Cannes Contenders 2018: 121 Experiences

Sparsh Vinayak

 

India is home to the world's largest number of blind people, contributing to over 15 per cent of the world’s blind. As a country, we lack an aperture into the world of the blind which leads to lack of sensitivity and hence, we have minimal eye donations. Adding to the grim scenario, Eye bank of India only receives 28000 eye donations annually against a requirement of at least .1mn. The greatest contributors to this formidable situation is the blind faith of Indians’ in ‘religion, it is religion that demotivates people from organ donation by seeding in a fear of being born disabled in the next life. Eye Bank India in association with Tata Nx wanted to find a way to increase the number of eye donations, thereby reducing the dependency on international donations. 

 

Our entire campaign revolved around enabling the blinds to touch Lord Ganesh. Every Ganpati festival creates a lot of buzz about the most unique idol avatars of God Ganesh. In the news, on social media or through general word of mouth. We wanted to break into that news and conversations by reinforcing an idea that stood for a noble cause. The very name Sparsh Vinayak literally translates to Touch Lord Ganesh. Lord Ganesha through the pandal (temporarily built installation) of ‘Sparsh Vinayak’ refused monetary offering and encouraged the devotees to donate their eyes. 

 

Sparsh Vinayak was installed at Growel mall, Kandivali, has an organic footfall of over .7 million over the festive period of 11 days during Ganesh Chaturthi. It took over 30 days for one of Mumbai’s leading idol sculpture artist to finally give shape to the idol. A first of its kind, the idol of Sparsh Vinayak was made using materials like nylon, cotton and thread treated with wax to drape the idol giving it a pronounced definition for the blind to touch, feel and visualize the idol of their favorite elephant god. The usual festival finale ritual of idol immersion was ditched and instead the SparshVinayak idol was donated to a blind school.

 

The campaign was only executed at one touch point but the thought behind the campaign left an everlasting impression on the audiences. The campaign reached 7.5 million people out of which 5 million were devotees of Lord Ganesha. 86% of the devotees that visited the pandal were the sight gifted audience. The campaign created a large impression being the third most trending topic on twitter with 32 per cent engagements on social media and 28x earned media. Over 2,21,000 people pledged to donate their eyes, Sparsh Vinayak saw a surge of 689 per cent breaking the stereotype for good.