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Journalism of Courage
Ad guru Piyush Pandey has helmed many public service health campaigns, two of which stand out for not only effective communication but also ensuring the community implements the message. Notable among them is the well-known Pulse Polio immunisation campaign, Do Boond Zindagi Ki, with Amitabh Bachchan in 2002. The series of ads got people to the vaccination centre to immunise their children below the age of five. It ensured a robust template for a mass immunisation drive, one that helped in Covid vaccination coverage later.
Lesser known but done way ahead of its time in 2000 was the no smoking campaign for the Cancer Patients Aid Association (CPAA), “Be kind to the smoker, they have not much time left.”
India launched the massive pulse polio immunisation rounds in 1994, with health workers reaching every doorstep across the country, providing them with the two-drop oral vaccine against polio — a viral infection that can lead to paralysis and death. The country was declared polio-free in 2014, within two decades from the launch of the mass immunisation campaign when the country accounted for nearly 60 per cent of the global polio cases.
“The advertisements were emotional. It appealed to the parents to get just the two drops that could save the lives of the children — it communicated the importance of vaccination in a simple manner. The advertisement campaign had a huge recall value — it prompted people to come to the polio booths. And, even when they didn’t, the campaign was able to create behaviour change so that the health workers who went to people’s doors were allowed to vaccinate the children,” says public health expert Dr Jugal Kishore.
Talking about the polio campaign and zeroing in on Amitabh Bachchan as its face, Pandey had once said in an interview, “He is India’s most iconic and trusted face. KBC (Kaun Banga Crorepati) had happened and he had made a connect with people in their homes. This was an opportunity to present him as an ‘angry old man’, a takeoff on his ‘angry young man’ image. We did a series of ads. At first, we presented him as an elder who looked benevolent and understanding, clearing doubts about the vaccination and dispelling hesitant behaviour. Who else but a wisened man could link children’s well-being with parental responsibility? We then made him a stentorian elder who could make people feel guilty about not taking the shots and harming future generations. And then we made him go to individual homes and rebuke and scold them for not doing the most basic thing to protect their children, taking the vaccination.” Pandey played on the old world value system of listening to the family patriarch. “The basic value system — that you’re born and nurtured by a family and will, therefore, listen to it — will forever work across generations. That’s why the pulse polio campaign succeeded to the degree it did,” Pandey had said.
That and the language of the common man in Hindi. The impact was for all to see. Bachchan himself admitted that women feared him and went to the nearest centre to get vaccinated.
A 2005 Unicef report found a high exposure as well as good recall for the advertisement. Around 82.7% said that they had heard or seen the polio advertisement in the two months prior to the survey, with 53.7% recalling the TV advertisement. The recall was higher in urban centres where 77.2% respondents remembered it. Importantly, 36.% people remembered the correct date for the next round of immunisation — the number as high as 52.5% in urban areas.
Once India was declared polio-free, Bachchan continued to tell people that the virus still existed in the world and that they should continue to immunise their children to keep them safe. The ads said: “Do boond har baar, jeet rahe barkarar (Two drops everytime, we continue to win).”
In early 2000, CPAA approached Pandey to create a campaign for cancer prevention, specifically anti-smoking. It continues to be the punchiest. The storyboard plays out in a public bus where a young man lights up while standing next to a seat occupied by two turbanned old men. One of the old men gets up and offers him a seat so that he can smoke comfortably next to the bus window. And then the voiceover says that the elderly knew he had not much life left and had offered him a seat for comfort. “It turned around the idea of vacating a seat in a public transport for the elderly. And it positioned the idea of mortality arising out of smoking and cancer,” Pandey had said.
A lot of people were sceptical about the length of Pandey’s Fortune Cooking Oil ad at a time of dwindling attention spans. “Yet the four-minute 38 second ad worked on prime time as it showed a concerned grandmother carrying home-cooked dal for her injured grandson in hospital, hoping the homely touch will rejuvenate him as it does. An idea can bend rules. Overload of information does not mean knowledge. But how you present it as a human story with emotions matters. It is expressed best when your story meets people face-to-face. Otherwise this information is available to everybody,” Pandey had said.
