The Great Online Shopping Festival, Google’s mega online shopping festival offering best deals from more than 450 brands over a period of 72 hours, came to an end on December 13, 2014 with e-commerce as well as m-commerce players reportedly seeing five times more traffic and double the growth over the Diwali period. India’s version of cyber Monday, which was started by Google India in 2012 involving several e-commerce websites, is claimed to have seen more than 300 per cent growth and in 2013, saw 20 lakh visitors on gosf.in and more than 1.5 crore across partner websites.

Among multiple platforms used for advertising the virtual marketplace, GOSF’s outdoor was handled by Kinetic India, which was set to move away from the generic to create buzz and impact amongst the target audience in different cities across the country. Fourteen brands were running a 14-minute free shopping contest everyday for three days and these 14 brands were part of different genres, making it a unique contest.

To take the idea of multiple brands in one shopping festival further, a huge cut-out of each product in the creative was created to give a 3D effect in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. All the products were pasted together with a wire connected to a mouse to signify the online shopping connotation. This mouse was made with a backlit LED box.

Talking about the campaign, Adil Khan, GM North, Kinetic India says that the objective was to create awareness about the unique 14-day contest of GOSF, along with the annual three-day shopping fiesta. “Strategic locations were chosen to create maximum reach in the 14 cities. This was one-of-a-kind campaign for Kinetic as there were 15 creative changeovers in 15 days across 30 sites. The campaign was effectively executed with the strong support from the client and the creative agency,” Khan adds.

The 18-day campaign that ran from November 25, 2014 to December 12, 2014 utilised LED Screens, pillar branding, digital pods, unipoles and billboards. Along with vanilla sites, a strategic medium such as the Cyber Hub 26x13 feet LED screen played the campaign video, adding to the buzz. The outdoor media strategy was to be present at major junctions across Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Indore, Chandigarh, Pune, Cochin, Coimbatore and Lucknow to highlight each brand partner every day. The outdoor media was chosen keeping the key areas visited by shoppers and youth in mind to make them aware about the daily contests. The campaign highlight was the changeover of the creative every day across 30 locations in these 14 cities, and change to the generic GOSF creative on the 15th day.

Along with Kinetic India, the outdoor agency for this campaign, Ideas at Work, Mumbai and Maxus had also worked on the same as the creative and media agency respectively. The success of GOSF can be discussed once Google releases its official sales figures, but the traffic claims by industry sources such as MobiKwik and DesiDime show that the e-tailers may have a good New Year.