MUMBAI: Lowe Lintas and Partners along with India’s largest FMCG Company Hindustan Unilever Ltd. have won the Global Mobile Awards under the category- Best Advertising or Marketing on Mobile for their innovative ‘Free mobile Radio’ service- ‘Kan Khajura Tesan’. HUL and Lowe Lintas are amongst one of the 31 winners from 680 entries across the world.
An ‘innovative’ medium that effectively reaches to the rural audience, The ‘Kan Khajura Tesan’ is a ‘Free mobile Radio’ in Bihar that provides users to access entertainment content worth 15 minutes per week. Reaching out to more than 5 million consumers, the channel has now become the biggest radio station in the state that was otherwise termed to be ‘media dark’.
Speaking more about the service, Anaheeta Goenka (Executive Director, Lowe Lintas and Partners, India) said, “For Kan Khajura to take off, we needed people to take the first step and hence our singular task was to drive missed calls. Unlike all other mediums where you push the message out, here the consumer had to first call to even experience the content. The communication strategy was built around making them remember a 10 digit number, and call this number, again and again and again”. Quite a challenge in a day and age where we remember nothing beyond our own mobile numbers!
Deepa Geetakrishnan (President, Creative – Lowe Lintas and Partners) said, “Kan Khajura Tesan was an answer to this task. We needed something surprising and sticky around this innovative mobile channel that would make people want to call it. And from there came the idea of Kan Khajura tesan….the tesan that gets stuck to your ears. A Kan Khajura (Centipede) is an insect that enters the ear, and gets lodged there. It’s quite common in North India.”
To access the content the consumer is required to give a “Missed call” (the call here gets disconnected automatically after the two initial rings) on a given number. He is then called back where some content, which includes an RJ speak, jokes, and Bollywood songs amongst others, is played to him. Hence, giving the entertainment hungry audience exactly what they want.
In today’s age of communication, although it has become easier to reach out to people globally, brands still face a problem in reaching out to the heart of India – the rural population. Currently, about 70% of India’s population resides in rural areas. Hindustan Unilever Ltd, for a while, had been trying to explore this untapped market further. Most of rural India lives in darkness due to lack of electricity, and hence most of rural India is ‘Media dark’. Keeping in mind the tremendous success achieved in Bihar, HUL has launched the campaign in Jharkhand and plans to take it to other states including Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
