Content centered on elections so had to be unbiased and not favoring any political party.

Never before had political manifesto been discussed pre-elections. Never before had Indian women voiced their issues and found a direct window with politicians. We changed this norm and made politicians take note for the first time in history.

Election content always happens on news channels. But we had to drive mass behavioral change. So we changed programming norms to drive a political movement through general entertainment stars.

Top 3 entertainment networks are involved in an intense week on week number game. It was impossible to get the leading faces of all three networks– Star Network, Zee, Viacom18 together on one platform and that too for a brand. But we made this happen.

Changing fiction storylines always impacted ratings. We worked around this challenge, changed plots to incorporate our cause and still ensured unchanged ratings.

TV stars were seen as entertainers. Fiction storylines were regressive. For the first time, these “entertainers” were seen championing a serious political cause and got unprecedented response from women.

We had to adhere to the Indian Information and Broadcasting Ministry and Censor Board norms, which was getting stricter by the day.

The execution aimed at crowd-sourcing issues for a manifesto to be presented to Indian politicians. To make the platform accessible to every Indian woman, we used the native-most function of any mobile-Voice.

The TV protagonists encouraged women to act and table their issues by simply giving a call-and-disconnect to a number. And they got called back to register issues viz.Safety, health+sanitation, education etc, through an Interactive Voice Recorded (IVR) Forum. Women could register by simply pressing a pre-set number for each issue.

Further, we fed news channels with topics collected from women for national debates, adding back to the campaign.

At an overall level, the campaign became a movement of a national scale. And with an objective of reaching the womens’ pleas to the politicians, the results were staggering where-

At a campaign level-

• 1.2 million women contributed issues, which got used in creating the first crowd sourced womens’ manifesto.

• Amongst the women exposed to PO49, Tata Tea’s brand preference grew 50%

• Tata Tea sales growth was 2X category rate

At a society level-

• Pre-campaign, political party manifestos had little mention of women’s issues. Which became prominent post PO49

• 24% cabinet ministers in new government are women - Highest ever

• 50-70% increase in scores on women’s power to decide outcome, informed vote and not to vote with family

• The campaign dared to use mobile not just as a medium, but a tool to shape national policies and agendas.