The Dengeez

In an effort to reduce the spread of dengue in Sri Lanka, Softlogic Life, one of Sri Lanka’s largest insurance providers, has launched a campaign developed by Shift Integrated.

'The Most Annoying Campaign Ever'

Dengue has become an epidemic in Sri Lanka and is a major public health problem. Dengue fever is now an island wide, year-round threat in Sri Lanka, leading to thousands of cases and high number of deaths. Despite years of public service announcements and campaigns by health authorities, people were unphased by the epidemic and carried on with their lives totally tuned out from the deadly threat that was growing at an alarming rate steadily and quietly. The endemic nature of the situation has rendered increasing case and mortality figures largely disregarded; indicative of a populace habituated to the presence of the disease in their daily lives.
Softlogic Life realized that people had to be woken up from this apathy and partnered with Shift Integrated to create a campaign to make Sri Lankans take notice of this ever-growing threat.

Born from the insight of the annoying buzz of mosquitoes, the campaign aimed to annoy people into waking up to the reality of the ongoing epidemic; with annoying, candidly shot, badly sung music and videos featuring Rude Moz Madura and Death Angel Maduri of ‘Dengeez’ band (“Madura” and “Maduri” were wordplays on the Sinhala name for Mosquito, “Maduruwa”).

“Being the best health insurer in Sri Lanka, that promotes proactive living towards a great quality life, Softlogic Life decided to wake people up with a rather annoying yet an attention-grabbing approach using, the Dengeez.” Chamindri Pilimatalauwe, VP / Head of Marketing at Softlogic Life, told Campaign Asia.

To make things even more annoying we collaborated with YouTube artiste / viral sensation Sandaru Sathsara renowned for his humorous remakes of popular songs, as the vocal artiste for the Dengeez song to purposefully dial up the annoying factor.

It’s a clever public service message, which pushes the idea that you need to take steps like keeping your surroundings clean, by getting the annoying Dengeez band to state the opposite; how by not clearing mosquito breeding sites and being apathetic to the epidemic, people are helping the irritating band get more popular.

We released a music video featuring The Dengeez, on TV, digital, and on radio, supported by DJ endorsements. On social media, we made announcements that Dengeez is coming to an area near you to preform (naming high Dengue case areas), together with contextual posts (real-time responses) based on news reports of the epidemic, and digital videos featuring the band hosting a press conference. On ground activations programmes, together with a sticker / poster rollout in partnership with Public Health officials and the Police were also carried out.

“Surviving Dengue myself, I was troubled by my fellow Sri Lankans' indifference towards combating this grave disease. With the Dengeez campaign, our team recognized the need for a disruptive strategy and adopted the unconventional tactic of 'annoyance' to jolt people into action, making it impossible for them to ignore the urgency of taking decisive steps,” added Naveen Amarasuriya, Creative Director at Shift Integrated.

Given the nature of the creative execution, Softlogic Life decided to call itself the ‘Unsponsor’ of the Dengeez band. Softlogic Life used its social media pages asking people to not support the Dengeez while using PR to claim that the brand had nothing to do with these annoying, disease-causing pests, and calling all Sri Lankans to help eradicate them!

The campaign works because it effectively captures the attention of an audience inherently resistant to safety messaging, having grown desensitized to previous dengue control public service initiatives.

The campaign was ideated and created by Shift Integrated, while the mainstream media rollout was handled by Third Shift Media and digital extensions were created by Digibrush.