India VS Tech Hinsa was created for Chhaa Jaa (Hindi for “Shine on”), Girl Effect’s youth platform for India’s Hindi-speaking regions. Girl Effect, founded by the Nike Foundation, works to empower girls and young women with the information, tools and confidence to make choices about their lives and futures.
Online Gender-Based Violence is everywhere. The problem is, it doesn’t always look like violence.
It can look like asking for your partner’s password. Checking their location. Reading their messages. Sharing a private image. Or disguising control as concern.
For young Men & Women aged 18–24, many of these behaviours had become so normalised that they were difficult to recognise as abuse.
So instead of telling them what tech hinsa looked like, we asked them.
India VS Tech Hinsa was built as a Vox Pop series of 10 vertical videos. No actors. No scripts. No lectures. Just a camera, direct questions and real young Men & Women talking about what actually happens in their digital lives.
Our objective was to make Online Gender-Based Violence instantly recognisable through the voices of the generation experiencing it.
The format was deliberately built for the feed: vertical, fast, conversational, Hindi and Hinglish.
We wanted someone scrolling to stop, hear a stranger describe something familiar and think:
“Wait. That’s happened to me.”
Because before young Men & Women can challenge tech hinsa, they first need to recognise it.
And sometimes the most powerful way to do that isn’t to write a better script.
It’s to hand them the mic.
Our creative strategy started with one bet: real answers would be more powerful than anything we could script.
For an issue as personal as tech hinsa, we believed young Men & Women would trust someone who looked, spoke and sounded like them more than a brand explaining what was right or wrong.
So we took the camera to where they actually were — streets, campuses and cafés — and built a Vox Pop series of 10 vertical videos around questions people rarely get asked out loud.
When does concern become control?
Is asking for your partner’s password okay?
What does consent mean over text?
What happens when a DM crosses the line?
The responses were unscripted. Sometimes funny. Sometimes awkward. Sometimes uncomfortable. And often surprisingly familiar.
That unpredictability became the creative.
We didn’t polish away pauses, reactions or contradictions. Real faces, real language and real Hindi and Hinglish gave every video the feeling of a conversation you had walked into rather than an awareness campaign you had been served.
But authenticity alone doesn’t stop a thumb.
Every episode was designed specifically for vertical viewing. We opened with the strongest question or most surprising response, used fast cuts to maintain momentum, and kept the visual language native to Reels and Shorts.
The biggest creative challenge was tone.
Working closely with Girl Effect, we balanced humour and relatability with its trauma-informed, rights-based approach. The content needed to be entertaining enough to earn attention without ever trivialising the experiences being discussed.
And 10 episodes meant 10 chances to stay fresh.
We changed questions, locations, faces and perspectives across the series. Instead of forcing every episode into the same template, we let the most interesting answers determine the edit.
The series was then extended through teasers, recaps and comment-response content, allowing audience reactions to feed back into the campaign.
What started on the street became a conversation in the comments, which became more content for the feed.
The result was vertical storytelling in its most native form: immediate, human, participatory and built around the behaviour of the platform.
We didn’t create ten films explaining tech hinsa.
We created ten conversations that made young India recognise it for themselves.
10 vertical videos. 3 platforms. 85M+ views.
India VS Tech Hinsa became the breakout content series of the campaign, proving that real voices and a vertical-first format could take a difficult social issue to extraordinary scale.
Across Instagram, Facebook and YouTube Shorts, the 10-part Vox Pop series generated 85M+ views:
55.5M views on Instagram
20.4M views on Facebook
8.6M views on YouTube Shorts
That’s an average of 8.5M+ views per episode for a series built around young Men & Women simply talking about their experiences with tech violence.
The strongest episode generated 12.8M combined views, including 9.76M on Instagram alone.
Episode 9 generated 170K+ likes, while multiple episodes crossed the 8–9M view mark.
But the most important result was what happened after people watched.
The conversation continued.
Young Men & Women recognised situations they had experienced, shared their own perspectives, tagged friends and debated where everyday digital behaviour crosses the line into control and abuse. Those reactions became material for recaps and comment-response content, extending the conversation beyond the original videos.
A subject that could easily have become a lecture instead became something people chose to watch.
No actors. No scripts. No manufactured stories.
Just real questions, real Men & Women and real experiences.
And 85M+ views later, the simplest creative decision proved to be the most powerful:
Hand young India the mic — and listen.
All figures are based on campaign tracking and subject to final platform verification
