Summary
Truecaller as a brand stands for verified communication. And hence it enables one to block any unwanted call for that matter. However, in India, stalking and phone harassment are not considered a problem. We wanted this to be India's first anti-stalking and harassment awareness campaign.
Challenge
A large part of Truecaller's ethos as a company has been to take a higher stance where it encourages reporting harassment and bringing down online abuse in general. The idea was to reinforce, reinstate and inspire women to "Block & Report" abusive communication directed at them. Our initiative would feature under the communication property #ItsNotOK, which has been active since 2016 and has seen tremendous traction since its inception.
Objective
1) Reach 2) Engagement and conversations across media & social channels 3) Provide a platform where users could talk/report about the harassment that is faced by them on a day to day basis
Strategy
After sifting through different data touchpoints across multiple forums, we got something that stuck with us. On average, 1 woman is harassed every 55 minutes in India. We wanted to create a campaign around this data point appealing predominantly to urban women between 20 and 45 years of age as a first step from the brand, to create a forum to inspire women to block and report harassers. And of course, to speak more openly about their respective stories. The approach was to create a brand video emphasizing the problem of online abuse and harassment and collaborating with different partners in our community, like Humans of Bombay and Under 25. Their followers were the right target audience to generate wider awareness and conversation around the campaign, and the core thought we were trying to put forward.
Data
In 2018, news portal Quint reported that one woman is stalked every 55 minutes in India. Truecaller's internal data revealed that reporting of such issues was at an all-time low. That's what instigated India's first anti-stalking and harassment campaign on Women's Day 2021.
Solution
The campaign was centered around our main film called Shabd, a 5-minute-long video that highlights the horrors that a mute woman goes through and how she is inspired and pushed to raise her voice. Abhinaya Anand, the speech impaired actor played the protagonist. The campaign ran for a week between March 3 and March 11 and was placed and promoted across all social media platforms as well as partner platforms. We worked with media partners like Glance and Humans of Bombay to amplify the scope of the campaign and generate mass awareness. We noticed that almost 54% of the audience had been victims of phone harassment and almost 60% of the people had no idea that there are helpline numbers that are available or even open sources for them to reach out to in case of emergencies.
Results
Overall, the campaign generated over 179 million impressions across all channels and platforms. We had almost 2 million hits on our microsite. With almost 80,000 people taking an active part in the survey we had hosted on the microsite. The brand film received overwhelmingly positive reviews and generated tremendous engagement with over 140,000 hours of watch time for the video across platforms with almost 10 million video views. Moreover, the campaign generated enormous conversations on all platforms and partner platforms as well. People opened up about their past experiences. Overall, the campaign generated 900X engagement in the form of comments and shares and was trending at #3 on Twitter on Women's Day. The campaign was widely appreciated on news media and got featured on Dainik Bhaskar, Brand Equity, Campaign India, Mad Over Marketing, Afaqs, Ads of the World, and more.
