Category Archives: Blog

KRDS Singapore & Volkswagen Launch an Innovative Campaign

To promote the Volkswagen Caddy, Volkswagen Singapore roped in Social & Mobile Agency KRDS Singapore to launch an innovative campaign involving 4 phases for customers to know more about the Caddy and everything it can do.

The campaign began with asking users to share their ideas on how the Caddy can be transformed and 10 best comments saw their idea come into life.

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Later interesting facts and features of the new Caddy was posted online including suggestions from fans on which colours they preferred and an innovative Facebook Live video was broadcasted on the page.

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The campaign was a success with the Caddy being seen online over 2.5 million times.

Click here to check out the entire campaign and results on Youtube. 

Visit our slideshare presentation for more insight on the campaign.

KRDS Launches a Comical Bot for CommitStrip – The Web Comic Loved by Coders

What started as a side project for one of the cofounders of KRDS, a leading Digital Marketing Agency, has now turned into a popular web comic among developers, for its spot-on observations of life as a coder.

CommitStrip is a web comic strip on the daily experiences and struggles as a full time developer.  CommitStrip is the kind of thing developers would like to read between two cups of coffee. CommitStrip got off the ground in 2012 and now boasts a global readership of over 500,000 visitors per month . The most viral post, Terminal Forever was seen over 1 million times and shared 30,000 times across all social media.

As more users turned to the website, there was a possibility that finding a particular comic strip around a topic would pose a challenge. Thus, KRDS developed a Chatbot for CommitStrip readers on Facebook to let them look for a particular comic strip simply by answering some questions and interacting with the Bot.

The central idea was to provide a mobile-friendly and frictionless access to the database of close to 1,000 strips created to this day. That’s why the chatbot was done on Facebook Messenger, an app that most readers would have on their phone.

KRDS considered that marrying comic strips – a great and underrated way to tell stories in the mobile era, to a Messenger chatbot – the latest of today’s intuitive digital communication channels, was a winning combination for users.

The chatbot can be accessed at m.me/wearecoders (or on CommitStrip’s Facebook account by messaging the page).  The Chatbot can be used to view the 5 latest posts, the best comic of the month and also enables users to search for a comic based on keywords.

The popularity of KRDS’ CommitStrip transcends into all media, so much so that when a Kickstarter campaign was launched to turn the comic strips into a book – within a month, the goal was reached and over 5,000 books were published and shipped to its avid readers.

CommitStrip aims to continue exploring the idea of bringing the experiences of techies across the world into life, on the web space.

BNP Paribas Launches a WeChat Live Interaction During its Annual Dinner

27th February 2017, Shanghai:

BNP Paribas is one of the best-positioned international financial institutions with
an uninterrupted presence in Asia Pacific since 1860. As the financial year begins, BNP Paribas hosted its annual dinner to celebrate its employees at Changzhou and Tianjin, with over 200 guests at each location.

It is a common tradition at BNP Paribas to have a series of fun events for its employees at the dinner. This year, BNP Paribas wanted to host innovative digital interactions for its employees. Thus, BNP Paribas roped in Social & Mobile Agency KRDS Shanghai to develop a WeChat live quiz for the guests.

The WeChat live interactions included a set of two quizzes on the rich history of BNP Paribas and staff anecdotes, and a voting system to elect the best show of the night on WeChat. Live leaderboards and countdowns were displayed on a main screen to push engagement and enhance a friendly competitive spirit among the guests. The interaction was a soaring success as many employees were thrilled to compete with each other and in the process, were also recruited on the WeChat account.

Maggie MA, Head of Brand and Communications, China at BNP Paribas commented:

“The Annual Dinner is one of the most important events of the year for BNP Paribas employees in China. We welcome our employees to the event to celebrate our success and hard work together. Compared to traditional dinner, a WeChat live interaction enabled all our staff onsite to participate with enthusiasm. The staff was able to enjoy competing with each other while learning about BNP Paribas’ history in an interesting manner.”

Commenting on this, Aurelien Ferrie, the General Manager at KRDS Greater China said, “KRDS believes WeChat can be more than a digital marketing platform for brands. As a daily life tool for people in China, brands can leverage WeChat in many aspects of their corporate life, like an annual dinner party to strengthen ties with employees, just like BNP Paribas did with its live WeChat interaction.”

The winners of the quiz went home with exciting prizes and the interactive session saw a participation of over 95% employees in the WeChat live.

ICICI Lombard’s ‘Caring Hands’ initiative receives a tremendous response on social media

The initiative leveraged the digital medium to create awareness and consequently trended at No. 1 on Twitter on the day of the event

ICICI Lombard, one of India’s largest general insurance company recently concluded its sixth edition of ‘Caring Hands’, an initiative that aims at providing preventive healthcare services to underprivileged children in India. Tapping into the power of digital media, the initiative, that provides a clear vision to India’s future generation, KRDS India helped execute this campaign using latest trends in social media marketing.

Every year, at the ‘Caring Hands’ event, employees of ICICI Lombard volunteer to set up camps at various schools across the country. The volunteers along with a team of ophthalmologists conduct eye-check ups for the underprivileged children and provide spectacles to those in need. Since its inception, ‘Caring Hands’ has reached out to over a lakh children in nearly 250 schools across India. To encapsulate the essence of the initiative, this year, the activity on social media was primarily executed in a video format. Series of videos chronicled the journey of the initiative and the overall impact it has had on the community. On the day of the event, i.e 9th December, the activity not only garnered eye balls via live-tweets, it also encouraged positive conversations around the cause, thereby trending at no. 1 on the day. Overall, on social media, the campaign reached out to 24.4 lakh people on Facebook, with 3.2 lakh + video views and over 2.17 lakh impressions on Twitter.

To kick-start the activity on digital, a teaser video was released around what is about to be launched shortly. The video giving a glimpse of the initiative reached out to over 3.8 Lakhs people on Facebook, garnering 101k views.

The teaser video was followed up by a pre-launch video, which gave audiences a further insight on the initiative and the impact it has created over the years. The pre-launch video reached over 7 lakh people, garnering 196K views.

On the day of the event, camps were set up across the country, where employees of the organisation volunteered to visit schools, conduct eye-check -ups for children and provide spectacles to those who needed it. The entire event was documented via live-tweets, receiving a great response from the audiences on Twitter. This led to conversations around the cause, leading to #ICICILombard_CaringHands trending at No. 1 spot on the day.

Simultaneously, on Facebook, the entire journey from the day was captured and compiled into an album that reached out to over 1.2 million people, engaging with over 78.5K audiences.

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Commenting on the success of the initiative, ICICI Lombard GIC, MD & CEO, Bhargav Dasgupta said, “It is our continuous endeavor to go beyond our business goals and contribute to the community at large. I am happy to see the perseverance and dedication of over 2500 colleagues at ICICI Lombard who have been participating regularly in this unique employee volunteering initiative for the last 6 years. In the process, they have helped screen more than 1.4 lakh underprivileged children for eye vision and provided free spectacles to more than 10,000 kids with poor vision.”
Achal Deoda, Business Head – India, KRDS India added, ‘The ICICI Lombard Caring Hands initiative by design has great participation from the brand and the employees alike, since its inception. We at KRDS India are very excited that we could further enable this brilliant initiative to be a part of national trend across social media platforms and further add to this great cause by bringing the brand and the audiences together ’.

The activity concluded with a post-launch video that comprised of the impact the initiative had this year along with bytes from children across centres and how ‘Caring Hands’ affected their lives.
The video garnered 25k views on Facebook and garnered 21k impressions on Twitter:

This year, the initiative reached out to 33,386 children across the country and provided spectacles to 4,802 children with a poor vision.
With ‘Caring Hands’, ICICI Lombard along with its employees that volunteer to strive to contribute to the betterment of the society, continue to embrace its commitment to communities across India.
To know more about this campaign, please write to : [email protected]

ABOUT KRDS:

KRDS India is a part of the KRDS Group, a network founded in 2008 in Paris with a headcount of over 150 employees at present and over eight offices across Europe and Asia (France, Singapore, India and China).

KRDS has a reputation for being one of the foremost Facebook Marketing Partners since 2010 and specializes in designing social media strategies, integrated applications and developing microsites. Community building and management along with social ads management is another forte for their specialization.

At the 2013 “Facebook Innovation Competition”, KRDS Group was the only non-American contestant to have won among the 260 agencies. KRDS Group has handled over 2000 social campaigns across 30 countries for some of the world’s most prestigious brands, such as DBS, AIA, Peugeot, Danone, Microsoft, LVMH, Unilever, Veuve Clicquot, Nestlé, Tag Heuer, Air France and L’Oréal. KRDS India presently handles campaigns for brands like Bata India, SBI Cards, ICICI Lombard, Adiya Birla – More Retail and Lifecell International.

KRDS Group counts Ardian (ex Axa Private Equity) as an investor and is part of R3 Social 40 – an initiative from global consulting firm, R3, to showcase forty of the world’s best Social Media agencies across globe.

About ICICI Lombard General Insurance

ICICI Lombard GIC Ltd. is a joint venture between ICICI Bank Limited and Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited, a Canada-based diversified financial services company engaged in general insurance, reinsurance, insurance claims management and investment management. ICICI Lombard GIC Ltd. is one of the leading private sector general insurance companies in India with a Gross Written Premium (GWP) of Rs 83.07 billion for the year ended March 31, 2016. The company issued over 15.80 million policies and settled over 1.62 million claims as on March 31, 2016.

ICICI Lombard General Insurance has been declared the ‘Most Innovative Health Insurance Company of the Year’ at ‘The 2016 Frost & Sullivan India Best Practices Awards’. It has also been conferred with the Association for Talent Development (ATD) Best Award 2016 for the fourth time. ICICI Lombard has won the ‘Claim Service Leader’ (General Insurance – Large category) and ‘Technology Innovation’ Awards at the Indian Insurance Awards, 2016. The company received the ‘Claim Service Leader’ award for its excellent track record in claim settlement across product segments. It was given the ‘Technology Innovation’ recognition for its technology driven initiatives especially the ‘RiskInspect’ App, a mobile application developed to capture risk information of low sum insured property risk. ICICI Lombard General Insurance has been adjudged the ‘Non-life Insurer of the Year’ at the coveted Outlook Money Awards, 2015. Non-life Insurance as a category has been included for the first time at the Outlook Money awards, which were introduced more than a decade ago. It is a matter of pride that ICICI Lombard has been chosen as the Winner in the introductory year of the award category.

ICICI Lombard General Insurance has been conferred the coveted ‘Golden Peacock Corporate Social Responsibility Award 2015’. The award recognizes the company for it continuous contribution to CSR and especially for its ‘Caring Hands’ initiative, an employee volunteering CSR program. ICICI Lombard was adjudged the award ‘Golden Peacock Innovation Management Award, 2015’ for demonstrating innovation across multiple functions of its business operations and promoting the ‘culture of innovation’. The award ‘Golden Peacock Award for Business Excellence, 2015’ recognizes best management practices that act as the basis for business excellence.

ICICI Lombard General Insurance received the award for its robust risk management practices and customer centric initiatives. ICICI Lombard was conferred with the ‘E-Business Leader’ Award in the General Insurance Category at the 5th annual edition of the Indian Insurance Award 2015 for its performance, growth, product and market innovation, customer service and technology. ICICI Lombard was also named as the ‘Best Travel Insurance Company’ by CNBC Awaaz Travel Awards 2015 presented by the Chattisgarh Government based on an online and on-air survey.

Event: KRDS Studio in Chennai has hosted our first Behance Portfolio Review Meet

KRDS has always encouraged young professionals and provided them with the right platform to exhibit their expertise. We often come together to initiate various interesting events with a motive to bring together creative professionals from all fields. Our most recent success was organizing the ‘Portfolio Review Week’ for Behance, that saw young minds come and participate from different parts of the country. The ‘Portfolio Review Week’ is a volunteer organized event that is conducted twice annually and has been previously hosted at various International venues.We were enthusiastic at the opportunity to bring creative minds under one roof to appreciate, analyse and acknowledge artistic caliber.

The five hour session was attended by 50 candidates and 4 jury members who were invited to judge the best work from the group. Designs were evaluated based on their proficiency and winners were chosen for each category as follow :

Arvind Kumar for the best Visual Designs
Ravi Ganesh Vijayakumar for the best Illustrations
Krishna Kumar for the best Motion Graphics

The event has been extensively covered on social media and we had more than 5,000 people following our Facebook live.

The Behance Portfolio review meet saw talents come in from various parts of the country and share among themselves the love for art. The Halloween themed set-up helped create an artistic atmosphere for the event and grabbed everyone’s attention. Our sincere thanks to everyone who helped host the review meet and to the jury who helped us immensely.

A big thank you as well to our Jury members for their participation and precious recommendations:

Nithin K Surendran – Digital Art Director & Head of studio at KRDS India
Apeksha Sharma – Freelance Art Director and former Senior Art Director at Ogilvy & Mather India
Jose Fernando – Digital Art Director at Boomerang Pharmaceutical Communications (an Accenture company)
Monisha Miriam Ravikumar – Freelance Game Designer & Concept Artist at GSN Games

We are definitely looking forward to welcoming our next Behance Portfolio Review Meet-up.

Here are some pictures from Behance Portfolio Review Meet held at KRDS- Chennai on Oct 24th 2016.

Getting started for the event in the Traditional way with Diya.

The Head of Creatives at KRDS giving a cheerful welcome speech to all the participants at the event.
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Nithin K Surendran, Digital Art Director & Head of studio at KRDS India, jury member, open the meeting with his speech.
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The Jury members & the participants paying attention to the presentation done by host.
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Open portfolio review sessions with the Jury.
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Candidates looking over the works of fellow designers.
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Participants appreciating the works of fellow creative people.
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The winner for Visual Designs: Arvind Kumar
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The winner for best works on Illustrations : Ravi Ganesh Vijayakumar
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Best work for Motion graphics : Krishna Kumar
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And here is the whole group posing for a picture.
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Last but not the least, the whole Design-Studio team from KRDS who made this happen with their immense passion towards discovering new talents & making this event a success.
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Disney India partners with KRDS India to celebrate Mickey Mouse’s Birthday with an Innovative Campaign !

Visit the Microsite

Disney India wanted to celebrate Mickey Mouse’s Birthday (18th November) along with their beloved fans in India. Social & Digital Agency KRDS India was roped in to ideate and develop the “Add Ears to your Picture” campaign.
The campaign was launched on 11th November 2016, a week before Mickey’s Birthday.
The Objective of the campaign was to build an interesting experience for Mickey’s Fan’s to wish their much loved Character on his Birthday.

Add Ears to Your Picture

KRDS India built Disney’s microsite and invited people to wish Mickey a Happy Birthday by uploading their photos and adding the iconic Mickey’s Ears to their picture. The user could also add a birthday wish to Mickey and share it on Social Media.

The Mickey Mouse ears were made available as a layer on top of the uploaded users’s picture. The user was given the option to re-size / rotate the Ears to position it correctly on their picture.

The Gallery

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After positioning the Mickey ears, users could enter their Birthday Message on the website. All the submissions were captured in a Gallery that was made available on the website. The users were also given an option to share the image over Social Networks or download it on their devices.

Loyal fans of Mickey Mouse were overjoyed to celebrate the character’s Birthday and be a part of the Disney Magic.

The Results

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There are over 55,000 users who have added Ears to their Pictures and shared them on Social media and users spent an average of 3 Min 40 Secs on the microsite browsing through the submissions of other people.

KRDS India, launches India’s first Celebrity based Facebook ChatBOT for the Promotion of the movie Kaabil

As fans of Hrithik Roshan eagerly await the trailer of his upcoming movie “Kaabil”, we saw an opportunity to engage the fans in an interesting conversation with the Star himself!

Just after the success of the ChatBOT for the promotion of the movie M.S Dhoni, KRDS India suggested an engaging Facebook Chatbot on the pages of the actors Hrithik and Yami through which their fans can interact with them and receive the trailer of the movie personally on a one on one chat.

The Facebook Chatbot, that is currently hosted on the Messenger of Hrithik and Yami’s . Facebook Page  is accessible both on desktop and mobile. To interact with the stars, users can either search for the stars’ respective pages on their Facebook Messenger, or just visit their facebook pages (Hrithik Roshan | Yami Gautham) and click on “Message” .

The BOT is a simple conversational BOT that interacts with the Fans with an audio message from the Star through which they communicate that they will personally share the trailer link to those people who pinged them on messenger.
The trailer of the movie will be automatically shared on the date of the trailer launch (on 26th October) with the user through the BOT. Users also get a personally autographed poster of the movie from the star with a special message.

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HBO Asia Launches Facebook Quiz For Westworld with KRDS Singapore

Premier programming service HBO Asia wanted to launch and promote its HBO original series Westworld on Facebook. Westworld is a science fiction thriller which premiered Oct 3.

Thus, HBO Asia roped in Social & Mobile Agency KRDS Singapore to develop a fun platform to create awareness about the show on Facebook. The appointment comes after KRDS Singapore was tasked with developing a campaign on Facebook to promote the HBO original series Halfworlds back in 2015.

In the world of Westworld, it’s never easy to distinguish guests from hosts. So, the Westworld campaign on social was built as a guessing game based on differentiating Hosts (life-like robots) from Guests (humans). The series follows the concept of the TV shows where fantasy and reality come together in one world.

Users click on one of the two options based on their intuition alone to determine which character is a robot or human. The game thus provides an overview of the show, the cast and characters in the series and the concept of the fantasy and reality coming as one in Westworld.  At the end of the game, the score is revealed with a showcase of the series trailer. The campaign has been adapted on to HBO’s Weibo and WeChat accounts to build excitement amongst users in China.

The Application can be accessed on Westworld’s Facebook page here.

KRDS Singapore aims to continue lending their digital expertise to promote HBO’s original series Westworld on Facebook.

Fox Star Studios Partners with KRDS India to Launch the First Entertainment Bot on Facebook

As fans of cricket and MS Dhoni eagerly await the biopic made on his life and journey from an eager Ranchi boy to the most successful Captain of the Indian Cricket Team, Fox Star Hindi wanted to create a unique engagement to identify the Greatest Dhoni Fan!

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Having worked with digital activations for movies like Bahubali, PK, Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Airlift and others, KRDS India suggested to develop an engaging Facebook Chatbot that can interact with users and challenge them with trivia about M.S Dhoni.

The Facebook Chatbot, that is currently hosted on the Messenger of Fox Star Hindi is accessible both on desktop and mobile. To play the game, users can either search for “Fox Star Hindi” on their Facebook Messenger, or just visit Fox Star Hindi page and click on “Message” .
The BOT is a Trivia BOT, which asks the users 10 random questions on M.S Dhoni. For every correct answer you score a “SIX” and for every wrong answer you lose a Wicket.
Questions range from famous innings played by MS Dhoni, cricket stats and his partnerships leading to victory. At the end of the quiz the user then receives a personalized message with the signature of MS Dhoni announcing them as his biggest fan on Facebook.
Users can then post this message on their timeline, share this game with their friends and view the trailer of the movie.
The bot is available by messaging the page at : https://www.facebook.com/foxstarhindi

KRDS India Partners with Fox Star Studios to Launch the first Entertainment Bot

As fans of cricket and MS Dhoni eagerly await the biopic made on his life and journey from an eager Ranchi boy to the most successful Captain of the Indian Cricket Team, Fox Star Hindi wanted to create a unique engagement to identify the Greatest Dhoni Fan!

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Having worked with digital activations for movies like Bahubali, PK, Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Airlift and others, KRDS India suggested to develop an engaging Facebook Chatbot that can interact with users and challenge them with trivia about M.S Dhoni.

The Facebook Chatbot, that is currently hosted on the Messenger of Fox Star Hindi is accessible both on desktop and mobile. To play the game, users can either search for “Fox Star Hindi” on their Facebook Messenger, or just visit Fox Star Hindi page and click on “Message” .
The BOT is a Trivia BOT, which asks the users 10 random questions on M.S Dhoni. For every correct answer you score a “SIX” and for every wrong answer you lose a Wicket.
Questions range from famous innings played by MS Dhoni, cricket stats and his partnerships leading to victory. At the end of the quiz the user then receives a personalized message with the signature of MS Dhoni announcing them as his biggest fan on Facebook.
Users can then post this message on their timeline, share this game with their friends and view the trailer of the movie.
The bot is available by messaging the page at : https://www.facebook.com/foxstarhindi/