Summary
Call of safety, one swipe away. Josh's #SafeSwipe empowers women to be fearless when taking late night cabs.
Challenge
Even in the 21st century, late-night commutes are still a safety hazard for women. 48% of women feel unsafe getting a taxi ride alone at night. With countless incidents of harassment, the gravity of the problem was undeniable. Women in these situations use phone calls and location sharing as a default defence mechanism. But what if there was a creative way to avert predatorial behaviour? Josh designed an ingenious solution for this problem. ‘Safe Swipe' – Scripted content disguised as convincing video calls to deter predatorial misbehaviour.
Objective
For any media platform, marketing success boils down to how engaged the audience really is. So, Josh didn't just want to build relevance, we wanted to leapfrog the level of engagement and social proof among the targeted audience cohort. Our previous efforts with similar budgets had given us 100 hours of playback, a 5% increase in time spent and 1000 videos created so these became our benchmarks to beat. Josh was determined to trigger a social discourse, create a positive outlook of the brand, and of course, increase app downloads and usage, especially among women.
Strategy
Just like the market gap for vernacular content that Josh won over, the gap for women-centric content was untapped and had very high potential. Entertainment was the only metric that social sharing platforms were chasing. But Josh decided to think about utility and ingenuity that would create organic word of mouth for the brand. We planned to measure this by tracking organic PR, social discourse, and positive sentiment that the brand was able to create.
Data
Josh had 35Mn Female Average Daily Users on its platform. While Josh made online safety its priority, the world offline was no safer than it was yesterday. We used ‘CONTENT' to solve for ‘THE NIGHTMARE OF LATE NIGHT COMMUTES'. 48% of Indian women feel unsafe while getting a taxi/ride-share alone at night. Women in these situations often open their phones and social media. We created Safe Swipe - Content Camouflaged As A Video Call to ward off misbehaviour. Safe Swipe needed to be a useful tool for women so we identified critical checkpoints for success – 1. The Content Design – We needed the content to mimic a video call that people around could hear. 2. Two-way Conversation – We needed the consumer to engage with the content by exchanging dialogues. 3. Custom Creation – We wanted people to create their own versions of content that could help more women. 4. Grand Launch – We decided to launch on Women's Day for virality and topical relevance. Ride on Existing Behaviour > Create New Behaviour Commute safety was a sensitive issue. We realised that the solution needs to be intuitive and something that comes instinctively to women. We realised that women in these situations divert their attention to their phones – 1. They make phone calls and share their location to feel safe and ward off predatorial behaviour 2. They text and chat with their friends and keep them posted on their journey 3. They scroll through social media to keep themselves distracted and busy
Solution
We didn't want to reinvent the wheel. We decided to make a better mouse trap! Our idea was simple, what if we created content that made listeners believe that you are on a video call? What if this video call could serve as a warning to people with dastardly intentions? This seemingly bizarre idea was just what the doctor ordered. Introducing Safe Swipe – Content Camouflaged as a video to deter misbehaviour. We know for our intervention to be successful the user interface and experience need to be simple, easy and glitch-free. We programmed these video calls as simple conversations. The text on the screen prompted women to respond and the script for each of these conversations was designed to make the listener alert to the fact that someone was waiting for the person to reach home. The technical details and tech interventions were addressed. But the biggest marker for our success was going to be our campaign rollout plan. Campaign Rollout Strategy. The Hallmark of a successful campaign rollout was that it had to have a Grand Launch, it needed to Inspire conversations and social discourse and it must create a lasting halo effect for the platform. Therefore we structured it that way: • Grand Launch – We launched Safe Swipe in the lead-up to Women's Day making our initiative highly relevant, giving it the platform it deserved for virality. • Inspire Conversations & Social Discourse – Multiple influencers, media publications and people on the internet used our initiative to spotlight the problems women faced. They even created new content with the help of #SafeSwipe that helped multiple other women. • Lasting Halo Effect – While every other brand played bystander, Josh took matters into their own hands with a clear determination to solve for women's safety.
Results
Josh wanted to win over women, but the Safe Swipe campaign was able to deliver beyond what it set out to achieve. 1. For the first time in Josh's existence, the App saw a 62% spike in downloads after the Safe Swipe campaign and brought 1 Million new women onto our platform. 2. Josh was also successfully able to make a dent in the male to Female Audience ratio across many parameters - 1. Average daily users went up from 65% (M) 35% (F) split to a 58% (M) 42% (F) Split. 2. We witnessed an increase of 22% in the Average Monthly Women users on the platform 3. But where Josh won big was the overall engagement with #SafeSwipe – 1. With Over 5000 videos created and 252 hours of video playback, we realised that the scale of engagement and the quality of engagement were tremendous. 2. The platform also saw a 10% increase in overall platform engagement among women. 4. Last but not least, Safe Swipe helped Josh gain a positive tailwind from the campaign. Our sentiment scores gained a positive upswing of 14.5% after the campaign.
