Truecaller as a brand stands for verified communication. And hence it enables one to block any unwanted call for that matter. However, in India, stalking and phone harassment are not considered a problem in India. In fact, the one who reports it gets ridiculed as society feels it's ok. Truecaller as a brand stood against this social taboo, urging women to report and say #ItsNotOk every time there's a case of stalking.

The task was to push the envelope and inspire women to take any action to Block and Report against any form of online harassment and speak up for society at large.

One of our key objectives was to generate massive reach and engagement across all social and media channels, and even partners, to get people to discuss the topic openly and take steps to break the stigma associated with this problem.

As women stay silent because of the stigma, cases of stalking spiral up every day. Creating a toxic social menace. According to recent data, there’s a case of stalking in India every 55 minutes.

Our idea was to motivate women and make them speak up. Urging them to block the harasser and report the stalker. We decided to make a digital film titled Shabd on a real-life narrative, where a speech-impaired girl gets stalked and harassed. But she still reports the harassment. Conveying that one doesn’t need words but courage and willpower to speak up against such status quo of the society.

After sifting through different data touchpoints across multiple forums, we got something that stuck with us. On average, 1 woman is harassed every 55 minutes in India. We wanted to create a campaign around this data point appealing predominantly to urban women between 20 and 45 years of age as a first step from the brand, to create a forum to inspire women to block and report harassers. And of course, to speak more openly about their respective stories.

The approach was to create a brand video emphasizing the problem of online abuse and harassment and collaborating with different partners in our community, like Humans of Bombay and Under 25. Their followers were the right target audience to generate wider awareness and conversation around the campaign, and the core thought we were trying to put forward.

The campaign was centered around our main film called Shabd, a 5-minute-long video that highlights the horrors that a mute woman goes through and how she is inspired and pushed, to raise her voice. Abhinaya Anand, the speech impaired actor played the protagonist.

The campaign ran for a week between March 3 and March 11 and was placed and promoted across all social media platforms as well as partner platforms. We worked with media partners like Glance and Humans of Bombay to amplify the scope of the campaign and generate mass awareness. We noticed that almost 54% of the audience had been victims of phone harassment and almost 60% of the people had no idea that there are helpline numbers that are available or even open sources for them to reach out to in case of emergencies.

Overall, the campaign generated over 179 million impressions across all channels and platforms. We had almost 2 million hits on our microsite. With almost 80,000 people taking an active part in the survey we had hosted on the microsite. The brand film received overwhelmingly positive reviews and generated tremendous engagement with over 140,000 hours of watch time for the video across platforms with almost 10 million video views.

Moreover, the campaign generated enormous conversations on all platforms and partner platforms as well. People opened up about their past experiences. Overall, the campaign generated 900X engagement in the form of comments and shares and was trending at #3 on Twitter on Women’s Day.

The campaign was widely appreciated on news media and got featured on Dainik Bhaskar, Brand Equity, Campaign India, Mad Over Marketing, Afaqs, Ads of the World, and more.