‘News-jacking’ is the art of injecting ideas (with your brand DNA) into news stories, creating kick-ass content and riding media coverage plus social engagement. What started on a Friday evening, came full circle with coverage on NDTV’s homepage on the D-Day! 🙂
Idea & Execution
We had the hindu festival of Dussehra coming up in a few days. The popular mythology around Dussehra is the victory of god Rama over the ‘ten-headed’ demon king Ravana. After countless ideas and brainstorm droppings, our hunt was to find brand DNA match to News-jack this.
So came the simple idea to turn the central character of the festival on its head! We re-imagined Ravana (the ten-headed demon king), as if he were alive today, and put him in everyday situations, creating cool graphics for a Facebook Album. There’s always an urgency of a news-room when we’re working on topical content: Move Fast and Execute! And when it’s ready, distribute like crazy. Distribution is half the game, after you’ve cracked the idea and content. From Facebook post, internal promotion to blogger outreach in the beginning.
See the full series – Guess Who’s Back
Results
Got a ping from a friend on WhatsApp that NDTV had picked up our post and it had made it to their homepage. Phew! Happy Dussehra!
- NDTV did a full story on the post, and embedded the images directly from the Facebook Album (good for distribution)
- They posted on their Facebook page among 5.5 million fans
- They Tweeted to their 5 million followers
- All organic 🙂
“Spending money is easy, getting there with an idea and kick-ass execution is Startup Swag!”
asha chaudhry
neat. very neat.
Siddhant Jain
Hi Ashish, quite an execution. loved the idea.
Aashish Chopra
Thanks Siddhant 🙂
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
awesome!! Loved the creatives!
Now I think Ravana is the VC with 10 heads in 10 different Startups :))
Abhishek Goel
Although I wont call ixigo a startup, but kudos to your execution. I am sceptical about the results if you did this in a non-funded bootstrapped startup.
Wanted to know what metrics do you track to measure performance of such campaigns? (Spike in Traffic / Bookings / Something else) or these are just for branding?
Aashish Chopra
Hey Abhishek,
This one particularly was for branding, started from rising engagement on FB to organic feature on NDTV. For the videos however direct CTA to app downloads has worked well.
Aashish
PS: and about ixigo being a startup, I guess it’s more like working like one, minimal resources, organic hacks 🙂
Abhishek Goel
Good to hear that 🙂
Would like to read more about your organic growth hacks with direct CTAs. Following you on Twitter in hopes of reading some good stuff 😀
Aashish Chopra
The game keeps changing, case in point FB CTA buttons on video. Few months back CTA on video which was growing gave solid re-directs to app downloads, but FB now wants more money, add CTA today and it considers video as an Ad and not just content, so boost, ain’t no fun in boosting 😉 Without spends its more holistic, making content part of conversations, with spillover in traffic and app downloads. Interesting question though 🙂