"Where there's care, there's family"

The traditional view on family is that you care for someone BECAUSE they are family. Vicks' point of view was different: it's because you care for someone that they become family.

Our view is that today, the family unit is not defined only by your last name, your blood ties, or by the fact you live under the same roof, but by who cares for you and who you care for.

To make the film powerful enough to be sharable, we used the traditional codes of cinematic storytelling, to tell a classic Mother - Daughter story of care through hardships, one that resonates particularly well with the Indian audience.

Our point for that was to present Gauri, our Hijra (transgender) mother, like the human being she is, like any other mother, one that everyone can easily identify with - and to avoid representing Hijras the way they always are in other ads or in mainstream media, as mere stereotypes.

Only then could people really understand what she and her daughter have been through and how powerful their relationship is. Only then we had a chance to change their minds and make the story worth sharing.

In just one week, our singular post on Vicks India page garnered 739% organic reach of our fanbase which is 284x the benchmark of 2.6%. We also witnessed the highest organic fan growth ever at 997%, gaining over 8,000 fans. With zero media dollar spend, the video garnered over 60.6 million impressions from Facebook and Twitter alone.

In just two weeks, the video garnered over 35.5 million views & 79.8 million impressions, and sparked over 1.5 million interactions, reaching almost 500,000 shares. The story was picked up by several major national dailies, from Hindustan Times, India today to Zee News, later being reported by International outlets like NBC news, NPR & CNN, generating above USD 2.96 million of earned media. The famous and influential also discussed it online: Film directors, sports stars, bloggers, from Karan Johar to Vidya Balan & George Takei, it was tweeted around the globe and even the United Nations joined in. The film was projected at the NYT organised event & Women in the World summit; without anyone from brand or agency being aware of it. But beyond everything else, we were overwhelmed by the amazingly supportive reaction from everyone for such a sensitive topic.