Anushka Sharma was at every Indian wedding in the last three months...as Shashi !

In a bid to promote its upcoming movie Phillauri, Fox Star Studios India has launched an integrated Social Listening digital campaign that aims to engage with over 30 million active social media users.

Social listening is a process through which companies and brands track social media conversations around specific phrases, brand names or hashtags to keep a tab on consumer trends or gauge consumer feedback. The movie production studio has taken a step ahead it is for the first time in the world that social Listening has become the premise for a film promotional campaign.

Given that the storyline of the film Phillauri revolves around the friendly spirit Shashi, played by Anushka Sharma, the marketing strategy was built on playing up the characteristic traits of the spirit – she was invisible and she was omnipresent - and drive social engagement around the film.

Three months ago, Fox Star Studios engaged the Social Listening process to track weddings through popular hashtags such as #weddings and #shaadi, in line with the movie’s plot. The plot of the film unfolds during a mad Punjabi wedding and the movie’s central character is called Shashi, a friendly spirit, played by Anushka Sharma.

This helped the company gather data of over 10,000 social media users who have shared their wedding experiences by posting images or videos. After gathering this data, Fox Star Studios has now kick-started the digital campaign #ShashiWasThere. Under this campaign, Anushka Sharma has started responding to these social media users by reposting an altered version of their pictures, in which the character Shashi has been photoshopped in their wedding pictures.

Shikha Kapur, Chief Marketing Officer, Fox Star Studios India, said that while social listening tools have always been used by brands to monitor online chatter, the company has gone ahead and integrated it in the digital campaign. “For Phillauri, we have created ideas that are experiential in nature and invoke participation from the target audience. We expect this digital campaign to garner organic traction and engagement with social media users. The campaign lends itself seamlessly to these social media conversations around weddings. We believe there is a potential to reach over 30 million social media users through this unique campaign,”

Phillauri is a co-production between Fox Star Studios and Anushka Sharma’s Clean Slate Films and is slated to be released on March 24.