Achint’s blog

I was planning a post about the colossal waste that is the "Save our Tigers" campaign, when I came across this.

Now I'm not surprised that someone else has taken it up already - there are tons of smart people out there. What I was surprised about however is how comprehensive his critique is. He's hit the nail right on it's head and I concur 100%.

So without taking up any more real estate, over to Tantanoo:

‘Save’ is perhaps the noblest of all four letter words that I’ve come across. It doesn’t have the hidden desperation that other four letter words have. ‘Save me’ sounds much better than ‘Love me’, much more earnest in its desperation.

When I first saw the ‘Save our tigers’ ad on teewhee, I rubbished it, you know, like we rubbish everything from Save Haiti to Save Hockey. That way. But having 400 friends on Facebook does have its disadvantages especially when sending invites to stupid clubs is the favourite pastime of some of them. But when some of the ‘sane’ friends also sent me invites to join ‘Stripey the club’, I was sure something was amiss.

It happens so that ‘Stripey’ is an innocent tiger cub whose mom ventures out in the forest and doesn’t return. You know, like women venture out in Goa(or Delhi or Bombay or <insert Indian city>) and don’t return. But let’s not digress. So Stripey’s mom has been killed by some poachers or so the commercial says and it then punches a figure of ‘only 1411 tigers left’ in your face. Very poetic. Figures always move people. You know, when anchors were screaming the number of Swine flu victims on news channels, people were scared shitless. Similarly this 1411 figure brings a sudden horror. Add to it a cute tiger cub and you have a win social initiative. Good job Aircel. Not.

Save the Tiger – www.saveourtigers.com , in my honest and unwanted opinion, is a very poorly executed social initiative. I am not sure if this has brought any mileage to Aircel but apart from creating some buzz, the initiative hardly does anything worthwhile. It lacks the soul and resolve that a social initiative requires. It applies armchair activism to an issue where its effect is debatable, and the extent of change that can be brought is extremely limited. Let’s do a quick post-mortem of the initiative.

1. The Videos:

The only saving grace of the Save our Tigers initiative is the promotional video/ad. A lot of people apparently find the tiger cub cute, most of them are distressed to see its fate. This ad also had a significant effect of kids. My mom tells me that every kid in her school now knows that there are only 1411 tigers left in India. This video is followed by some pleas by Dhoni, Baichung and Some other dude – The less said about this, the better. Shahrukh does a better job in convincing me to use face wash, than them. But that is just me.

 

2. Roar Online:

 

On the home page you get an option to Join the Roar. It is basically a wall thingy where you can pledge your support, reserve a pixel by adding your name to it, and a tiger-jigsaw-puzzle-thingy finishes as more and more people join up. You have to enter your name, your email id and if you wish, your mobile number. Which is a very good way to form a mailer list and build numbers. But once you join the roar, the website fails to tell how to roar, or even purr.

 

3. What can I do?

When you click on this link, it gives you five sweet options:

• Roar Online
• Be Informed
• Speak Up
• Donate
• Lead the Change

We’ll comeback to the Roar online thing later. Let us click on Be Informed.

 

It gives you links to three pdfs. The awesome part? They are scanned copies of news clippings. One TOI and two HT stories, scanned. Are you informed enough? A Google search on Save Tiger will give me more information than those clippings. The page doesn’t even mention other sources of information. No links, nothing. Not even links to WWF’s articles. Not one mention of Project Tiger. This is where my faith in Save our Tigers took a big nosedive.

 

Next, Let us Speak Up.

 

Write a letter or an email to editors of popular newspapers and magazines, asking them to support the cause and highlight the urgency to save our tigers. The more people we can reach and inform, the stronger our roar will be.

That’s it. Two lines. How short of ideas/content were you when you prepared this webpage? Two lines? They don’t even make sense. I mean, isn’t your ad already showing up on all popular newspapers, magazines and television? This is your idea of speaking up? Of making noise?

By this time, I had lost all hope in the campaign but for the sake of analysis, let us tread further.

The Donate page is another excuse of a page. A few lines and a link to WWF India’s donation page. No pleas, no requests. Remember you are asking those people who most probably didn’t donate a penny for the Haiti earthquake(barring a few ofcourse). You are asking people who generally don’t spend anything to help humans, to shell out money for animals. At least make a good case for the cause. Tell them where the money goes, how is it utilized, why is it needed. But no, we made this website in a hurry, we had to save Stripey you see.

Then there is a Lead the Change page, which tells us to:

• Spread the word
• SMS: Dear Aircel, How about donating some money to WWF, everytime an sms is sent on your network?
• Write to editors – as if the majority population reads editorials and this considering the fact that they already have print ads.
• Donate: Okay, we’ll ignore the recursion. But they ask us to donate clothes for forest guards. I am not sure if that makes sense but I’ll give it the benefit of doubt.
• Volunteer for our Tigers: Finally! A brainwave. But where do we begin? Any pointers? A list of NGOs perhaps? Profiles, list of training courses, opportunities? Nothing. They have a list of wildlife sanctuaries plotted on India’s map for visual pleasure but they couldn’t make a list of NGOs where people can volunteer.
• Preserve our Natural Resource: Ha!
• Be a responsible Tourist: Double Ha!

I can ramble on, but let us have a quick look at the Roar Online page:

• Youtube: Where you have all the ads in one place
• Twitter: 3000+ followers but only 17 tweets. Hell of a difference that made. Listed at 51 places, following only WWF but a whole lot of opportunity blissfully lost.

I’ve been on Twitter long enough to understand its potential. I’ve seen several campaigns being pulled off with amazing ease on Twitter without a corporate backing. Be it people chipping in funds for the welfare of the girl child on Diwali or people coaxing others to donate for Haiti, Twitter has been a very strong medium for translating arm-chair activism to something worthwhile. Sadly, Aircel with all its mighty powers fails to understand and put Twitter to good use, even moderately effective use. 

• Facebook: 99000 fans and counting. 253 Links, half of which are updates linking back to saveourtigers.com – which as you all can see is a storehouse of information. Stripey ofcourse says a few cute things once in a while, like “I can hear 50,000 roars for me and all the tigers of India! I feel this is only the start of good things to come.”

Good and bad. Good because the photos section has loads of photographs some of which are brutal and can bring a change of heart. Good because there are loads of discussions.

Bad because no body is moderating. If you read a few discussions you’ll know. Even the participants are confused because there is no plan of action. They lament the fact that the website is outright lame. There isn’t much information. Still some of them are meeting on Valentine’s day I hear. Some are trying hard to pull something together and I wish them luck. But the candles will burn out, like they eventually do and this will just be another protest. Our memories are short. Aarushi anyone? 

• Stripey’s Blog: Two Posts. One with 2100+ comments, another with 21 odd comments as of now.

Immense potential. Down the drain. Two posts. Just two. I went through 19 pages of comments. Scanned some 1000 odd comments looking for blog posts, bits and pieces. The levels of trolling are limited, not like say the godlike Rediff or even Youtube. But believe me, it wasn’t easy.

I shouldn’t comment on grammar and spellings, being a usual offender myself. But it often got out of hands. Some myths that featured regularly in the comments are:

• Almost everybody thinks that stating the fact that Tiger is our National Animal is unique. Almost every Indian (apart from a few who take part in Splitsvilla and Rahul ka Swayamvar) knows that Tiger is the National Animal.
• Everybody wants to ‘join hands’.
• Everybody thinks ‘Its High Time’
• Everybody wants each other(or India) to ‘wake up’
• Some go off in the preamble mode – We the citizens of india….
• Some think that TYPING IN CAPS LOCK WILL PROVE THEIR URGENCY AND DETERMINATION
• Others pass the responsibility – Plz save the tigers..
• The opinion is divided – Some blame Indians, others blame humans.
• Most want to save tigers because they want their children to see them – I am assuming most of these are the same people who haven’t taken their kids to the zoo and think the Discovery channel and Playstation are better teachers.
• The religious kinds offer a Jai Mata Di in the comment.
• Then there are the Orkut kinds who leave a ‘Plz reply me’ in the comment.

 

But there were some real gems in the comments and the blog posts that I read:

• A guy had an acronym ready –

T-TRULY
I-INDIAN,
G-GENERATED,
E-ENTHUSIASTIC,
R-RACE……

• Another fellow announced an NGO giving a link to his blog.
  

  SAVE SAVE SAVE THE TIGER

  DON’T LET THE VOICE DOWN
  I AM OPENING N NGO FOR TIGER PROTECTION
  join now when u join u help save the tiger
  I need 2000 members there will be 15 main members.be the lucky ist 15 members or be 2000 strong volunteers.

• Then this:

we must do at least a bit 2 save this priceless organisms
togetherly our single bit would 1 day form a huge contribution
PLZ REQUEST UR SOUL NOT 2 MIND ABOUT DOING THIS JOB

• And the most outrageous thing that I read in a forum:

Aircel has recently launched a campaign to save tigers in India. I hereby, writing a post to do my bit. Well, there are only 1411 tigers left in India. This number is too less to keep an ecological balance. and if not protected, this number will go down soon. How much do you thing should be proportion of Tigers as to humans? Though there is no perfect answer to this, I think it is around 1:10. How did I figure it out? Well, a sheer judgement. Now some people might not agree to this proportion. For them, lets apply a factor of safety of 10. So this proportion is now, 1:100. This means there should be 1 tiger per 100 human beings in india. Now India’s population is 1.1 billion (110 Crores). So there should be 1.1 Crore tigers in India. and how many have we got? One Thousand Four Hundred and Eleven. Now look at that huge difference. So we are short of 1,09,98,589 tigers. One Crore, Nine Lakhs, Ninety Eight Thousand, Five Hundred Eighty Nine. God, Where do we get those many tigers from?
Now, look carefully at the picture of cubs of tigers, above. Look at the grace on their face. This genetic gift of nature will be completely and permanently lost if tigers are not preserved. We will never be able to see that beauty again.
Now I want you to tell the best ways and means to save tigers. Let me start here by telling one. Let them live on themselves with zero human intervention in their territory.

Tigers = Maggots? Though I do agree with his bit that we must leave them alone.

I have some 12 pages of comments that I can quote here. People who think the tiger is on the ‘virge’ of extinction, it is a symbol of our ‘bravory’ and we must stop the ‘cheep people’ (read: poachers) by giving AK-47s to our guards. There was someone who wanted us to ‘defeat the battle’ for ‘survive tigers from extinct’.

Bad grammar or typos isn’t my point. The point is that this comment section isn’t moderated. No body is separating the wheat from the chaff. There is no grading of comments. I found of a lot of good comments, NGO descriptions, links, even some blog posts by bloggers that I know. But no body is aggregating them, reposting them as blog posts. All the information is blissfully wasted.

On top of it the second blog post says:

“I’ve read all your comments and it’s really great to see everyone not just stopping at showing support, but also giving ideas and suggestions to help us. With more people joining us every day, I hope you’ll spread our message far and wide.
And I’m really excited to see the discussions on my Facebook page too (Stripey the Cub).

With people planning events, discussing ideas and actions to help us and getting actively involved, it gives me hope that this is just the beginning of great things to come.
I can’t wait to hear more suggestions and see the people of India lead the change!

Looking ahead with pride,

Stripey”

If they keep ignoring the info that is being oh-so-totally ignored in the comment section, I’m sorry, I won’t look ahead with pride. The pride thing almost reminds me of Neo’s post on being a proud Indian. Stripey dear, you are wasting all the buzz that you’ve gathered.

I want to suggest a lot of things here. Put a list of NGOs there. Tell people to work, volunteer for them. Urge them to donate. Tell them why. Tell them about Land encroachment deals that the government is approving thereby clearing the Tiger’s habitat one by one. Ask people to file an RTI. Tell them how to do it. Most importantly tell them WHY it is so important to save Tigers. But that will be useless. All that is already mentioned in the comments and the facebook discussion forums. If only they had the good sense to put it to use.

This isn't the entire post (Yes it's long). He's also offered them a few out-of-the-box-into-the-dustbin suggestions and a comic. Check the out at http://bit.ly/cYrvpZ. I'm totally subscribing to his blog.

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More than 67% of global Internet users arrive at web sites through Direct Domain Navigation, making domain names an awesome medium for advertisers to reach their target market. (Domain Advertising’s nailed this concept here).

Here’s a great example that demonstrates the effectiveness of direct domain name advertising, specifically advertising on parked pages (domain names that have no websites for the uninitiated). It’s well targeted, it’s a creative approach (even for direct domain navigation advertising), it’s cheap(er) (more so in this case because they’re all .co.il domains) and, while I’d like to see actual stats in terms of number of site visits, coupon redemptions, etc., it’s apparently worked well.

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I was reading an interesting Case Study about How Nike Used Interactive Video to Draw Crowds at Sporting Events recently realized that it’s Perfect for so many companies – including my own.

       

Click here to download:

Augmented_Reality_An_Awesome_w.zip (773 KB)

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There are recruitment campaigns and there are recruitment campaigns. And then there's the Best Job in the World campaign, which can be described best as the most effective recruitment campaign in a very long time – making for a killer case study.

In fact, I shouldn't even call it a recruitment campaign - this was a lot bigger than that. It transcended mere recruitment to cover brand building, tourism promotion, social media marketing and even reality TV - garnering tremendous exposure for Australia's Great Barrier Reef islands – nothing the ads that the tourism industry normally comes up with could ever achieve.  

I won’t even be surprised if I hear that the Australians never really needed an island caretaker and this was all an elaborate way to bringing the focus of the world’s media to the Barrier Reef islands. Money well spent I say, especially when you’re getting:

This case study is a great example of a couple of things that we’ve been talking about for a while now, viz.:

-          Marketing is consistently becoming less advertising and more PR and this is a great example of this. Ads are becoming blind spots and you need to create genuine content around something with a unique angle/concept/hook to stand out from the clutter.

-          Further, this is yet another example of how Social Media Marketing can propel campaigns to becoming viral movements. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were all perfectly suited to this campaign as the infrastructure needed to help content go viral.

Enuf said, Roll the Case Study video

(Thanks xcruz82)

It’s no surprise that this won 3 lions at Cannes this year.

It’s also interesting that there was another campaign, with a similar concept that wasn’t submitted for consideration for the awards, but achieved great results nonetheless. It was the Professional Fan Job – Case Study below:

(Thanks Daniel)

On a separate note, while the Australian Tourism Board must have surely received hundreds of great applications from several qualified candidates, here's one that I stumbled upon that I think was awesome:

And in case you're wondering who won, it's this guy:

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