India, WhatsApp’s largest market with 390.1 million monthly active users, uses WhatsApp for communication with friends and family, business, professional and institutional purposes.

While WhatsApp Groups are integral to this, when they have fulfilled their purpose or generate too much spam, the only solution is to leave.

In August 2022, WhatsApp introduced the “Leave Groups Silently” feature, which would notify only the group admin if a member left and not the whole group.

Brief: Find an impactful and interesting way to introduce the much desired new “Leave Groups Silently” feature.

Objective: Introduce the “Leave Groups Silently” feature in a simple yet eye-catching way.

We created a poster featuring a Jenga tower, a metaphor for a discreet exit. We kept these posters at public exit points like doorways and elevators, making the placements themselves another layer of metaphor. These metaphors helped evoke associations of exit, making the feature memorable.

WhatsApp is the clear leader among messaging apps in India, with users concentrated amongst the youth but across age groups. Group chats for friends, family, co-workers and even customers of a business are common.

Sometimes, it becomes necessary to leave a group. But people, especially non-confrontational millennials, are afraid of offending people and do not want to make a spectacle of it.

To promote the new, highly desired “Leave Groups Silently” feature in a simple yet effective way, we created a minimal poster with a Jenga tower. Jenga is a popular game involving a tower of blocks, where one must pull a block out without toppling the entire tower.

Jenga is an analogy for a discreet exit which does not disturb or destroy the larger structure. When people see a Jenga tower, the anxiety of pulling the block out and the relief of successfully managing it come to mind.

The target audience for this campaign was WhatsApp users, who span across all age groups but are concentrated amongst the youth.

Today’s youth are known for being more non-confrontational than the generations before them. In the era of ghosting and being politically correct so as not to offend others, these users do not want to make waves and invite questions or conflict by leaving a group very obviously.

Jenga is a classic game from the 1980s which remains popular even today. The objective is to carefully remove a block from a block tower. The symbol of a Jenga tower thus perfectly captures the unique situation of a removal which does not disturb the larger structure.

Just like users should not have to explain to anyone their reasons for leaving a group, the placement of the Jenga tower posters at public exit points wordlessly got the point across without overexplaining.

Once the posters were created, we put them up at public places, colleges and business complexes, strategically focusing on points of exit: under the exit signs of doorways, near elevators and on the walls of parking lots. Anyone trying to exit from these places would come across the posters and easily make the connection between the content of the poster and the intentionality of its placement.

Users were overjoyed by the “Leave Groups Silently” feature as it was a long-time demand. By addressing such specific and relevant user issues, WhatsApp’s usefulness and simplicity rating among users has increased.

“Leave Groups Silently” is one of WhatsApp’s multiple interlocking layers of protection to ensure privacy. The impact of this outdoor as part of the larger privacy campaign was:

- Increased Strong Ad Recall and Believability, indicating an effective media/creative strategy.

- Increased Absolute Privacy metric, as well as Relative Privacy metric

- We won over people that were sceptical about the privacy of WhatsApp and messaging apps in general.

The overall brand was also positively impacted:

- Over 50% Indian users say WhatsApp is the best app in protecting users’ privacy.

- WhatsApp receives the highest loyalty rating across apps in India.

Roughly 7 in 10 Indians agree that WhatsApp cares about its users.