Aircel’s Save The Tiger campaign has been generating a lot of comments and opinions. On one hand, there are tons of people who have joined online, owned-media channels initiated by Aircel/ it’s agency – the comments on Facebook alone make for hilarious reading and come very close to Orkut’s Fraandship standards. On the other, we’ve a Twitter account, that, symbolically, follows only one – World Wildlife Fund India, and has all of 20 informative tweets, but 4,000+ followers expecting gains of wisdom on how to save our national animal. So much hope!
And we’ve deliciously satirical blog posts – like Tantanu’s that beautifully dissects the channels they’ve adopted and how inappropriately each one is being used. The most hilarious and cynical one is by Leonardo DaPinchy of Big Fish Mag – worth a lot of ROTFLs :-). There are more serious, anguished posts too, like this one, by Sreeyesh Vijayan and commentaries on the communication angle of the campaign…or the lack of it, like this one, by Ravi Sinha.
Now, let us consider a few questions.
What was Aircel’s objective with this campaign? Was it,
- To increase awareness that there is an alarmingly low number of tigers in a country that celebrates that darn creature as it’s national animal?
- To initiate dialog between various stakeholders about saving the tiger?
- To do something proactive about saving the tiger?
If it was 1, I’m sure they have achieved their objective. If the campaign’s intention was merely to raise awareness, the use of 1,411 as an alarming number worth remembering has been communicated really well. No, not intelligently or subtly, but by sheer brute force. I laud Aircel’s media buying agency for this – they have placed so many ads all over the place that the communication seems to have worked. Note that I’m referring to only paid media here – they have used it extraordinarily well.
Now, the question that I’ve heard from many, many people – why didn’t Aircel not spend that money (or as they put it, ‘wasted’ on media buying) to do something for saving the tiger. What would that be? Answers range from donating that money to WWF to paying better salaries for forest rangers and so on. Fair point, but let us recall what the assumed objective here, once again – ‘To increase awareness’. Period.
If it was 2, then I suppose Aircel has failed. Their use of interactive channels like Facebook, Twitter or blogs is extremely sad – they have not initiated any questions to start with and not even given some initial thoughts for saving the tiger. They seem to have used even interactive channels for broadcasting and communicating that there is a need to save the tiger. Now, why would that be? If it’s because their objective was ‘to increase awareness’, what they have done seems fair – beyond a personal grouse about the gross misuse (opinion!) of interactive media, when seen in context with the 2nd assumed objective. Even the use of PR seems half-hearted given how well PR can be employed to initiate discussions with stakeholders.
If it was 3, sorry, the campaign has failed miserably.
An interesting side effect of their campaign is the fact that people seem to have been so upset about the lack of any forward looking thoughts from Aircel that they have started the dialog on their own, with or without Aircel. It usually starts off with a mandatory (and completely understandable) drubbing about Aircel and the campaign, and goes on to offer fascinating and useful commentary on what can be done, and what other countries are doing. This is more pronounced on Twitter. For instance, the enlightening discussion kick-started by Surekha Pillai (this and this one!) and the responses from many tweeters that has so much to think about. Like this one, by Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan.
So, would this discussion about ways to save the tiger be otherwise possible were it not for Aircel’s high decibel campaign? No, I’m not pro-Aircel here – I strongly think they have not thought through the possibilities at all, but who is to judge what their objective should have been? And the question – why was all this tiger talk not in existence till Aircel initiated some spark using their advertising budget?
As a corporate, wanting to do ‘something’ within the spectrum of CSR, they may have assumed an objective that meant merely raising the level of awareness about the low number of tigers left in the country. Has that message been communicated? Oh yes, more than adequately. Would it help sell more connections…increase their number of subscribers? Err…wouldn’t that be a pertinent question for Idea and their ‘save paper, go mobile’ campaign too? Yes, Idea seems to be giving some interesting ideas/ hints on saving paper, unlike Aircel where merely uses money to highlight an issue, but the question of selling more connections is still a moot point.
But is highlighting an issue wrong? Why should Aircel also be expected to spearhead the campaign to actually go about saving the tiger? Will that increase subscribers? No again – so they chose an easier campaign objective (assuming), and have indeed made people talk about it, with or without a positive outlook towards Aircel.
My personal take is that Aircel does have a rather shallow campaign in hand, but they seemed to have achieved what they set out to do – if it was indeed raising awareness. It does go against the authenticity that is expected out of businesses these days when prospective and existing customers have become extra vocal thanks to social media. The tools they adopted to make this happen were obviously simplistic, but it did achieve what sporadic, occasional articles in mainstream media did not manage to do. Now, it’s up to people to take it to the next level – if they are interested enough to save that animal and go beyond dissecting corporate CSR campaigns or making jokes about how badly Aircel failed.
Yes, I did joke about the campaign too (ahem! – one and two). But I also happen to donate money to WWF for 5 years at a stretch. I cannot spend time to save the tiger, so I do what I can. This blog post included.
Unfortunately, an Aircel spokesperson digs Aircel’s own pit when he tells The Economic Times that the objective of the campaign was to, “creating mass awareness about the diminishing tiger population and engaging the youth to spread the message, especially in the digital space“. Both ‘engaging’ and ‘digital space’ are massive face-palm moments and something Aircel’s PR agency should have advised against using as PR messages. Sad.
Picture courtesy: Maxington via Flickr