PUNE: For Mumbai-based social media marketing firm SoCheers, the creatives for their campaign against misinformation and fake news came quite naturally when the team members saw their own parents fall prey to Covid-19-related false information, particularly via WhatsApp.
“The creatives were mostly from personal experiences. My parents are adapting to technology and they are gullible to WhatsApp forwards right now. That is also the case for many on our team so we used those experiences in our creatives for social media,” said Ankita Kulkarni, who is part of the strategy team at SoCheers.
The campaign, Fake News, Genuine Problem, came about when the team was working on a brief from the United Nations that mentioned the need to tackle ‘infodemic’ or misinformation over the Covid-19 pandemic. As the team was looking to partner with prominent brands to spread the campaign, help was on hand from social media content aggregators Social Samosa, Social Media Dissect, and No Filtr.
The template is the WhatsApp chat page. “People do generally consider anything they see online to be true and they will continue to receive these messages no matter what. In the creatives, we have asked people to read and verify before sharing the messages they receive,” Kulkarni added.