Godrej Aer gives a social message with #DontSmokeBecause

The campaign aims to engage with the youth.

What started out as a Twitter hashtag is now a song based on a social message. #DontSmokeBecause is a Twitter crowd-sourced music video done for brand Godrej Aer. The lyrics of the song are compiled with 2,704 tweets posted by people across India and filmed with the support of 330 people.

Godrej Aer recently launched its variant called the Musk After Smoke, which eliminates the stale smell of smoke that lingers in a room after smoking. The campaign aimed at engaging with the youth through a social message.

The campaign is rather ironical as the product is an after-smoke air freshener and the video urges people to give up smoking. However, the brand found it a moral responsibility to get the important message across to the youth.

Conceptualised by Creativeland Asia, #DontSmokeBecause was launched as a hashtag on the Twitter profile of @Godrejaer and asked people to write in their reasons to avoid or quit smoking. Launched in July on Twitter, the comments started pouring in. Soon after this, the video was filmed with the support of people including young college students, senior citizens, working professionals and singers, amongst others.

The video was launched on YouTube on August 25. Till now, the video has received more than 10,000 views and is being promoted on Twitter and Facebook. According to the agency, the project took two months, from conceptualisation to execution.

The brief received from the brand team at Godrej Aer was to engage with the youth on digital and pass on the social message. The idea was to get people to write the lyrics themselves. This thought was further executed on Twitter by the social media team of Creativeland Asia. Subsequently, the in-house production team and 330 people came together to film the video.

Anu Joseph, executive creative director, Creativeland Asia, says, "In the early days of Twitter, we had created a successful Twitter-based campaign to track inventory for Hippo. Since then, we have continued to push ourselves to use social media properties for client partners to create value-based differentiation. #DontSmokeBecause is a step-towards using the 140-character platform inventively."

Parle Agro's Hippo, which was launched in 2010, became a runaway success, but its nascent sales and distribution network couldn't keep pace with tracking stock, identifying and re-stocking empty shelves across 400,000 stores nationwide.

Hippo used Twitter as an alternative inventory-tracking tool. It urged followers to tweet whenever they found empty shelves in their neighbourhoods. This was conceptualised by Creativeland Asia.

In 2012, Godrej launched its campaign for Aer, a range of home and car fragrances with Bombay Times, where the front page in The Times of India led the reader through a slug stating 'Fresh news and fresh aer in Bombay Times today. Check it out'. The front page of the supplement carried the ad with the fragrance of the product. The campaign was designed by Godrej, along with its creative and media buying partners, Creativeland Asia and Madison, respectively.