The strategy was simple: make the audience curious, fox them, force them to think. So we did exactly that with a series of ads.Each ad bore three seemingly unrelated visuals placed within each other, which together told a set of inter-related, globally relevant stories. Each ad also carried a code that people could text to a given number, after which they’d be texted the respective stories in return.

For this campaign, we used a mix of press, outdoor and digital advertising, all with a strong interactive element that invited the audience to participate and satisfy their curiosity. The curiosity principle worked and soon enough, SMS responses to the campaign began flowing in.

11,194 SMS responses were received between 8th Nov and 1st Dec. Subscription registrations on www.economist.com went up by 44% during the campaign period. And the website www.interprettheworld.in registered 66,851 visitors and 1,34,431 page views in a matter of just two weeks. The campaign achieved all this, apart from becoming a popular topic of conversation, and at times heated debate, across the country.