“Where the head is held high, and the mind is without fear, into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake”. – from Rabindra Nath Tagore’s work that was awarded a Nobel in 1913.

No words can better describe the world that Absolut believes in for every human and for every human who identifies with the LGBTQIA+ community. But for these words to come true, we have to be absolutely free of biases. Only when our perceptions would be uncoloured we would be like Absolut- Colourless.

“Born Colourless” is not just our line, it’s our north star. It defines us & guides us. As it did here.

Brief: Fight against the hurt that individuals who identify LGBTQIA+ community, face due to the lack of sensitivity prevalent among the CisHets

Objective: How can we make people with right intent also have right sensitivities towards members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

This time, get the LGBTQIA+ community to help out the allies.

While we deeply feel the state of the LGBTQIA+ community, we also equally well understand the struggle of well-intentioned cishets. They don’t know what they don’t know. And quite frankly, the only ones who truly ‘know’ are the individuals from the community, and hence we realized that this time the LGBTQIA+ community has to come to the aid of the larger society. To let them know what they ought to know, through the 10 video episodes of the Absolut Playbook

In the campaign, ten diverse influencers from LGBTQIA+ spectrum recount seemingly innocuous yet provocative aspects of their interactions with the world around them. The beauty of each narrative is that cishets can instantly see/ hear themselves at some point, inadvertently saying the same things, making errors of judgment, and a moment later learning what they should have said, instead.

Cishets set the benchmark for the rest of the society, more sensitive they are, towards the members of the LGBTQIA+ community, more inclusive the whole society is

In-depth research told us that LGBTQIA+ people were most hurt when their immediate peers, friends, and colleagues in their chats spoke only in binaries or made assumptions about gender or the gender of one’s partner without giving a second thought.

It became clearer that the next step in normalization is to expand our culture, our language, or our thinking to include the non-binary and the fluids, and for that, things will have to be unlearned and some new things will have to be learned and practiced.

The place to focus was the well intentioned allies, betting on the inherent goodness in their hearts that they would be willing to unlearn and learn and then, through their actions, teach the rest of the world.

In execution, itself, we talked and walked the talk

Talk: Across relevant media The campaign went live in Jan’23, across all key platforms where our TG is most likely to be present – META, YT, IG, FB, SPOTIFY etc.

Act: Pubs & Bars- We collaborated with Mr. Bartender & The Crew, India’s first bar academy for women (especially for the underprivileged, human trafficking victims, ex-prison inmates and members of the LGBTQIA+ community). We conducted sensitization workshops for bartenders, helping them be appropriate and welcoming while conversing with the guests from the LGBTQIA+ community. The first leg, targeted 100 bars, across the country.

A safe and happy space for self expression: The brand conducted Pride nights in key metropolises with drag performances and artists from the community.

Additionally, walkway was created at a prime location in Mumbai to engage the audience through gesture technology, performers from the community were invited to

The campaign was overwhelmingly received as a genuine and much needed initiative.

It achieved a total of 91M views, (145% of the target) with cumulative reach over 50mn, (117% of the target) and an overall VTR of 23% (132% of the target)

But the campaign did something much bigger, it engaged well-respected influencers and celebrities like Kusha Kapila, Swara Bhaskar among others, with millions of followers, to share it with their own followers. Their voice reached more than 10M additional followers. Important media voices like Vice media, Home Grown, Better India etc. picked it up and amplified it further, to reach approximately 10 million more.

Paid amplification on Meta, YouTube, Spotify garnered more than 50 million reach and more than 200 Million impressions.

The biggest achievement was, however, that it inspired members of the LGBTQIA+ community to share their experiences and instances of CisHets literally changing the conversation.