Law & Kenneth Saatchi & Saatchi + Facebook make India’s biggest shopping festival bigger

Big Bazaar revolutionised the way Indians shop back in 2006 when it started India’s biggest shopping festival – the Sabse Saste Din Sale. For the last 12 years, every year Sabse Saste Din takes over the country around 26th January with customers lining up for hours and making several preparations to get the best deals out of India’s biggest shopping festival.

But the millennials are now surrounded by shopping festivals from every offline and online retailer, turning exciting deals and discounts into an annual monotonous ritual. Big Bazaar wanted to break out of this clutter and create a more authentic connect with millennials who spend hours on social media everyday looking for ways to keep themselves entertained.

We decided to marry the energy of the biggest shopping festival of India with the excitement of entertainment. Law & Kenneth Saatchi & Saatchi partnered with Facebook and Big Bazaar for the World First 24 Hour Facebook Live Shopping Entertainment Show. The campaign broke through shopping festival clutter and bridged the gap between a digital first millennial consumer and the offline retail giant.

This was the first time in the world that a retail giant reached out to its customers individually on their phones – not just with exciting exclusive deals but with live entertaining content crafted around those deals.

Pawan Sarda, Group Head – Digital, Future Group sais, “24 Hours Facebook live for “Sabse Sasta 5 Din” is one of the most exciting marketing ideas we have built in recent times. Thanks to Facebook and Law & Kenneth Saatchi & Saatchi to come together with us to make this happen. It was a challenging project as we had to create content for 24 hours. We created an entertaining programme with leading Bollywood and television influencers for our viewers and with M-coupons we were able to drive them to the stores. The most exciting part though, is that 10 million people viewed it real time. I am not sure if anyone has done anything like this before, but I can imagine this to be the biggest online to offline initiative.”

Anil K Nair, Managing Partner, Law & Kenneth Saatchi & Saatchi (pictured left) said, “Our biggest challenge was how to make the country’s biggest shopping festival interesting for millennials, especially considering habitual discounting has become such a hygiene across both offline and online retailers. We were very clear that we didn’t want to use social media for the sake of it. This 24 hour live entertainment event turned a monotonous transactional exchange into an authentic engaging experience for our customers and fans. We couldn’t have done this without The Big Bazaar team and Pawan Sarda supporting this maverick idea all the way. It is a matter of great pride that an Indian brick and mortar retail brand is showing the way to the rest of the world by creating such a world class contextual branded content and digital event.”

Credits – Managing Partner – Anil K Nair. Executive Creative Director: Rohit Malkani. Creative Team: Ishan Mehta, Richa Aggarwal, Chagas Ferdinando, Prashant Sukumar, Sonika Aggarwal, Prashant Gawde and Akshay. Planning Team – Aarti Samant, Ishita Samaddar. Social Media – RoshnI Donny, Sagar Sali. Account management: Shailendra Shyamsukha, Vineeta Wadhwa, Murali Mohan. Production house: Trigno Media. Director: Shariq Patel.