LitMart, an initiative by Bangalore Literature Festival, is India’s first and only pitch platform for aspiring authors. It gives first-time writers pitch their book ideas to the Who’s Who of the publishing world, including commissioning editors, literary agents, and publishers.
To generate interest in LitMart, we created 30-word pitches for bestselling books with the hashtag #PitchesWork. These were put out as promoted posts on social media, resulting in a significant increase in the number of submissions received.
Knock Knock jokes never get old. So we made these up as a play on our product names. This newsletter also made it to the list of Urban Ladder’s most popular mailers of all time.
Thousands of Indian engineers take the GRE each year and a majority of them struggle with the Vocabulary section that requires them to know the contextual meanings of words not used in everyday conversations.
Wordtoons is a set of GRE flashcards designed especially for Indian GRE aspirants. Through visual cues and silly vernacular clues, they make learning fun and help the words and their meanings sticky.
I conceptualized ~150 of these flashcards and worked with an illustrator to get them created. These are offered as part of the GRE course material at CrackVerbal and also retailed on Amazon.
The Harry Potter series came back into the limelight with the release of The Cursed Child in early August 2016. We used the series as inspiration for one of our newsletters and sent this out on September 1, 2017, on the eve of the departure of the Hogwarts Express from King’s Cross.. With a 13%+ engagement, this ended up in a list of Urban Ladder’s most popular emails of all time and got us rave reviews on social media.
In January 2018, Urban Ladder launched a 360-degree digital campaign to announce the launch of the Fujiwara collection, a premium range of furniture inspired by the shoji screens of Japan. I handled the entire campaign from concept and story to copy across radio, web, email, and social media.
This became one of Urban Ladder’s most successful collection launches; sales picked up in the month following the campaign and the range continues to be a bestseller.
RADIO SPOT
Radio spots typically tend to be loud and fast, with brands trying to fill every millisecond with words and music. We went the opposite route in the spirit of the zen state of mind the Fujiwara range inspires. We wrote a radio ad that makes 30 seconds feel a lot longer (in a serene, refreshing way!).
SOCIAL MEDIA
Prior to the launch, we put out teaser posts on social media in the form of haiku poetry to subtly underscore the Japanese connect. We asked folks to guess what was coming up, resulting in some fun conversations and building anticipation.
Gowri N Kishore 