This food delivery startup has 150,000 Indians making crazy sounds on Instagram

• Swiggy's #VoiceofHunger Instagram challenge garnered 150,000 entries within its first week.
• In the challenge, users have to recreate certain shapes using the waveform of voice notes.
• This is new for Instagram, a platform that is primarily visual and relies on heavily on photos.
• The challenge also saw participation from influencers like Rohan Joshi, Shrishti Bansal and Ashish Chanchlani.

Swiggy's new #VoiceofHunger challenge on Instagram doesn't conform to the platform's central photography approach by uses the voice note feature instead — and within a week, the challenge received 150,000 entries. And, increased Swiggy's follower count by 30%.

Within the first half an hour of making the challenge live, Swiggy got more than 500 entries. And after the first 24 hours, Swiggy had received close to 10,000 entries and increased their follower count by 2000 people.


According to the vice president of marketing at Swiggy, Srivats TS, the challenge blew up a little bit more every time an influencer participated like Rohan Joshi, Ashish Chanchlani, or Shrishti Bansal.

The Swiggy handle on Instagram even ended up getting blocked four times over in the 5 days of the campaign.

In this 5-part challenge, the food delivery service got customers to recreate the shape of foods like a Kebab Skewer, Nacho, and Pancakes using the waveform of a voice note.


WhatsApp and Facebook also have the voice feature, but the difference is that instead of showing waveforms, they only let users play the recording.

Making of the ‘#VoiceOfHunger' Challenge

Dentsu Web Chutney, the digital agency behind the challenge, first saw the potential for their idea when they realised that voice notes could resemble different shapes. Their client services director, GD Prasad, then tried to see if he could do the same in his studio.

But soon, he explains, “That's when I realised that Instagram's waveform itself is somewhat a simplified format of a regular wave form that you see in professional sound recordings and things like that.”


The social media team came up with the idea to use the voice note feature in a way that integrated technology that consumers were familiar with, according to the vice president of marketing at Swiggy, Srivats TS.


Digital campaigns on platforms like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram aren't uncommon. Instagram, in particular, is a visual medium that relies mostly on images. But, using Instagram for its voice notes opens a new paradigm for digital marketers to explore.

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