When trolling is tackled with funny banter, brand emerges ultimate winner

What Netflix did in the case of Radhika Apte was a response to social media trend and not a planned campaign

Which is your best campaign and why have you chosen it? When was it launched?

We work with over 40 brands today and hence for each new phase there is a favourite which, too, gets replaced in due course. This makes it tough to come up with one single answer for such a question but in the last two and a half years, the kind of work we have done for Netflix is the highlight for me. One such campaign which is really close to my heart is called Radflix, a portmanteau made by combining Radhika (Apte) and Netflix released in October.

It was not a planned campaign but a response to a social media trend. It started when our data team informed us that since Radhika had been part of many of our originals released back to back, people were constantly discussing this online. So immediately after the mini-series Ghoul was released, we thought of tackling it head on by taking the joke on ourselves rather than brushing it under the carpet. So what we did was get Radhika to feature in a small video where she said that in an upcoming series, she was doing every character – from the hero to the heroine and supporting actors.

What did the campaign achieve for the brand? Could you also share some numbers to corroborate your claim?

As a policy, we don’t share numbers but what I can tell you is that we managed to change that conversation -- which started with a brand being trolled for using the same actor again and again – from a negative note to a positive one. It attracted a lot of coverage from all the big magazines to web portals, earning a lot of free PR in the process. Radhika herself was very excited and literally jumped at the idea when we first told her

Among other things, the Netflix official instagram handle said it was “an official Radhika Apte fan page” in the bio and we started engaging in conversations from that front. One particularly interesting episode was the banter that we had on Zomato which listed paneerdishes and said that it was the ingredient that was omnipresent and it was not Apte. We encircled a R-A-D-H-I-K-A from the dishes they had named and posted a reply to Zomato.

Rohit Raj, co-founder & creative chief, The Glitch

What are the execution challenges for such a campaign where you don’t come up with an idea but things first fall in place?

Again, the reason I chose this as one of my best works is because unlike the other campaigns where you work with a brief, we crafted the brief ourselves here. And that was to use a cultural trend that we arrived at using data. So we did not have a target of selling x number of products. It was as if a conversation was happening and we decided to become a part of it. However, time was of the essence as in the digital medium you have to jump on something that is happening today, immediately. Tomorrow can be too late. We did that. So the idea had to come and the production carried out without any delay.

What was the industry response to the campaign?

A lot of people applauded it across the industry and I think that happened because we never tried to show that the trolling made us insecure. Our effort to laugh at ourselves was appreciated all across. The credit should also go to our data team that was quick to identify the trend and update us on time.

Given a chance, what would you do differently?

Since we did not have a brief, there is little that could change. I feel that we capitalised the moment and maximised the opportunity to help it blow up into something big.