The Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon (SCMM) is Asia’s largest road race and enjoys massive participation every year. In its 13th year, we wanted to make the SCMM even bigger by letting more people run for their reasons.

In order to reach the maximum number of people both online and offline, we devised a plan that took into consideration various digital touchpoints and the type of activities that best suited them.

We launched the #RunForAReason campaign – a digital first initiative that was aimed at creating medium-specific experiences for the masses.

The campaign flagged off with an online film that introduced this year’s theme and paved the way for a host of other activities.

With Twitter ‘Ask Me Anything’ with fitness advocates, ‘How to videos’ on Instagram with celeb runners, shareable social media content and digital films, we aimed to boost the physical participation of the SCMM.

We took things offline with India’s first virtually run marathon- the SCMM Virtual Run. This digital activation let the masses run the SCMM in an immersive simulated environment using the Gear VR.

There yet remained thousands of people who had a reason to run, but couldn’t make it to the real or the virtual marathon. For them, we debuted the World’s First Socially Run Marathon, the SCMM Twitter Run. The Twitter Run asked the Twitterverse their reasons to run. Every character tweeted took the run ahead by 0.1 meter. The objective was to cover 42 kilometers.

For the first time since its inception, the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon witnessed the non-runners join the marathon proceedings with such enthusiasm.

The #RunForAReason campaign garnered over 2.6 million video views on the digital films.

Over 1000 Twitter users ran the SCMM Twitter Run and completed it in a record time of 7 hours, 22 minutes and 28 seconds.

More than 300,000 people experienced the SCMM Virtual Run.

The hashtag #RunForAReason trended for more than 14 hours over the 2-week campaign period, while #SCMMTwitterRun trended for over 7 hours on race day.

The Standard Chartered microsite was viewed over 119,000 times during the campaign period.

The campaign reached out to over 20 million users and garnered 150 million+ impressions.

In the process of helping people run for their reasons, we also became the World’s First Marathon that was run On-ground, Online and Virtually.