Only a few months into re-launching Bangladesh’s largest music streaming platform, the 45th Independence Day was a big opportunity for GP Music to connect with its audience to achieve some level of brand affinity. The brief was to connect the brand to existing and new users with the spirit of independence.

The objectives were to:

• Celebrate Bangladesh’s Independence Day by staying relevant to the brand
• Connect with the Youth in a relevant way
• Create an emotional experience for existing users

Acquire new users

On the 26th of March 1971, Bangladesh declared itself independent. After 9 months of intense war, we finally celebrated our Victory Day on the 16th of December 1971.

During the war, radio was the only tool for mass communication, reaching the far ends of Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi freedom fighters formed an underground radio station called “Shadhin Bangla Betar Kendro”, which means, “Free Bengal Radio Station”, and it was used to communicate with the citizens and unite them. The Music that was broadcasted from that Radio Station, played a dominant role in motivating people and uplifting their mental strength during the war.

Our idea was to bring back the experience of “Shadhin Bangla Betar Kendro” to today’s youth by re-creating the 45 year old musical radio content and distributing it with modern day technology in the country’s largest music streaming platform, GP Music. The strategy behind the idea satisfied the brand’s objectives perfectly. An important insight was that the younger generation of Bangladesh cared mostly about the present, thus hardly knowing much about the struggles of independence. The solution was to connect with them at present in a way that would be relevant to them. So connecting a 45 yearold Nationally significant Radio Station to the country’s largest music streaming platform was the most contextual way to illustrate the role of music in achieving our independence.

Under the campaign “Shadhinotar Shure”, which means “Rhythm of Independence”, we brought together 3 of the most iconic radio presenters of “Shadhin Bangla Betar Kendro”, to re-create the radio stream of 1971 in the form of a modern podcast. The Radio Presenters greeted their audience exactly in the way they used to do 45 years ago and shared their untold stories. Guests who had experienced the war, were brought in to the studio to converse with the Presenters about their personal experiences.
In between the conversations, they played the music, which were featured in Shadhin Bangla Betar Kendro’s Playlist 45 years ago.
The entire podcast was divided into 6 different tracks and released exclusively in GP Music’s iOS App, Android App and Web Platform exactly at the same minute of the original radio station’s launch 45 years ago. We produced a promo video and static posts to publicize the campaign.

By empowering hundreds of thousands of people with the historical experience, the brand successfully connected with the Youth in their emotional space, resulting in increase of brand affinity and eventually acquiring new users, thus meeting the objectives.

• The campaign reached over 1 million people through GP Music’s Facebook page alone.
• More than 400,000 users listened to the ‘Rhythm of Independence’ Podcast through GP Music’s iOS App, Android App and Web Platform.
• The overall streaming hours in GP Music Platform went up by 60% after the campaign and 117,362 new Paid Users were acquired in the Platform.

Above all, through this special initiative, we brought a little piece of our history to the youth of today as a reminder of our struggle for independence.