TCS Research: Forty And Forward
We turned TCS Research’s rich legacy into a series of content pieces, leading to an award-winning campaign called Forty And Forward.
Rough Paper worked with the TCS Research (the science and research division of India’s largest IT services company) on a year-long brand-building campaign called Forty And Forward. The division, erstwhile called TRDDC (Tata Research Development and Design Centre) was going through a rebranding, and wanted to communicate their rich legacy of pioneering research and projects known to a variety of stakeholders - potential employees, partners, current employees and the public at large. Ultimately, this led to over 50 pieces of content across the many verticals TCS Research does work in, used on their social media.
We worked with their innovation evangelism team to:
- Conceptualise the campaign
- Turn disparate archival content into easy-to-consume social media content
- Copywriting and scriptwriting
- Liaison for design and video development
Depending on the story and available assets, design would involve photographs, vectors, infographics, GIFs and videos.
The challenges for us:
- Highly technical content that often involved whitepapers, research videos, screenshots and subjects like AI, biotechnology and robotics (none of which we were formally skilled in, Chuck’s perfunctory Chemical Engineering degree from 2006 was of zero help)
- Each story’s raw material would consist of varying content and quantum. Sometimes we’d have just one small document to work with, and sometimes we’d get a gigabyte of videos.
- The TCS Research team themselves had never done a campaign such as this before.
Soon, we put in place a process for working to optimise the workflow: a concept storyflow, final content, and then pushing to design. This made the campaign execution smooth, despite the variable input and story matter each time.
Selected posts
Each of the below is meant to showcase a different style of design, or concept. They are not necessarily the “best of”!
- How TCS Research built Cobalt, a case-based-reasoning tool
- We wrote “code” to explain their internal coding competition, CodeVita.
- On TCS Research’s collaboration with TIFR for quantum research
- How TCS Research & IIT Kanpur collaborated to develop award-winning warehousing robots
- Developing a technology for the elderly to live better
- A solution for farmers that won awards and has now been adopted by the parent company.
- A technology for the visually-impaired to ‘read’ books.
- How AI-ML was used to make chatbots better.
All of the posts have been archived on a specially-made page for Forty & Forward, here.
What this led to
For TCS Research, the campaign:
- Earned more than 2.5 million impressions organically, besides growing their follower base on LinkedIn by 300%
- Helped increase awareness of the TCS Research brand and the pillars it stands for
- Resonated with external as well as internal audiences (each post saw a lot of nostalgia from folks who worked on the project)
And yes, the campaign won two golds at the Social Stars 2022 awards - for best technical content, and best LinkedIn presence!
Along the way, we instilled enough confidence in the TCS Research team about our capabilities - we ended up working on scripting and execution of three videos, including one for their brand.
