The Challenge

Rice is the Philippines’ staple and among its largest farming category. About 5 million hectares, and only 30% of it is hybrid. The government backs and subsidises hybrids in full. Digitally, the country has the highest Facebook penetration in Southeast Asia. mipl was entering that market with a brand not many had heard of and also had no digital presence, no audience, no recall.

The brand was called: Ninety 95

The brand’s claim was in its name. In a category when the time from sowing to harvesting was 120 days, Ninety 95 seeds reduced the time by about a month.

Telling a farmer he can harvest 25 – 30 days earlier is a big promise, and a big promise from an unknown name reads as a sales pitch. Filipino farmers are trade-savvy, hold small parcels, and take their cues from demo plots and from each other rather than from retailers or advertising. Seeing is believing. We had to make the speed claim something a farmer could witness before he was ever asked to believe it.

The Product Truth

Ninety95 is ready to harvest in 90–95 days. The normal cycle is 120.

That month is not a specification. It is a head start and it compounds into a third cropping cycle in the same year, which means a third income cycle for the farmer. Everything we developed came out of that one fact.

The Idea

Make the advantage visible, not stated.

Harvest in 90–95 days is a number, and numbers get scrolled past. So we stopped explaining the advantage and staged it as a race as speed only means something in comparison. Every execution carried someone falling behind in the same frame.

Then we made the race ownable. The cars tearing ahead weren’t cars, they were rice grains shaped into speeding cars. The product itself was the thing moving fast. The same logic ran through a mascot film, where a running rice grain leaves a trail of slower ones behind it.

And we localised it. Alongside the race cars ran a bangka, the outrigger boat every Filipino knows, cutting hard across a paddy waterway while the others waited.

We have also developed video concepts for the above, which can be viewed here:

The Impact

The speed work reached 344,017 people across its three awareness ads, at around ₹17 per thousand reached. Organically, three posts of Ninety95 crossed 125,000 views each. Totally there were over 409,000 views and close to 1,180 engagements.

The sharpest signal wasn’t in the dashboard. It was in the comments – “Magkano po?” · “How to order?” · “Saan makabili ng seeds?” — as farmers began answering each other, quoting maturity days, plant height, tiller counts and potential yield to fellow farmers, unprompted. The peer validation loop we had designed for had begun running on its own.

The Takeaway

Where farmers trust their neighbours over advertisers, start with what the product genuinely does better, show it in the farmer’s own world, and let other farmers carry it.