By Dr. Sarita Ahlawat
Drone shows replacing fireworks this festival season reflects a shift in Indian brands towards pollution-free celebrations.
Lavish, grand and joyous – there is no equivalent to the Indian festive season. We deserve to celebrate all our beloved festivals magnificently, while also making our celebrations environment-friendly. Over the past years, severe air and noise pollution has prompted domestic and international brands as well as state and national governments to look for eco-conscious alternatives to fireworks for their celebrations. Most memorably, in 2024, governments, companies and citizen groups across the USA led a concerted effort to celebrate Fourth of July with drone light shows rather than fireworks. This festival season, India too will join countries like America, France, Spain, Greece, China, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Djibouti, Gabon and many more, at the cutting-edge of spectacle and sustainability, transforming festival celebrations forever.
Amongst the densely packed crowds at Durga Puja pandals, Garba nights, and Dussehra and Diwali Melas, the open sky is free real estate that has been left untapped for too long. Today, brands are fast waking up to this unrealised potential, leveraging drone light shows to take over the skies (and the internet) in one go. Picture for a moment, the stories of our gods against the glowing city skyline – Lord Ram shooting a fiery arrow at Ravan, Hanuman flying to Lanka, Goddess Durga’s awe-inspiring many-armed avatar, devotees lighting lamps at the banks of the Ganga, and Ganesha blessing the crowds below! Drone shows are a highly versatile storytelling medium that can translate any idea into stunning visuals created with hundreds of points of light, whether that is mythology, a social issue or a brand story.
The emotional impact of a drone show, already powerful, is elevated by the spiritual fervour around festivals, moving audiences to worshipful and reverent awe. Such is the show’s effect that devotees have stopped to offer prayer and lie prostrate before the visages appearing in the sky! The crowd-pulling power of a drone show is unmatched – at an Ashwamedha ghat show in Varanasi in May this year, footfall increased 11X from 50,000 on the first show day to 6 lakh on the fourth! An award-winning mega show at the Sanwaliya Seth temple in Chittorgarh drew 4 lakh people – 7 times the expected crowd.
Drone show videos go viral across video-first social media platforms. Not only have campaigns from brands like the House of Abhinandan Lodha, Mahindra and Tata EV achieved virality in less than 24 hours, drone show video collaterals have driven on average 185% more engagement than other campaign collaterals designed around the same activation. Additionally, show design drawing on spiritual or mythological themes go viral organically, repeatedly crossing the 1M+ mark in digital reach.
Even more remarkable is the online impact drone shows drum up with zero extra investment – whipping up organic media coverage and massive User Generated Content (UGC). In fact, in a ground-breaking Durga Puja drone show sponsored by a local pandal last year at Park Circus Maidan, Kolkata, 15+ national and local media houses organically covered the show. The UGC generated by the 10,000+ crowd achieved a digital reach of a million-plus without any marketing! The high-range visibility of the show ensured that the UGC created was not only from the crowd present at the site, but residential areas, offices, markets and streets as far away as 5 km. On clear nights, shows have been visible from up to 7 km away!
Integrated marketing is another big triumph for drone light shows (though not many companies have the technical expertise to pull it off). Effective for app launches in particular, a drone show can put an aerial QR code in the sky to link the audience seamlessly to a brand’s digital assets. The novelty of a scannable QR code in the sky guarantees that the entire show audience is eager to scan it!
This all-round marketing tool has pre-marketing in-built also! A Full Dress Rehearsal (FDR) is conducted for testing and location familiarisation on the eve of the actual show. This pre-show draws eyeballs and inspires curiosity even before the actual event, drumming up hype and leading to increased online search interest in a vast area around the take-off site. The FDR itself can be leveraged in very impactful and creative ways. For the purposes of a Mahindra LifeSpaces project launch, for example, a video ad using FDR footage was prepared for the digital announcement of the launch before the actual show even commenced, ensuring that the on-ground launch event was timed perfectly with online activations.
Let us think back to the most memorable Diwali campaigns from popular brands. These have always been people-centric, advocating togetherness and community. However, how much more impactful would it have been if Coca Cola’s Follow the Bottle or Amazon’s #DeliverTheLove campaigns last Diwali could have been accompanied by spectacular drone light shows at Diwali melas? This would have showcased the values of shared festive cheer amidst crowds of festival-goers, powerfully translating a digital ad campaign into an on-ground activation as well. Brands can also sponsor shows at festival gatherings, building relationships with communities with a shared immersive experience, their logos and wishes appended to the visual masterpiece.
Increasingly, brands are also opting for drone shows as part of their internal celebrations and company retreats. Beyond all the data and metrics that have been laid out so far, this non-marketing use case is perhaps the most telling of the emotional responses that a show evokes. Jaquar and Axor are among companies that scheduled repeated follow-up drone shows for their employees after watching the first one. Over and over, drone light shows have earned their right to be called the best in experiential storytelling.
We all admired the clear blue of the Delhi skies during the monsoons this year. Made-in-India drone technology can help us keep them that way, with celebrations that capture the festive spirit creatively and on a scale so much grander than fireworks can manage. Globally and now domestically, companies and governments are leveraging this one-of-a-kind marketing tool to build awareness, increase visibility and celebrate spectacularly while being eco-conscious.
The author is MD and co-founder, BotLab Dynamics Pvt. Ltd. Views expressed in this article are personal and not necessarily those of financialexpress.com