Diwali, the ultimate festival of prosperity upon us, we knew we had an opportunity to tell an extraordinary story that spoke to the moment. After all, 2020 and prosperity simply don’t sit well together. So, the plan was to bring alive the old maxim that ‘prosperity too grows only when we share it with others.’ What better time to inspire people to do so than the current difficult one we all find ourselves in the midst of.

Brief was to design a manifestation of the Facebook More Together campaign for the India’s biggest festival of prosperity – Diwali.

Facebook has always believed in the power of people and connections at scale. That power, we continue to believe, can be leveraged for a variety of reasons. We will keep telling stories of the multi-faceted ways in which people use Facebook for both the greater good and their own progress.

The idea behind the campaign was that many people have faced difficulties in this period in different ways. However, that has not taken away people’s spirit to do good for others, which is why people relate to the film. Almost everybody has endured varying degrees of struggle this year. And yet, a lot of us have also managed to do good for others.

The opening sets up both the gravity & the largeness of what Pooja is trying to accomplish. She isn’t a mega-rich business owner. But she believes she can do some good, even if it means stretching herself and her resources that get much thinner and she goes all in. It’s this selflessness even in the face of adversity and even at the cost of losing a lot is what sets up the story for the viewer.

There’s an age old Indian saying – Prosperity grows when you share it with others. This was especially prescient in a year like 2020 and served as our strategic plank. To tell a story of what a lot of people in India were doing, which is, they were coming together and selflessly going the extra mile to be there for others. Often by harnessing, the power of Facebook to amplify the good within us for the greater good. This is the story of 28-year-old Pooja who uses Facebook to find people who had lost their other jobs, who she keeps hiring, even though she doesn’t need them, through the hardest months of 2020, at great personal cost and how those people come together and come through for her, using Facebook to tell the world about the selflessness of Pooja and save her shop.

One of the challenges faced in making the film was the time constraints as the festival of Diwali cannot be pushed, and setting up the feeling of lockdown near the festive season. The story of the film spanned about 6 months and the production team had to recreate the atmosphere of the early days of lockdown. March right up to the buzz of pre-Diwali days, all this keeping the strictest testing and safety protocols in place. Once we decided to base the story in Amritsar, all other elements started getting processed through that very lens. We wanted to be as authentic as possible to the local sensibilities. We were very keen to make sure the actors were casted as locally as possible.

As a result, it broke the internet in India. Drove 230K reshares (19x compared to typical video reshare per view), 62M views of which 6M organic views on facebook. With 68.9M views of which 900k organic, 25K reactions, 84% of likes on Youtube. Earned 22M reach, celebrated by 36 media exposures across leading mainline & marketing media, global advertising publications, and influencers in India and overseas. The video gained over 160M reach in total, generated 544 million impressions, 122 million completed views, for around 900 million minutes of viewing across multiple video platforms. The ad was picked up by wide range of news channels. Positive social sentiment shot up during the campaign period. The film went viral on Twitter a day after the release, on top ten India trending topics for over 12 hours followed by whole bunch of emotional reaction videos from Pakistani YouTubers, which also went viral.