#OneTripAtATime
In 2021 the instinct for every travel brand was to shout that travel was back. Book now, fly now, make up for lost time. The trouble was that nobody had a desire problem. India had just spent a year indoors and what was standing in the way was not a lack of wanting, it was a lack of nerve. You cannot discount your way past fear. So the campaign lowered its own ambition on purpose, which is where the whole thing turned: not go everywhere, just go once. One trip at a time is a small, permissive, almost apologetic idea, and that is exactly why it worked on people who were not ready to be sold a holiday.
It became a crowdsourced year end film, twelve influencers speaking to camera about a year of staying put and about slowly finding their way back out. Which meant the brand never had to say the reassuring thing itself, because an ad telling you it is safe out there convinces nobody, while twelve people admitting they were scared too and went anyway convinces almost everybody. The writing job was research, scripting, storyboarding, on ground coordination and copy, and the difficulty sat in the stitching. Twelve people shooting separately in twelve places will hand you twelve unrelated confessions unless something underneath is carrying them in one direction. So each voice had to land on its own and pass the feeling along to the next one, holding the film’s arc from a bad year to a first step, without any of them sounding like they were reading the same brand note.
Watch the #OneTripAtATime film on Instagram
#MyIndia
The campaign grew and needed a bigger frame, and the one it found was Republic Day. Every January this country watches itself parade, state after state rolling past in tableaux. So #MyIndia became India’s first online travel parade, and the hidden places became the floats. Sixty plus creators, over a hundred lesser known destinations, nineteen states and three union territories across sixty days, with Sehwag, Mary Kom, Sunil Chhetri, Saina Nehwal, Pankaj Tripathi and others joining in. Borrowing a ritual the audience already had feelings about is cheaper and far more effective than trying to manufacture a new one.
At that size the discipline stops being copywriting and becomes content strategy. A hundred locations each need their own reason to exist, and all hundred still have to add up to one thing rather than a feed of pretty places. That was the research and the storyboarding doing the silent work underneath. The campaign went on to win Gold at the ET Influencer Awards and Gold at Smarties India for best use of user generated content, along with silvers at Buzzin, ScreenXX and ETSpott.