Tasty Bite’s mission is to free people from boring meals through healthy and authentic ready-to-heat Indian food that can spice up everyday food routines. In the ready-to-heat category, ingredient and recipe quality often suffers for the sake of convenience. But, Tasty Bite stands out for its continued authenticity: Not only does the brand have Indian founders, it prides itself on fresh, authentic ingredients that come directly from farms in India.
Of course, the name “Tasty Bite” doesn’t quite cue the authentic Indian Food that the brand offers. Tasty Bite faces a unique challenge in the ethnic Ready To Heat space: all of its products are Indian food, but the brand lacks an association with the cuisine.
Our objective was to increase Tasty Bite’s association with Indian cuisine in a low-cost way that could earn reach for our small but mighty brand.
We benchmarked our campaign against the success of a Giphy campaign for another small brand in our portfolio, which had had a record-breaking success on Giphy earlier in the year. With that in mind, we set an extremely ambitious goal to beat 385 million views in one week.
When we began researching to identify how we could build our association with Indian cuisine, we uncovered an unexpected insight: Americans love to celebrate diverse cultural holidays with roots around the world – like St. Patrick’s Day, Cinco De Mayo, Carnivale– but were largely missing out on the excitement of Indian holidays. We wanted to help Americans experience the joy of Indian culture and to help them celebrate the right way, the authentic way, with Tasty Bite.
Although Indian culture has multiple, vibrant festivals and holidays throughout the year, we strategically chose to activate during Diwali. This is because using social listening tools, we discovered that Diwali has the highest positive sentiment of all winter holidays – more than Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanza, and Thanksgiving – making Diwali the internet’s happiest holiday.
Diwali is the biggest celebration in the entire world – over one billion people take part in what is also called the Festival of Lights. And the holiday has a powerful message; it represents the triumph of good over evil. We wanted to tap into this positivity and be a part of this celebratory cultural moment.
Being an authentic, Indian brand is an important element of Tasty Bite’s heritage and values. We knew from the start that we wanted to partner with an Indian artist to create our campaign content. Based on a blossoming partnership with GIPHY, we also knew that working with a Certified GIPHY Artist would maximize results. Ultimately, we worked with the artist Ankita Thakur (@Unkita), whose design style beautifully captured Tasty Bite’s spirit and the joyous vibrancy of the holiday, to develop 20 Giphy assets related to Diwali.
Understanding the native behavior of the Giphy platform– i.e. that consumer behavior around GIFs and stickers is occasion-based and that search is what gets content visibility– enabled us to further design our activation for success. We used SEO and tagging to ensure our content would show up in relevant moments for our audience. We developed a unique tagging structure for each individual sticker using a mixture of relevant holiday tags and by tapping into relevant subcultures like “Desi girl” culture with tags like #DesiLook.
When it came time for execution, our Community Managers lead the way for organic exposure for our GIFs and stickers. Not only did they create content announcing our sticker packs on Twitter and Instagram, but they stoked the flames of conversation around Diwali, engaging with consumers in real-time. To drive more reach, we also wanted to gain momentum with celebrities. Our team developed a list of influencers who celebrated Diwali last year and posted about it on social, and proactively messaged them all, wishing a Happy Diwali and letting them know about the Diwali sticker pack.
We wanted to spread positivity and position Tasty Bite as a part of this important Indian celebration. Our activation was a massive success: Millions viewed Tasty Bite’s GIFs and stickers during the Festival of Lights.
Objective: Increase Tasty Bite’s association with Indian cuisine in a low-cost way that could earn reach for our small but mighty brand.
Result: Tasty Bite had 458 million organic views through the week of Diwali. This activation had zero media dollars. All our success was organic and largely due to the relevance of our content, which fueled it being shared. Giphy loved our content - they featured it on their homepage and our content was so widely shared on Instagram that it was in the “featured’ section on Instagram Stickers. Even celebs couldn’t resist our content – One notable Indian “Top” chef celebrity tweeted our GIFs while she celebrated Diwali.
This campaign was successful because we approached it with a clear business challenge, defined objective and grounded everything we did in data. We used social listening to identify the right moment to participate and used we learned in social to shape our approach to participating in this joyous holiday. Partnership with the GIPHY platform also helped make this program a success, as we designed our program around proven behaviors on the platform. In every instance, turning data into human insights made our work work better.
Today, this content has well over half a billion views.
