Touching Film from Indian TV Brand Seeks to Help Underprivileged Children During the Pandemic

D2H, a direct to home television brand in India, has teamed up with Lowe Lintas to launch #Donate2Help, a new brand campaign with one-of-a-kind concept in the DTH industry. Set in the times of the Covid-19 fallout where schools and colleges remain shut, the campaign strives to motivate the users to give away their spare D2H set-top box to empower underprivileged children to continue their education with the free educational channels and services available on the D2H platform.

While the pandemic has taken a massive health toll, there have been economic costs such as inflation, salary cuts, and job losses - particularly amongst the less privileged.  The children of these sectors were perhaps the hardest hit as their ‘Right to Education’ was paused, with schools being shut and parents not having resources to deploy for their kids' full-time education.  

Through this campaign, D2H encourages its subscribers to donate their spare set-top box to the underprivileged peers in their community. The brand on its part will facilitate the migration and installation of the box besides providing all FTA and educational channels for free for one month.

Commenting on the new D2H campaign, Sugato Banerji, corporate head - marketing, D2H Brand, Dish TV India Limited, said: “In these pandemic times, there is a strong urge in many of us to be helpful and altruistic. Using this insight, we came up with the idea of Donating or Gift an unused D2H set-top box lying in homes to underprivileged sections of our society like - domestic helps, society guards, drivers - our consumers interact with, to help them. We will be running the campaign extensively on targeted social media and digital channels apart from heavily running on our internal subscriber communication channels, including our on-TV assets.” 

Many D2H subscribers have unutilised/spare Set-Top Boxes with them at their homes. Further, to keep the spread of Covid-19 under check, schools have stayed shut and the closure of schools meant a pause in the education of children, as well as limited revision of what the children had already learned. Being from a weaker economic section, remote online learning was restricted as well. Added to this was the insight that many people were keen to do their bit to contribute to mitigating the impact of the Pandemic.

Together with the brand, Lowe Lintas identified this opportunity by connecting the dots between various insights, leading to the conception of the #Donate2help campaign.

Speaking on the new campaign, Janmenjoy Mohanty, regional creative officer, Lowe Lintas, said: “D2H’s brand platform of ‘Alag Hi View’ embodies the core thought that the platform’s diverse content, services, and new-age tech solutions aren’t just simplifying the life of consumers but making them more aware, opening their minds, helping them have a differentiated (alag) point of view. The campaign was the perfect pedestal to bring the brand platform to life. The life of a child could be empowered as she goes back to learning – gaining new perspectives and insights. An emotionally evocative and beautiful story of a Kashmiri girl helping her father at the shop as her school was shut deeply moves our protagonist, a regular customer. He realizes what could get the girl to open her notebook again and donates his spare set-top box lying at home and calls D2H to do the rest. The expression of #Donate2Help was coined using the same brand letters of D2H to ensure easy noticeability and connect with the brand cause.” 

The brand will leverage the campaign through TV channels, digital, and social media platforms to seed, maximize, and engage its subscribers to #Donate2Help.