CASE STUDY: How Indosat turned a concert sponsorship into a social movement

Background
Soulnation is a popular music festival held annually in September, showcasing performances from local and international artists. Indosat wanted to make the most of its sponsorship of the event as the festival is popular among young people—a key target audience for the telco. But among younger generations in Indonesian youth populations, gang fights between different schools are back in fashion, and drug use and low discipline remain problems. JWT Jakarta saw an opportunity for Indosat to harness the unifying power of music and lead a movement to improve the outlook and attitude of today’s young generation.

Aim
Dubbed "Soul of the nation", the idea was to create the biggest sing-along in Indonesia in order to encourage young people to reconnect with the Indonesian spirit of unity and positive action. JWT helped Indosat use social media to turn a concert sponsorship into a movement for social change, motivating Indonesian youth to pledge to take a more positive outlook on life and rekindle their passion for their country. “As a truly youth brand, we need to reach deeper into the lives of youth,” said Andrini Novie Hastuti, group head marketing communication at Indosat. “The idea here was to invite them to become agents of positive change.”

Execution
The campaign started on 17 August, Indonesia's Independence Day, with a YouTube video. The video featured Raisa, a young artist, singing a popular national song "Bagimu Negeri" (To you my country). The video showed scenes of violence and vandalism, and ended with an emotional appeal by Raisa to encourage Indonesian youth to become agents of positive change. 

The singer asked young viewers to go to a microsite to pledge, in the words of the song, to dedicate their lives to their country. This was followed by a call for young people to submit a video of themselves singing the song. These videos were then composed into the biggest sing-along performed live with Raisa at Soulnation, on 30 September. 

Results
More than 2,300 people sang along on video, and more than 2,800 digital pledges were made on the microsite. In less than a month, the video garnered more than 420,000 views on Youtube; and more than 7.9 million impressions on social media. The event has gone down in history in MURI, Indonesia’s book of records, as the biggest sing-a-long in Indonesia.

“Together with JWT we created a youth movement that earned high recognition and was a real success, measured both by numbers of people who took part in the biggest sing a long—and the number of people who were moved, emotionally, by it all,” Hastuti said.