The digital payments ecosystem in India is cluttered with players betting high on partner offers and cashback to garner usage. The category just lacks fun. Google Pay wants to be India’s preferred payments app, building an emotional relationship around the category — and this means delivering high user engagement at key spending periods. Stamps Wali Diwali was the most viral in-app gamification for Google in India and unlocked viral growth on social media instead of expensive paid media acquisition.
Loyalty is hard-won in digital payments. Instead of assuming 67 million users would prefer the app, we introduced a game with in-built sharing. New internet users, ones who are now in the habit of flexing their pockets during Diwali found a reason to discover the benefits of digital payments this way. This insight would lead to creating a celebratory feel to each transaction. The internet lit up with positive vibes and conversations, and Google Pay won share of voice by many multiples in a short period.
And Google’s iconic status of bold social campaigns would be table-stakes to achieve our category objective. Social media plans had to be devised to break through category noise and build brand preference. The Twitter activity stamp exchange bet on community building. In the process, it got the internet together to exchange a new social currency - stamps, thereby making it Google India’s largest social campaign yet. In the process, #StampsWaliDiwali redefined the meaning of Diwali and Rangoli — elevating digital payments at the forefront of every Diwali-related conversation.


This project is:
Client-commissioned

Agency
Dentsu Webchutney

Client URL
https://pay.google.com/

My Role in This Project
India has 50+ festivals, but that one festival that cuts across cultures, caste, and religions is Diwali. It also happens to be the time when India shops the most. Instead of charting a campaign to push people to use Google Pay for shopping, we wanted to build a new category code - use Google Pay to win something. Right from collaborating with the product team to design a game to devising the social leg of the campaign, I crafted this activation with my team, for an otherwise dull category, that turned into a cultural zeitgeist during the most cluttered ad season of the year.