahead-of-the-curve technological intervention – all the key ingredients for a successful campaign. We were able to wake India up to the level of air pollution in key metros, show people how that affects their well-being and provide a quick and effective solution for the same. The link between environmental and public health concerns is strong, and our campaign also sought to appeal to this more deep-seated issue as well. 

Did you conduct any consumer research before launching the campaign? What was the key idea behind the campaign?

We went through a rigorous process of studying this widely prevalent and infamous health concern called the common cold and understood that in India, pollution is emerging as one of the key reasons that trigger it. To our astonishment, we found that one in three people in our country suffered from allergy ki sardi as we are exposed to particle pollution a whopping 12 to 19 times the permissible limit. Our lifestyles, especially for working professionals, have led us to spend a significant portion of our day on the roads. Even at our homes  in metros, we are exposed to ever-increasing pollution. We wanted to position StopAllerG as the “quick solution” in this context and set out to generate brand awareness to create top of mind brand recall. We installed real-time an air quality index that appears as banner ads on websites. We moved away from routine, static banners and boosted our digital efficiency by leveraging DoubleClick to serve these intelligent ads. Programmatic banners fetched air quality index of the user’s location on a real-time basis. We optimised this campaign during Diwali through a mobile-based interactive banner to reinforce the benefits of StopAllerG across New Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Pune, Lucknow, Agra, Ludhiana. We displayed the banner to office goers, daily commuters, students and mothers who looked for remedies for kids, retail investors, besides news, finance, parental and health-related sites. We also leveraged high intent searches around common symptoms and took the users to StopAllerG’s blogs to educate and create awareness about the remedies.

What did the campaign achieve for the brand?

The reach of this campaign was phenomenal. The real-time banners reached a total of 15 million potential consumers. We saw 68 per cent engagement from New Delhi alone. A whopping 62.7 per cent of the engaged users were women and millennials from the 18-44 age group. Technology really brought about a happy marriage between creativity and relevance.  

The several awards we received for this particular campaign at prestigious platforms are a testament to the industry response. We have received a total of eight awards last year at renowned forums like Indian Marketing Awards, CDO Converge, Drivers of Digital Awards, The Mobby’s and so on.

My take

Technology really brought about a happy marriage between creativity and relevance

Brand: Piramal Healthcare

Year of launch: 2017 

Agency: Logicserve Digital