In August, Airtel launched 4G services in India with an integrated campaign with the ‘Airtel 4G Challenge’ that worked on a simple consumer insight ‘seeing is believing. The challenge with digital was how do we demonstrate the speed of 4G to the majority of Indians who are on 3G/2G connections.

We realized that consumers need speed most when they need to download something and apps are something almost everyone tries downloading atleast once on their smartphone. Taking this insight we created the #Airtel4gSpeedTest the fastest direct response campaign on Twitter.

All the user had to do was tweet to us the name of any App he would like to download from the App Store. Within a second we responded back with a customized infographic showing the time taken to download the app on Airtel 4G versus other data connections. We even followed it up with a link to apply for an Airtel 4G connection.

Using a custom created Twitter DM server that was connected to the App Store, as soon as the user Tweeted his request the server parsed the request, queried the app store for the file size and meta data which were used to create the custom infographic showing the difference between 4G as compared to 3G and 2G. All this in a matter of milliseconds. This graphic and the response was tweeted back to the user.

Taking this a step forward, we wanted the whole of India to join the demonstration for which we needed a platform which every indian is aware of.

Using Hangout on Air and custom interfaces, we created an experience where for the first time ever the user had the power to simultaneously control two handsets and witness the difference between 4G and 3G.

Two handsets connected wirelessly to a controller, encoded to accept Commands from Google HOA running a custom extension. A live broadcast with celebrity anchors and tech bloggers beaming across India from a live control room with real time feed encoding.

The 4G launch had a paradigm shift for brand airtel with brand score up by 10% on ‘data’ in an industry where competition is either flat lining or declining. Purchase intent for the brand is the highest ever in airtel’s corporate history & 15% higher than any other competitive communication in the category. Top Of the Mind Awareness(TOMA) and Consideration Top Box(CTB) jumped from 12% to 40% and from 15% to 39% since the launch of the campaign. With close to 50% of new smartphones sold(4G enabled) opting for an Airtel SIM 4G connections have doubled in circulation since the airtel 4G launch with a 100% increase in data consumption making the Airtel 4G launch the biggest telecom launch in the history of India.