Most Successful Digital Marketing Campaigns in India

A digital ad campaign’s goal can be about increasing brand awareness through a million views on YouTube. At the same time, a campaign’s success depends on how the targeted audience responds or connects to it emotionally and how long they remember social messages.

If you are looking to get inspired in creating a marketing campaign for your business, take notes from the best award-winning brands. 

For today, let’s explore 5 successful digital marketing campaigns from top brands in India. 

1. Swiggy’s ‘Voice of Hunger’ Campaign
2. British Airways’ ‘Fuelled By Love’ Campaign
3. Spotify India’s ‘There’s a Playlist for That’ Campaign
4. Cred’s ‘Not Everyone Gets It’ Campaign

Swiggy’s ‘Voice of Hunger’ Campaign

This social media marketing campaign incentivised the audience with a year’s worth of food vouchers on Swiggy. All the participant had to do was create a waveform resembling food shapes through voice notes on Instagram, which was a new feature, back in 2019. 

“The first 12 hours of the challenge saw close to 10,000 entries”, according to P G Aditya, Executive Creative Director at Dentsu Webchutney. Influencers including Rohan Joshi and Shristi Bansal along with comedians, musicians, and rappers, among others participated. 

This social media campaign bagged 3 Bronze Lions at Cannes Lions 2019. Created by Dentsu Webchutney, it drove more than 16 million social media impressions too. Swiggy also enjoyed a 40% rise in Instagram followers. You can read more about this campaign in Swiggy’s digital marketing strategy. 

Related: How to increase Instagram followers

British Airways’ ‘Fuelled By Love’ Campaign

This memorable video ad campaign from 2016 showed how brands can nurture good relationships with customers. The brand could tap into the emotional psyche of the Indian customer base and what they expect from commercials. 

Inspired by a true story, the campaign features a UK-based cabin crew member of British Airways who takes her first-ever maiden flight from the UK to Hyderabad. The campaign film was directed by Neeraj Ghaywan and focused on fictional storytelling through in-flight and recreated home scenes in Mumbai depicting Hyderabad. 

This campaign film received the National Film Award. Also, after releasing it, the brand offered a special 3-day offer for its customers travelling from India to the UK. 

On a related note, check out our page on What is Brand Management? 

Spotify India’s ‘There’s a Playlist for That’ Campaign

Created by Leo Burnett India in 2019, this ‘hyper contextual digital ad campaign’ utilised the traditional advertising technique of placing billboards across cities in India. But the billboard ads also garnered a lot of social media attention.

The campaign was ideated to reach all the different moods of the entire population and the communication was focused on relatable situations. The ad company created 3 billion playlists that could suit any mood for every demographic. 

It leveraged location-based social listening and conducted sentiment analysis (powered by Artificial Intelligence) to create these playlists. 

While the ads were placed offline, there were about 72000 social media shares, and “There’s a playlist for that” soon became a part of internet slang. 

Related: Traditional Marketing vs. Digital Marketing. 

Cred’s ‘Not Everyone Gets It’ Campaign

This campaign’s strategy was to use the most popular Bollywood celebrities from the 90s to create nostalgia, but focused on shocking viewers with a quirky ending narrative. 

This strategy was based on customer segmentation to target numerous Indian audiences who grew up in the 90s. They are perfectly aware of how celebrity ads work through dance and drama. 

The campaign throws a jab at the common approach of brands hiring celebrities to promote a product or service. So the actors are asked to audition, and they deliver all theatrics that is expected from them. 

While filming these actors, the shot moves to the executive team of CRED who end up rejecting the actors. The executives replace the same idea with a much simpler approach – a simple voice-over mentioning, Download CRED. 

This ad campaign won the prestigious Blue Elephant recognition in the 2022 Kyoorius Design Awards. 

Parting Thoughts

These were some of the most interesting and successful digital marketing campaigns in India. Of course, there are many more also, such as McDonald’s India EatQual campaign, and #RideYourIndependence from Bajaj Avenger. 

While each of them is unique, aspects such as customer segmentation, social listening, adapting to trends in technology, impactful yet relevant hashtags, and offering solutions to or addressing social challenges, are some of their key takeaways. 

If you wish to learn and apply more about such concepts, consider taking up digital marketing courses.