In 2014 Horlicks Malaysia, a GlaxoSmithKline family nutrition brand that helps mothers close their kids' nutrition gaps, took the entire VMS category by surprise with a totally new approach to engaging with its core audience of school children's mothers. Horlicks adopted a cause: the difficult journeys millions of kids face in order to get to school. Fitting to the brand's purpose of "nourishing potential of children", Horlicks used a pilot project in Malaysia to initiate a meaningful conversation with mothers far beyond product messaging. In an isolated village in Malaysia Horlicks made change happen. Along the way Horlicks produced rich content that populated the new website as well as social media platforms. In addition, interactive banners were used to allow the audience to experience difficult journeys and draw them into the story. This paid off: engagement with the new Horlicks Malaysia digital ecosystem grew beyond expectations.

The "Desert Journey Experience" is one of three banners in the digital campaign. The simple concept: Start with an impactful image and fact (57 million children around the world lack access to education - UN) to draw users in. Use this initial interest and engage them to take immediate action: take this child to school. Then let them experience the difficulties directly - by making the journey to the school difficult and long in an expandable banner format. In this case: the child's daily walk through arid mountains, dangerous wadis and across a desert - which surprisingly grows even longer on interaction. Along the way the user learns more and when finally delivering the child to school surely feels: this is all wrong. The perfect trigger to deliver the message about Horlicks changing it - combined with the direct link to the Kampung Cheweh Project on the Horlicks website.

As a result of the entire integrated digital campaign the Horlicks Malaysia website saw a jump in visits of astonishing +2147% after re-launch. Interestingly over 38% of all visits to the brand and product site were attracted by the story and content about Kampung Cheweh. The engagement rates with this content illustrate its power: organic reach of a single post 9.2% versus the average of 2-3%. This project and its integrated campaign in only 5 months (Oct14 to Feb15) reached over 35.6 million people through Facebook, YouTube, the new website and of course the interactive banners. A remarkable result considering the total population of Malaysia of 29.7 million. But most importantly: in conjunction with product campaigning this entirely new Horlicks story linked the brand to education, made the brand tangible and yielded solid business results - volumes sales in Malaysia grew year on year by impressive 22%.