Unacademy challenges students to overcome obstacles with Dhoni’s Lesson No. 7

An ed-tech unicorn like Unacademy understands that the lives of students and professional athletes have a lot of parallels, with both aspiring to achieve their dreams while battling obstacles. In a new brand film featuring former Indian national men’s cricket team skipper MS Dhoni, Unacademy has managed to seamlessly draw this parallel in a video that has gone viral since its release.

The video is titled Lesson No. 7 (to pay homage to MS Dhoni’s Team India jersey number) and the release date coincided with the International Day of Education on January 24. The brand film portrays a metaphorical representation of MS Dhoni’s journey with the vision of helping learners pursue their dreams. It shows the hurdles one needs to overcome to achieve greatness.

Conceptualised by MullenLowe Lintas Group, with Hungry Films serving as the production house, the ad shows a meteor shower heading towards earth, with Dhoni preparing to catch it. The film moves on to show various hurdles that Dhoni surpasses to finally emerge victorious by catching the meteor, epitomising his victory against all odds.

It took close to a year to make the ad, and on the day of the launch, Gaurav Munjal, Co-Founder and CEO of Unacademy, tweeted:

Meanwhile, Karan Shroff, Partner and Chief Marketing Officer of Unacademy, credited the extraordinary amount of work put in for this project in a LinkedIn post:

"We are very excited to share our latest brand film in association with MS #Dhoni which depicts his life lesson of and #persistence which is extremely relevant for all our Learners. We are extremely proud of this film that we have developed at Unacademy which took 250+ professionals, post production work across four countries and over 8 months of project duration."

---

Lesson No. 7 has already garnered 8 million views on YouTube

Since its release on January 24, the ad has already garnered over 8 million views on Unacademy’s official YouTube handle, and 3.7 million views on Unacademy’s official Twitter handle at the time of writing this report.

Unacademy roped in Indian cricket legend MS Dhoni as brand ambassador in August 2021 for a reported two-year contract at an undisclosed amount.

The present ad and the theme of surpassing obstacles to achieve success is also reminiscent of Unacademy’s previous film, titled ‘The Greatest Lesson’ from 2021. That film featured another Indian cricketing legend Sachin Tendulkar, who is also an investor in Unacademy, as well as an ambassador for the ed-tech brand.

Unacademy, one of India’s most noteworthy names in the ed-tech sector, last closed a $440 million funding round in August 2021 at a $3.44 billion valuation, as per reports.