Snapdeal is one of India’s largest online marketplaces with 7 million daily visits and 70+ million app downloads, with 63% of their audience belonging to 25+ age group (potential parents). They wanted to leverage their platform to bring to light the magnitude of the problem of child trafficking. They partnered with Save the Children, India's leading independent child rights NGO, to create awareness about this growing problem in India.

Child trafficking is the third largest crime in India. An estimated 7 children go missing every hour. Half of them, are never able to return home. Between 2016 and 2017, nearly 1 lakh children went missing.

We created a first-of-its-kind ‘Ecommerce sale’ that tried to ‘stop a sale’. Just like a typical sale, we announced an amazing "Sale for Kids" through fun banners which later switched to stark banners highlighting the "Sale of Kids". The sale microsite resembled an ecommerce website and highlighted stories of how children, both boys and girls, are trafficked and on many occasions even forced to give up their organs or fight in conflict zones thus leading to exploitation. On the microsite was a call to action asking the audience to sign a petition for early passage of the Anti-trafficking bill.

Using a bait and switch strategy, Snapdeal released a teaser announcing an “Amazing Sale for Kids”. On the day of the Sale (International Day Against Child Trafficking), the communication switched into campaign communication #KidsNOtForSale creating shock and outrage among those who were exposed to the teaser. Hence, we needed an assertive PR approach to make the scale and severity of child trafficking a national talking point and then provide meaningful ways for the public to act in response, such as the Change.org grassroots government petition to make child trafficking a ministerial responsibility. To achieve maximum awareness and scale, our target media was mainstream news outlets across broadcast, print and online channels.

A week before the actual launch of the campaign, we kick started a teaser with attractive pre-sale banners mentioning “Amazing Kids Sale,” portraying a mega sale on Snapdeal for kids. Communication was spread across social media via Snapdeal handles promoting the sale and was integrated into the Snapdeal app environment as well. On the D-day, banners led to a website (created with Snapdeal’s interface) showcasing the dark reality of child trafficking. Accordingly, communication across Snapdeal’s social handles changed to the message of #KidsNotForSale, this was further cross-promoted by Save the Children on their social profiles.

The website encouraged people to donate towards protecting children and sign a petition for the Anti-trafficking bill. Parents who were involved in the conversation were taken aback with the actual message and took to Twitter and video messages to express their outrage and created social pressure on the Government to pass the Anti-trafficking Bill.

With less than 5000$ the results were huge:

Snapdeal received an increase of 59% in terms of unique visitors due to the campaign in the month of July.

6277 petitions were signed, leading to the Government of India passing the Anti-Trafficking bill after 2 years of it being proposed in the parliament.

154 Million overall organic impressions (including media coverage, nationally and internationally)were received due to celebrities, influential members of parliament & millions of Indians came together to voice out to put a stop on the ‘Child Trafficking’.

The hashtag KidsNotForSale trended at number 3 for more than 3 hours along with 8329 mentions and 68.9 million impressions.

The campaign generated impressions and traction amounting to ad-equivalent of almost 40000$.