Work That Sets Us Apart

To utilise the occasion of April Fools’ Day to create awareness about the lack of sanitation facilities in India.

At the time of the campaign, over 157 million Indians lacked proper sanitation facilities. To start a discussion around this, we realised that we needed a fun and engaging social idea that would get people involved in this serious issue. As India’s largest mobility brand, Ola drives urgency in its customers while booking cabs. We leveraged the same level of urgency to highlight that millions of Indians lack access to clean and hygienic toilets. Here’s how we went about it.

We created Ola Restrooms - toilets on-the-go, as our April Fool’s Day prank. To drive home this message, we tied up with Gramalaya - an NGO that helps in building washrooms in rural areas. We rolled out our campaign in three phases - teaser, launch and the reveal.

In the teasers, we introduced the idea of ‘Toilets on-the-go’ leveraging Cat - A influencers on various social platforms. The influencers kick started the conversation, and as part of our launch strategy, Ola replied to the influencers with the solution ‘Ola-Restrooms’. Once the concept of ‘Ola-Restrooms’ being a prank started to sink into our audience, we revealed the true intention behind the campaign and Ola’s collaboration with Gramalaya.

This was the first time Ola as a brand got personal with its audience and replied to their tweets and stayed relevant real-time, giving Ola a more light, organic and approachable identity.

A post campaign brand study revealed that we achieved: