My Portfolio

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.

The Background

Lenovo was launching the new version of its Yoga tablet which featured 4 different ergonomically designed modes of use as the key differentiator — Hold, Tilt, Stand & Hang.

The insight we hit upon was that although our tech devices help us lead a productive, entertaining and an always-on life, thanks to very little focus on ergonomics, users feel trapped by the very devices designed to help us.

Once the initial rush of unboxing new gadgets is over, we find ourselves boxed up by technology in everyday situations.

The Insight

You can't CoEvolve without a little love!

When Bengaluru real estate developer Asset Builders needed a brand that reflected their commitment to sustainability, we got straight to the heart of the matter.

The transformation began with a universal truth — Change is the heartbeat of growth.

Love for the planet — at the core of their building designs, shone through as we helped them announce that they were changing, growing, evolving; and inviting the world to co-evolve.

, In 2017, we helped Google create a program to help the power of the internet reach 'The Next Billion' — the Indian internet user from smaller towns and villages who access the Internet from their mobile phone and prefer content and interfaces in their regional languages.

The Solve for India initiative aimed to nurture developers and tech entrepreneurs across India through Tech talks, Code Labs and startup mentoring sessions reaching the grassroots in 15 of India's smaller towns and cities.

The idea

As the first-ever smartphone with Dolby Atmos sound onboard, it was only logical to hold the launch event for the Lenovo A7000 in a Dolby Atmos cinema.

Building on this, we decided to promote the phone through a movie trailer for a fictional release telling the story of a spy and his adventures with a mystery gadget.

We planted 'news' teasing about the new movie in satire portals, and created a teaser trailer website, complete with graphic novel-style illustration, sound effects, and parallax animation.

The execution

Building buzz, we invited the audience to RSVP for a screening in their city, i.e. the launch events.

At the launch events, we unveiled the phone and also screened a Hollywood spy flick Kingsman: The Secret Service.

Attendees of the launch program also got priority passes to an online sale of the first 30000 Lenovo A7000 phones, meaning at the time of the sale, the phone would be automatically added to their cart.

Gone in 4 seconds!

On the day of the first 'flash sale', we invited the media to e-commerce giant Flipkart’s office, to see firsthand the demand that this phone had generated.

The phones sold out in just under 4 seconds, and the resulting media coverage generated a fresh wave of demand for the subsequent flash sales.

The background

The Lenovo Phab Plus aimed to create a new category of handheld devices that was positioned as a combination of a phone and a tablet. Preliminary surveys of consumer acceptance of the new (at the time) mammoth 7-inch screen size suggested people were skeptical.

To educate our target audience of young, tech-savvy global citizens about this new device, we needed to showcase its form factor and build advocacy amongst, and through influencers.

The target audience for this social media campaign was spread across Asia and Europe, and hence the use of universally understood imagery was important.

Don't be drab... #GoPhab

With #GoPhab as the common thread, a 3-phase creative campaign — Expose, Entice, and Establish was launched.

Expose educated consumers that Phab is a portmanteau of a Phone and Tablet, giving users the best of both worlds.

Entice reinforced that using multiple devices for different needs wasn’t considered ‘cool’ and Phab is the future.

Establish aimed to differentiate the Phab from competing products, and demonstrated that it is here to stay!

#CultOfPhab

We also drove influencer endorsements, through the 'Cult Of PHAB’, where influencers, from distinct backgrounds, with different phone usage patterns and requirements were offered the opportunity to try it out for themselves.

Content based on their experiences appealed to a wide range of audiences, and Lenovo created an inclination towards this new category of hybrid devices with a bigger screen size.

AskSid.ai was a little startup with massive vision, that needed to reach clients around the world with a strong global brand and an authentic relatable proposition.

As an AI-driven conversational commerce tool that quickly grew to so much more than a chatbot, we shouldered the responsibility of conveying their far more intelligent ecommerce proposition to the world.

When shoppers have a million questions about your products, conventional search won't cut it. Curious shoppers with curious questions can find all the answers they need with AskSid.

The idea

Flying Machine launched their Ice Cool Denims at the peak of the Indian summer. The breathable and moisture-wicking fabric of the denims made them more comfortable than regular denims.

Given their young, bold and quirky brand personality, we called out to their audience to 'Keep things that matter cool' .

The campaign

We used the Instagram Layout splitscreen format to create 3 off-beat films, that were hosted on YouTube and promoted across social media channels.

Shot for the Instagram format with a split screen treatment using the juxtaposition method of storytelling, these bold films helped launch Flying Machine's Ice Cool Denims in a manner that grabbed attention.

Flying Machine was one of the first brands in the country to embrace the meme format, and for this campaign that meant a series of posts and memes.

Beyond paid promotions, we hijacked conversations on Twitter too, at the peak of summer, when there was plenty of chatter around the sweltering heat, and ways to beat it.

Mobilizing citizens to reconnect with trees

MARA HABBA — meaning Tree Festival in Kannada, was a celebration of Bengaluru's trees — an appreciation of their role in helping the city beat the heat, air pollution and droughts, and a movement to highlight the need to protect Bengaluru's fast-depleting green cover.

We also aimed to gather signatures for a petition asking the muncipal authorities to form long-promised 'Greening Committees' to monitor the greening of the city and to ensure that Bengaluru's trees are not cut arbitrarily.

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 organisations across the world.

The Background

When Fortune Foods launched Vivo - India's first Diabetes-care cooking oil, our goal was to create awareness around this breakthrough product.

Oily foods are seen as indulgent, and it was a challenge to convey the proposition of an oil that would take care of diabetics. Our approach was based on the insight that the lifestyle of a person with diabetes is a function of their knowledge of the disease and their outlook or attitude.

With this campaign, we stayed clear of the fear-mongering approach, personifying the oil as a 'buddy' that would help people with diabetes eat better, get fitter, and live fuller.

Swiggy is a location-based food delivery app, now one of the biggest in India. When they launched, the ask was to devise a campaign to achieve customer loyalty, which is lacking in the online food ordering space, and to make Swiggy the go-to app in the hungry consumer’s mind, highlighting the main USPs: lightning fast delivery and live tracking.

The idea: Hangry (hungry+angry) — lack of food causes you to become angry, frustrated or both. Scientists say that even the most seemingly laidback people can experience hunger-based anger.