Goibibo

#ChooseToChallenge

Women's Day is the busiest date on the marketing calendar, and the hardest to sound real on. So much gets said that day that sincerity is genuinely difficult to land. Travel makes it harder still, because a woman's freedom to travel gets negotiated in real life, in questions about who she is going with, what she is wearing, why she is going alone at all. Goibibo wanted to mark the day by saying something true about that, about what actually happens to women when they travel, rather than something merely nice.

The answer the team arrived at was to go at flights specifically, the seatmate who asks why she is travelling alone, the polite interrogation dressed up as small talk. Goibibo's team brought in Vidya Balan to carry it, and #ChooseToChallenge, the global theme that year, gave the whole thing its spine. My part sat on the writing, contributing to the copy, the scripting and the storyboarding, and the rule the group kept returning to was to let her answer rather than lecture. Script the situation, not the sermon, set up what she is being asked and let the reply do the work, because a real comeback beats a written one and an audience hears the difference instantly.

It worked because it trusted wit over volume, and getting that right took a room full of people sharing a single instinct, the brand's team, the film's, and the writers alongside them. The film crossed well past a million and a half views on YouTube and took Bronze at the IDMA awards for best use of topical posts. Plenty of hands made that happen, and I was glad to be one of them.