Colgate Oral health month / #Keep India Smiling

Since 2004, Oral Health Month has been Colgate’s social initiative to step out and deliver free dental checkups and spread oral hygiene awareness across India. While most years we got a steady turnout, in 2015, we decided to up the game making use of the digital media.

The campaign insight was simple - let’s show the world how the real India smiles. And the communication promise was even simpler - Keep India Smiling.

We roped in a prestigious street photographer Prashant Godbole to travel around and created an image bank of smiles and the stories surrounding them. These which were then widely used in social media accounts and circulated widely on digital media. The impactful photo stories created much buzz and conversations around the brand ensuing a larger interest and awareness about the Oral health month. The Image bank created then was also used in print, outdoor and collaterals, supported by TVC’s and digital films. We even created a coffee table book of our smile stories later in the year to send to Our partners all across. The campaign though largely online at first turned out to be a true 360 campaign.

It was also the first time we introduced a real time ‘Find a Dentist’ locator to make it easier for consumers to access oral health care.

Above all, #keepindiasmiling managed to capture the smiles of real Indians from all walks of life, moments that moved beyond the medium and captured the hearts of the country, and made that year’s OHM the most attended and successful in the history of the brand.

The campaign was rewarded with a Bronze EFFIE in 2016, and it was replicated in countries across Asia, where it met with equal success.