MUMBAI: Interactive digital campaigns are creating a wide spectrum of opportunities for brands. This not only drives higher consumer engagement but also ensures a higher brand recall. Be it offering discounts on sharing screenshots from gifs or commenting with interesting anecdotes on promotional posts, brands have tried and tested all the tactics to leverage this new trend.  But what Swiggy  did recently can be termed as one of the most innovative and fun interactive campaigns on desi Instagram. So much so, that it caused Instagram to block the platform’s handle several times because of the flood of DMs reaching it.

The #VoiceofHunger campaign, conceptualised by Dentsu Webchutney  for Swiggy, required Instagram users to send in voice notes replicating the shapes of select food items to win a year’s worth of discount vouchers from the food delivery platform. And of course, the only thing better than food for millennials (or anybody else for that matter) is free food. This resulted in a deluge of responses. As per Swiggy, by the time they reached challenge three, they had already seen a 30 per cent increase in their follower growth with close to 70k+ entries.

Commenting on the idea behind the #VoiceofHunger campaign, a spokesperson from Dentsu Webchutney told Indiantelevision.com, “Instagram is a platform that Dentsu Webchutney absolutely hearts. We have been innovating with the platform features for the longest time, right from grids, to emoji sliders and IGTV. When Instagram released the voice note feature on DM, we immediately saw an opportunity for an extremely funny interaction between Swiggy and its consumers. By using gibberish sounds on voice notes as a creative device to inspire all kinds of food items, ‘Voice of Hunger was born’, reimagining the Instagram voice note feature differently than the purpose it was intended for.”

Team Swiggy, which has earlier created several hit digital campaigns including #MyValendines for Valentine's Day and #BurpDay for its 4th anniversary, added, “The freshness and relevance of ‘Voice of Hunger’ made it an instant hit at Swiggy. For service brands, engagement is at the core of every campaign that we do and what better than a campaign that promised never-ending participation from our customers. All we had to was guide the team from an amplification and gratification perspective.”

And the participation, indeed, seemed like a never-ending symphony of meaningless voices swarming Swiggy’s DM box.

“The response has been simply overwhelming. With the level of user interaction required to participate in the challenge, we had anticipated close to 10000 entries for the entire campaign. However, we hit that milestone within the first 12 hours. On day 1 itself, we had to increase the manpower required to answer all the voice notes flooding our inbox,” noted the Swiggy representative.

Dentsu Webchutney added, “At one point we were receiving over 50 DMs/minute which resulted in Instagram blocking our ID, not once, not twice but an incredible four times in 5 days of the campaign. With the volume of entries we are receiving, we’re hoping to set precedents in the voice category for participation and engagement as well.”

On being asked if the teams sat down to create all the shapes introduced during the challenge before announcing them on social media, Dentsu Webchutney spokesperson said it spent two weeks in researching voice notes and food items that could be possibly created.

“Having two engineer-turned-copywriters on the team definitely helped us better understand the physics of sound modulation and tailor the food items in the challenge accordingly. The objective was to increase the difficulty of the challenge with every challenge. A master list of different food items was created to be released as individual challenges, however, we ended up going ahead with the final 5 – Kebab Skewer, Nacho, Shawarma, Fish and a 21-stack pancake.”

Concluding the discussion, Dentsu Wenchutney highlighted that in 2019, brand managers are not just looking at creating hygiene content for their social media platforms but also increasingly executing interactive campaigns as they tend to be far more entertaining and memorable for the brand in the long run. And that is where campaigns like #VoiceofHunger stand out.

This interactive campaign surely struck an amazing chord with the brand patrons, managed to add new followers to its portfolio, and gave a ‘snack’ time to the team who sat down to listen to millions and millions of voice notes that probably did sound like hunger!