Viren Fernandes

The Background

In 2015, Lenovo partnered with YUWA, an organization that works with girls in rural Jharkhand, India — a place where girls are at risk of child marriage and human trafficking.

On the ground, there was a legitimate concern that without the knowledge and skills to use them, donated computers, tablets and smartphones would create more problems than they solved.

The core mission of YUWA is to use team sports and education to build character, confidence, and courage; and thus it was essential to avoid depiction of the girls as smiling-faced charity cases.

The idea

Through the course of their various awareness campaigns, Jhatkaa.org, a Bengaluru-based non-profit, realised that a lot of people don’t really understand the health impacts of air pollution.

Approached with this challenge, we came up with the simple idea of visually depicting what polluted air does to our lungs.

Giant lungs with fans to pull air through HEPA filters, and a real-time AQI digital display were placed in a high-traffic area. For the first few days, a performance artist sat below the billboard with a bunch of flowers — they wilted in a few hours.

You've got mail

In three weeks the lungs had turned black. After about four months, the installation was taken down and pieces of the filter, now tarry and the colour of charcoal, were cut up and tucked into neat little ‘evidence package’ mailers.

These evidence packages were mailed out to the Ministry of Environment, State and Central Pollution Control Boards and other key decision makers.

A breath of fresh air.

We knew we had a winner on our hands, when the biggest media houses in India took notice. We reached a few thousand people on the ground, but well over 4 million people online, with ZERO media budget.

The Billboard that Breathes then traveled to 4 more locations across India in 2018 and 2019, getting more attention and raising more awareness every time.

Jhatkaa.org have since shared a 'Tool Kit' outlining how to replicate this installation, with organizations across the world.

The Background

Lenovo, with its recent brand revamp, wanted to celebrate the ‘Fail Forward’ attitude — taking failure in stride and moving forward.

When a team from YUWA, a non-profit that uses football to empower tribal girls in rural India, was invited to the world’s largest youth soccer tournament, a unique opportunity arose, to make these girls role models who embody the Lenovo brand belief.

The brief called for a participative campaign to showcase the brand belief, engage the audience during the entire 2-week tournament and raise funds to build a new YUWA school.

The Strategy

We treated the team as sportstar influencers at a live sporting event, and produced a unique, unscripted documentary in four parts, in near real-time.

Ranbir Kapoor, an Indian film star, played storyteller, with all his parts recorded before the team left for Spain! But interwoven with the girls' candid interviews, the story came together beautifully, and the #FailForward brand attitude shone through.

Online, we drew people in with live tweets, candid Snapchats and live broadcasts of the tournament. Tapping into this engaged audience with Indian national team captain Sunil Chettri's ‘Kick For A Brick’ challenge, we amplified the fundraising aspect of this campaign too.

The Results

The four-part documentary was shared more than 10000 times, got over 5.3 million views, and thousands of people took the time to comment on the videos too. The live broadcasts of the game saw an average of 6000 people tune in.

With many people and organisations contributing, and also starting their own fundraisers, the YUWA school was well on its way to becoming a reality, with over 400000 INR raised during the duration of the campaign.

The Lenovo global #Goodweird campaign aimed to illustrate how their YOGA products embrace unexpected design and functionality — design that’s arguably weird, but in a good way.

In India, Lenovo tasked us with creating #GoodWeird stories with three design trendsetters — a chef, a jewellery designer and a fashion designer, who all challenge the norms of their field.

The stories had to be authentic, keeping both Lenovo's brand belief as well as the protagonists' essence intact, while still being told in an engaging, creative way.