Percept/H rolls out the next phase of Bharat Nirman Campaign

Percept/H ,the flagship advertising agency of Percept Limited, that services Indian and multinational brands in India rolled out the second phase of the Bharat Nirman Campaign for the Congress led Government of India.Percept/H has released a highly visible TV campaign to reach out to the masses, a year ahead of the elections.

Bharat Nirman was launched around six years back. So far, the communication had always projected the schemes as an opportunity to improve and empower the lives of people. The focus this year is to project the change that people have experienced in their lives through these schemes. Percept/H had won the creative duties of Bharat Nirman, the set of flagship programmes initiated by the Central Government for the development of rural India, in a multi-agency pitch held in July 2012.

The current burst of six films is the second leg of a seven-film campaign that was first launched around September, 2012. The first phase was about citizens' rights. This time, it talks about issues such as education, secularism, infrastructure, mobile telephony and government schemes and policies. A thematic film that ties them all together is also part of the mix. The Congress-led Government of India's latest 'Bharat Nirman' campaign has the look of any other brand campaign and intends to make one feel, well, empowered.

The campaign is largely driven by TV and is also being shown in cinema halls. Print serves as a reminder medium. The point of the campaign is to convey the revolutionary schemes that have been launched over the past few years - schemes that a large part of the population is not aware of and also to communicate the 'India growth story' to the masses. The agency was provided with several lists and a lot of data about the government's schemes and benefits that have been in play over the past six-seven years. And a precise communication objective by the I&B Ministry. The team at Percept/H focused on people-driven stories and treated the campaign like they would do a regular brand campaign.

These films have been extremely sensitively produced and filmed by Pradeep Sircar and his Apocolypso Filmworks team. The communication initiative by Bharat Nirman and Percept/H is unique because no other brand in the social, government or corporate (national or multinational) sector has ever attempted a massive and authentic communication and production.

Rajiv Agarwal, Executive Creative Director, Percept/H said, “this is a people’s campaign, people’s point-of-view. The idea was to translate the brief/schemes into people stories in a classic storytelling format so that people engaged and identified with the campaign. And why should sarkari work look sarkari? The whole idea was to treat it like any other brand campaign, so that when the govt logo appears at the end, it should be a surprise. There’s an insight behind every story, and it is meant to make the protagonist, and hence the consumer, feel empowered”

Kausar Anjum, Vice President, Percept/H, said, “This year the brief was slightly different in the sense that it was not only about schemes, but the way these schemes have been utilized by people to make a difference in their lives. The last campaign was about people asking for all these schemes as “their right”. As a natural progression in this phase, we talked about the difference one could make to one’s life through the proper utilization of these schemes, irrespective of whether its urban or rural India. As always the logistical challenges of executing the TVCs were immense: 5 TVCs and one overarching TVC, 4 language masters for each, making it a total of 24 master films and dubs in 7 languages of each film, making it 35 dubs. So in all a total of 59 films!