Dentsu Webchutney, Trigger Happy Perform Surgical Strike on Movie Promotions

Film promotions have a ton of scope for creativity and imagination, but, in Bollywood – where the stakes are high, various kinds of ‘safe’ marketing gimmicks, often leave much to be desired. This is precisely why disruptive and clutter-breaking new ways devised by Dentsu Webchutney and supported by Trigger Happy, to promote Uri: The Surgical Strike, has been the talk of the town, these past few weeks.

RSVP’s latest film starring Vicky Kaushal and Yami Gautam, addresses the highly explosive subject matter of the surgical strikes conducted by the Indian Military on Pakistan. With the film’s key messaging being, “Iss baar ghar mein ghusenge bhi, aur maarenge bhi,” the promotion carried out for this film needed to have a similar stance.

“The josh had to be high! With the traditional movie promotions in place, we couldn’t let ‘URI: The Surgical Strike’ play out in a similar old-fashioned way. It was imperative that we do justice to the solid content we were promoting. The content needed a rock-hard creative base; something which will stay with people for a long time. Disruption is and shall always be the key!” said Pravin Sutar, Executive Creative Head, Dentsu Webchutney.

The world got its first taste of this creative marketing campaign with the launch of the #UriDeceptiveStrikes video. In this seemingly uneventful video, set at a press conference held by Yami Gautam, the viewer is left stunned when they realise that Vicky Kaushal and a bunch of other soldiers were standing in the background the entire time, and they went unnoticed, until the very end. In line with the theme of a surgical strike.

The #UriDeceptiveStrikes video garnered about 2,00,000 views in just 5 hours after its release on YouTube and trended on Twitter organically. Till date, it is estimated to have reached around 1.2 million views.

” Taking an untraversed route, we struck gold. The right creative collaborations always reap new, unchartered and exciting ideas, and along with the RSVP marketing team, we at Trigger Happy and Dentsu Webchutney could walk the path less taken for Uri. The positive box office results are for all to see and it is highly motivating to have clients back us with their support, so we can keep innovating and thinking out of the box.” says Amit Chandrra, Chairman & Managing Director of Trigger Happy, awed by the positive response of the film’s promotions.

Taking their promotional stint to the next level, the team at Dentsu Webchutney engineered an engaging interrogation with the help of Google Assistant. A terrorist could be interrogated by the user to fish out vital information regarding a terrorist attack planned on India, via Google Assistant. This voice powered innovation garnered a lot of praise for its unique and bold stunt that got thousands involved in the activity. 

https://assistant.google.com/services/invoke/uid/0000003b47e2b1bb

“We really wanted to open up the movie promotion space and take it to the next level, hence collaborating with Trigger Happy yet again, and Dentsu Webchutney was beneficial in many ways. We all agreed that we wanted the users to be engrossed and be interactive through this campaign. While keeping the tonality cool and engaging. Every marketing unit and idea for URI has been noticed and appreciated, assuring us that creative gambles with the aid of like-minded partners will pay off positively, and are always worth taking,” said Pashan Jal, RSVP.

With Dentsu Webchutney and Trigger Happy on-board, by the time the movie arrived in theatres on Jan 11, audiences had their adrenaline pumped and were thronging at theatres to watch the much-anticipated film. With a Weekend Box office collection of ₹ 35.73 CR, the verdict is out, the film is highly appreciated, and the marketing campaign has delivered what it promised and more.

The third promotional activity was a brilliant and unpredictable attack on piracy that literally took on the phrasing of “Iss baar ghar mein ghuske maarenge” to a whole other level. A video was uploaded on Torrent sites with the same file size as that of a full-length movie. Upon downloading the torrent file, the users found a video of the cast talking to the person who downloaded it via the screen and urging them that the movie be seen at the theatres, and to stop piracy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIfjEHl-Its&feature=youtu.be

“What we hate is what we need to kill,” said Aalap Desai, Senior Creative Head of Dentsu Webchutney, after launching a successful attack on Torrents. He continued to say that, “We’re tired of seeing really predictable and boring film promotions. The consumer has evolved, and so must we as content creators and advertisers. To loosely quote The Dark Knight, the kind of promotion carried out for Uri: The Surgical strike is the hero our film industry deserves, but also needs (Not to forget how fun it was to troll thousands of torrent downloaders)”.

To say that The Surgical Strike on Torrents was well received would be an understatement. Over 20,000 illegal torrent downloaders caught the bait and presumably found themselves red faced when they realised what they had actually downloaded. When social media and news outlets got a whiff of what had happened, the entire activity went viral. Dozens of news articles, hundreds of tweets from important personalities lauding the anti-piracy efforts taken by the film, and thousands of memes started popping-up all over.  

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