Billboards in Mumbai
Tokenized gold is an easy idea to explain and a hard one to be trusted on. Gold already carries meaning in India that no campaign needs to manufacture, so the job was never to explain the asset. It was to make a digital version of it feel solid, permanent and worth taking seriously.
Out-of-home does that in a way digital cannot. A billboard is visibly expensive and visibly committed to, and in a category where most projects exist only as a website, that signal does a lot of work. We planned placements around the routes the target audience physically travels rather than around raw impression counts.
The campaign reached over 20 million people in physical traffic across the city — and, just as usefully, gave the press and creator activity running alongside it a name people had already seen.
The 72-hour window
Press briefed before anyone flew. Journalists at events are triaging dozens of pitches a day. The ones who write about you are the ones you spoke to the week before, with a specific angle and a spokesperson whose time is already blocked.
Creator activation timed to the floor. Content produced at the event, in the room, rather than a scripted post filmed in advance — which reads as an ad, because it is one.
Live community moments. Meetups and side gatherings that turned an online community into a room of people who had met each other, and gave the online channel something to talk about for the following month.
Why compression matters
The instinct with event marketing is to spread activity across the calendar so something is always happening. It is the wrong instinct. Attention is concentrated during a major conference and thin either side of it, so the same budget spent inside the window does considerably more than the same budget spread across a quarter.
Everything we ran pointed at the same three days. Press, creators and community were not three campaigns that happened to overlap — they were one campaign with three surfaces.
The outcome
The Mumbai billboard campaign reached over 20 million people in physical traffic, and the event window delivered the global presence and community acceleration the project was after — the two things a conference can actually buy you, as opposed to the badge scans that get reported as results.
