MUMBAI: To encourage more people to vote during the ongoing election season, Scoopwhoop has launched a unique initiative called ‘The Voting Cursor’ which switches the regular cursor on the Scoopwhoop website and their office systems with a modified hand cursor where the index finger is inked and says GO VOTE!
The calls for voting and doing your sacred duty reaches a fever pitch during the election season but despite having close to 900 million voters, nearly a third still don’t vote. To put that into perspective only 2/3 of the voting population is deciding the fate for the entire population!
A healthy democracy needs everyone’s vote. Period. Born out of this singular purpose, the campaign aims to get everyone off their seats and cast their votes.
The challenge, of course, is keeping it a top priority in everyone’s hectic lives without getting too intrusive.
Which is where the humble mouse cursor becomes the perfect, ‘non-conventional’ platform for the job: omnipresent and seen by everyone for nine hours in office. The campaign, therefore, hijacks the ‘hand avatar’ of the cursor which looks like the very hand that people flaunt post voting and inks its finger making it a simple yet effective way to keep voting top of mind for everyone.
Scoopwhoop Media co-founder and CEO Sattvik Mishra says, “Every election season we have tried to encourage more and more people to vote. This time we wanted to do it in a way that people wouldn’t see coming. Change begins at home, so we surprised own employees first by switching their cursors with Voting Cursor. We then scaled it up by leveraging ScoopWhoop’s sizeable reach on the web and deployed the Voting Cursor on our website targeting the masses”.
Sharing his perspective on the initiative, Dentsu Webchutney chief creative technologist Gurbaksh Singh said, “The mouse cursor is universal and hence it becomes the ideal platform to deploy our message. To transform the mouse hand gesture, we modded the Cursor File and ‘inked’ the hand turning it into the Voting Cursor. Through a centralised system, the Voting Cursor was pushed to every employee’s system replacing the regular cursor.”
Adds Dentsu Webchutney creative director Abbas Zaidi, “The Voting Cursor literally breaks through all clutter as the cursor is one medium that always stays on top, uneclipsed by everything else you do on your screen - your gaming, chatting, documents, Netflixing. So every time you’re on your screen, the Voting Cursor asks you to Go Vote!”
The Voting Cursor will be deployed for the entire duration of the elections, reverting to the original state once the poll results were announced, maximising the impact of its message.
As Sattvik puts it “After all if a simple mouse cursor has cast its vote, it’s high time you do too.”
