Summary
Every Ramadan, every brand in Indonesia delivers the same sermon about being better. Smartfren needed non-customers to notice a data package, so we skipped the sermon and told a comedy instead: a kid cursed to be good, and a hashtag that turned internet quota into the instrument of goodness.
Year
2018
Role
Strategic Planner / Creative Director
Discipline
Branded Entertainment
Services
Campaign Strategy / Branded Entertainment / Influencer Narrative / Digital Campaign
Case study film
Brand’s challenge
The brief asked for acquisition: get people who do not use Smartfren to consider it, with the Ramadan Unlimited package as the offer. Ramadan is the most crowded month in Indonesian advertising, and every brand reaches for the same register: gratitude, family, a soft voice over a call to prayer. The audience has heard a lifetime of it. A sermon from a telco is the easiest thing in the world to scroll past, because self-improvement in Ramadan is a personal project, and nobody has ever filed a data package under it. The category fights on price the other eleven months. In Ramadan it fights on piety. Neither gives a nonconsumer a reason to remember your name.
The idea
Ramadan is the moment people try to become a better version of themselves. So we made that the joke. Anak Dikutuk Baik: a kid cursed to be good. Goodness as an affliction he cannot escape, played for comedy in a kampung full of Ramadan life. And under the laugh, the real ask, carried by one hashtag: #KuotakanYangBaik. Use your quota for the good stuff. The internet in your hand is the fastest way to spread kindness in the one month everyone is trying, and Smartfren’s package is the pipe it flows through.
Campaign Strategy / Branded Entertainment / Influencer Narrative / Digital Campaign
The execution
01
A curse, not a sermon
The film opens on a laugh. Being good is the curse: money finally finds a busker after twelve years, card games lose out to ngaji, and nobody can quite explain why. The audience gets the Ramadan message by laughing at it.
03
Faces with their own audiences
Arief Muhammad, TJ, and Jarwo Kwat carry the film. Comedy timing the audience already trusts, and followings that give a seven-minute brand film a reason to be watched at all.
02
Ramadan drawn from life
Taraweh, ngaji, an opor recipe shared to the neighbourhood, an asrama gate. The film lives inside the audience’s own Ramadan, not an ad director’s version of it, so the goodness lands as recognisable rather than staged.
04
The quota as the instrument
#KuotakanYangBaik puts the product inside the story’s logic: goodness in the film travels through phones, and the Ramadan Unlimited package is what keeps it flowing. The offer never interrupts the comedy. It is the plumbing under it.
The impact
The only comedy in a month of sermons
The campaign entered the loudest, most uniform advertising season in Indonesia with the one Ramadan story told as a comedy. Instead of asking non-customers to compare data prices, it filed Smartfren under the thing Ramadan is actually about, trying to be better, and made the quota the way you do it. A sermon gets scrolled past. A curse gets watched to the end.