Ever tried to get someone to dance to your tunes and failed? Take a lesson from Dollar International. The Kolkata-based hosiery firm convinced nearly 2,000 people to tap their feet to the background score of its TV commercials—part of the company’s campaign to make itself popular in the youth segment.  

So, as an extension of Dollar’s new TV commercial last summer that featured dance maestro Prabhu Deva and Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar, the company launched an online dance competition to target a younger consumer base through its Facebook page. The ad showed Kumar and Deva competing with each other in a dance competition where the actor emerges the winner and the maestro compliments him with the brand’s tag line "Tu Fit Hai Boss".

The company integrated that idea into a digital campaign where it asked people to download the TV commercial’s soundtrack from its microwebsite, make a dance video with them in it, and upload it on the company’s Facebook page. Top five winners were to receive cash prizes up to 1 lakh. The campaign was launched on March 25, 2013 and was initially scheduled to run for 15 days. But, the campaign’s popularity forced the company to extend the deadline to a month, recalls Bidyut Nath, Dollar’s head of advertising.   

“We could have gone for contests or other passive competitions to increase engagement on our social media outlets, but we really wanted active participation of our potential customers,” explains Nath. “Ours is a mass-market brand and a need-based product, so it was important to get people talking about the brand to enhance brand recall,” he says.

Digital isn’t easily understood in companies of our size. There is still the notion that money is better spent on TV and print campaigns.”- Bidyut Nath

The whole process of participation seems cumbersome and requires significant effort for people to be a part of the competition, contends Indranil Mitra, vice president, Lowe Lintas, the creative agency behind the campaign. Mitra says they hadn’t expected more than 500 videos. Yet, there were 5,000 downloads of the soundtrack and Dollar claims to have received about 2,000 videos from people across the country—including smaller centres such as Gorakhpur, Varanasi, Guwahati and Allahabad—dancing to the 45-second soundtrack. The entries included both solo and group performances and because of the absence of an age limit, the campaign saw entries from young children and middle-aged persons as well. Another aim of the campaign was to create hype around the company’s Facebook page so that more and more people got feeds about the brand on their walls. Before the campaign had started, there were about 50,000 Facebook “likes” that grew to over a lakh by the end of the campaign. 

The analytics of the page helped the team understand the actual demographics of its potential customers that were different from those originally thought by the company, admits Mitra. “The benefit of social media over traditional media is that you get to know who your customer is. On TV, you don’t know who saw your ad and who will buy your product. In fact, ­­­­our aim was to bring down the age group of our potential buyers from the usual mass market of 25-30 year-olds to 18-23 year olds, which was the average age group of the participants, and we achieved it,” he says. 

The criteria for winning the competition were kept simple. Participants who chose any other song to dance or did not say the brand’s tagline at the end were disqualified. From amongst the pool of entries that qualified, the best dancers were chosen. While Nath claims that the company never asked the participants to buy its products for the video, nearly 20 to 30 per cent of the videos are of people wearing Dollar vests and dancing to the song to make their entries stand apart. 

“What more could a brand ask for? We had so many youngsters dance to our song and use our brand’s tagline. They must have played the soundtrack several times and practiced their moves for days to make those videos,” Nath says. 

The TVC featuring Askhay Kumar and Prabhu Deva, with which it all started.

Ten videos were shortlisted by the Dollar and Lowe Lintas teams. Brand ambassador Akshay Kumar chose the final winners. 

Dollar spent about Rs.15 lakh on the digital campaign. If one adds the print support, hoardings and other media to promote the campaign, the company effectively spent about seven to nine per cent of its total turnover that year. Convincing the top management to spend these resources wasn’t easy, Nath says.  “Even five lakhs seemed like an extravagance to spend on a digital campaign to our management. I had to struggle for two years to convince them, and get their buy in to launch the Facebook campaign. Digital isn’t easily understood in companies of our size. There is still the notion that money is better spent on TV and print campaigns.” 

Vinod Gupta, managing director, Dollar International, admits that initially there were apprehensions about the success of the campaign because it was such a new approach. That scepticism has now transformed to great enthusiasm for the possibilities that digital media presents to a company such as theirs. Recently, Dollar, in fact, appointed ILS Network, a specialised digital media agency, to design and execute more digital campaigns. The company claims it has been growing at 25 per cent year on year, and expects to cross Rs.650 crore in revenue by next fiscal from last year’s Rs.456 crore.