Now in its fourth year, the Times Power of Print campaign is inviting creative minds to make a difference through impactful print campaigns. This one-of-a-kind contest from the Times Group encourages creative teams at agencies to compete to develop the most compelling and effective campaign on a designated topic. At the same time, it draws attention to important issues facing India.

In its first year, the Power of Print initiative, which won a gold at the Abby Awards, also known as “the Oscars of Indian advertising.” Since then, it has continued to see overwhelming participation from the creative community every year. The winning team not only wins the coveted Power of Print trophy, but also sees its winning campaign released in the pages of the Times of India group publications.

Changing themes whilst changing minds

For the first two years, Nestlé India sponsored the campaigns. The first year, the focus of the campaign was “Educate the girl child,” followed by an “Educate parents on the right nutrition for their kids” initiative the second year. Both years saw an enthusiastic response and attracted high-quality entries.

The winning campaign in the first year was created by JWT (now Wunderman Thompson). The insight it delivered was that when you educate a girl, the entire family gets educated. The winning agency for the second year was Curry Nation, an independent agency from Mumbai.

Infinity Retail (Croma) from the Tata Group partnered with Times for the third year of the POP competition and is continuing that association this year as well. Both years, Croma developed briefs that are relevant across the country and allow them to use their creativity to make a big difference for India. Both initiatives involve a change in behaviour.

The theme for 2020 was “E-waste management” and it was designed to encourage people to discard their e-waste responsibly. Croma has a support system to collect and discard old electronics in a safe and responsible manner. The winning campaign came from a small independent agency called Collateral, which looked at the irreversible damage discarded electronics do to the environment. This is another aspect of POP: democratisation of opportunity, in which small, independent agencies can compete with much larger players.

A new kind of mask campaign

This year, the brief from Croma is contextual and extremely imperative in today’s pandemic world: Develop a campaign to influence people to wear a mask, but with a different motivation.

The primary objective of the campaign is to shift thinking from “Wearing a mask to protect me” to “a mask is essential to protect the world from me.” Given the surge in cases around the world and the incidence of asymptotic carriers, the campaign at an emotional level should deliver the message: “I do not have the right to put anyone else’s life at risk.” 

Since its inception, Times Power of Print has received unprecedented participation and phenomenal work, attracting 800+ entries from 200+ agencies from across the country every year. The last three years have seen some powerful, impactful print campaigns around causes that needed awakening amongst a mass audience.

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