USAID’s flagship project in private sector health, Sustaining Health Outcomes through the Private Sector (SHOPS) Plus in India won gold in the ‘Best Use of Mobile’ category in partnership with Bobble.AI at the second edition of the ETBrandEquity.com Shark Awards.

The award category recognizes campaigns where the use of mobile devices/platforms play a vital role in promoting ideas, concepts, products, services, or offers and delivers impressive results. The SHOPS Plus campaign ’50 Shades of ISHQ’, competed against Internet giants like, Amazon Prime Video and Flipkart-Google.

ETBrandEquity.com Shark Awards is organized by The Economic Times, India’s most-read business daily from the stable of The Times of India Group. The award recognizes excellence in marketing and focuses not only on high standards of work vital for marketing success, but also the innovations delivered by marketers. The award rests on careful and meticulous scrutiny of campaigns by marketing experts who assess entries on parameters such as talent, creativity, relevance, and execution.

To build on the project’s extensive ’50 Shades of ISHQ’ social media campaign, SHOPS Plus partnered with Bobble.AI to execute a mobile-based campaign that aimed to normalize conversations surrounding safe sexual behaviors with engaging GIFs and stickers. Bobble.AI is a popular smartphone keyboard available for download on both iOS and Android app stores in India, with over 10 million users per month. The stickers and GIFs can be used on any digital messaging/chat app like, WhatsApp, or Facebook messenger. The project recognizes the cultural trend that stickers and GIFs are fast evolving as the digital language among Millennials and Gen Z. SHOPS Plus sought to use this digital language to empower youth with the tools to negotiate topics such as consent, contraception use, and safe sexual behavior.

Tanmay Guha Roy, Manager for New Media at Abt Associates India, said, "Conversations are at the heart of every intimate relationship. Bobble AI's powerful conversation media marketing solutions allowed us to communicate to the youth in their own visual language on their chosen platform. These will help normalize the conversation around safety in sexual practices." On the collaboration with SHOPS Plus, Anika Tanwar, Head of Brand Marketing Solutions at Bobble AI, said, "To reach the hearts and minds of the Millennial and Gen Z, one needs to be where they spend the most significant amount of time and "dig" into their needs and likes."

Between 1 July and 31 August 2020, the stickers and GIFs of ‘50 Shades of ISHQ’ campaign have been shared over 300,000 times by about 176,000 people all over India. In the SHOPS Plus target states, Delhi, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh, they have been shared nearly 80,000 times by 35,000 unique people during the same time frame. As a model for sustaining these results, Bobble.AI has committed to distribute the stickers and GIFs as default keyboards, without needing to be downloaded from the app, across 30 million Xiaomi mobile phones in India, and sustain them for 5 years.