Shiva Tritlogy – Vayuputras

Challenge

After the success of ‘The Secret of the Nagas’, Amish’s next launch was the last book in the Shiva Trilogy series ‘The Oath of the Vayuputras’. This book was much larger in size and much bigger in scale as compared to the previous ones. The initial print run of the Vayuputras was 5 lakhs. The requirement was to achieve the decibel levels of a mass media campaign so as to bring in newer readers, over and above existing reader base of Amish.

We interpreted mass media as television, but the budget was simply not enough to accommodate TV.

Idea

We racked our brains to think how we can get this campaign a national reach through television. It struck us then that the only form of content that was getting free television was music! Hence the big idea was to produce a trailer in a musical form, i.e. a music video. To create attraction we engaged with top musicians – Toufeeq Qureshi & Sonu Nigam. They created the lead track ‘Jo Vayuputra Ho’ which brought to life the synopsis of Vayuputra. We then went one step further and created one more category first, the world’s first Original Sound Track for a book. 8-10 musicians brought to life various chapters of The Oath of the Vayuputras through a musical piece. Now that we had fantastic content with us the next step was to give it visibility. We explored the idea of fully exploiting this fantastic content by licensing this whole music album to Times. While Times got a ready product with no monetary investments they stood to benefit through sales of the music by riding on the existing fan base of Amish. In return Times would give us free media to publicize the album (also the book) and also ensure placement on TV through music channels. We there by delivered media value equal to 10 times the production cost of the album in print. The exposure on television was a sheer bonus, needless to say the campaign brought huge virality, not to mention the ample amount of free PR for the IPs created for this campaign.