His admirers cite this as proof of his integrity. A bureaucrat too honest to let entrenched interests keep him anywhere comfortable. Fair enough. But there is another other implication left unsaid too – this is a man whose institutional tenure has never once lasted. Every posting he’s made history in, he’s eventually left (forced to leave, to be fair). So, by his own track record, Maharashtra’s food safety crackdown has an expiry date, and nobody knows when it is, including him.

Honestly, Tukaram Mundhe’s food-safety crackdown is welcome. In fact, it is long overdue. But it has been framed as a personality story rather than an institutional one.

The enforcement itself is not uniquely effective in Maharashtra. It’s uniquely visible.

And to be sure, the visibility isn’t entirely accidental.

When Mundhe took charge, the Maharashtra FDA’s previously quiet media machinery changed almost immediately. The Indian Express reported that the department’s near-silent media group suddenly began receiving a steady stream of press notes, photographs and videos documenting raids.

Mundhe himself has acknowledged the change. When asked why such action wasn’t visible before his arrival, he said that while enforcement had happened earlier, “the other factor that is different from earlier is that we are making it public as well”. He has been explicit about the rationale – people should know what they are eating, where they are eating and whether those establishments comply.

There is nothing wrong with this strategy at all. In fact, food-safety enforcement probably needs more public communication, not less. If photographs of filthy kitchens make consumers more demanding, and publicity makes businesses more compliant, that is absolutely a public good. The distinction, however, is between putting the offence in the spotlight and putting the officer in the spotlight. Somewhere along all the visibility, awareness and adulation, Maharashtra’s FDA campaign acquired a protagonist… a hero of sorts, and the protagonist acquired a brand.

You could argue that this may just the media’s fault that Mundhe became famous, not the man himself. Partly true. However, the communication strategy was deliberately intensified, for perfectly legitimate regulatory reasons. But once you make publicity central to enforcement, you have to think carefully about whether you’re building public trust in the institution or personal trust in the person.

A leader can use personal visibility to make an institution visible. The danger is when, eventually, the institution becomes visible only through the leader.

And this is where the examples from other states become important.

Karnataka’s FDA inspected 60 3-star and 5-star hotels in a single 3-day drive in August, seizing 1,089 kg of unsafe, expired or mislabelled food and other products.

It didn’t stop at private hospitality either. The same enforcement drive reached Vidhana Soudha, Vikasa Soudha, Legislators’ Home and the Health Department headquarters and even the Health Department’s own Arogya Soudha canteen was found with expired food and hygiene violations.

In June alone, the department covered 720 hotels and restaurants statewide, 871 food stalls, 600 anganwadi centers.

No commissioner’s name attached. No standing ovations and no viral clips either. Just a department running its process, unwilling to carve out an exception even for its own government’s address.

Delhi has run its version in parallel. FSSAI’s recent inspections of Andaz Delhi and JW Marriott in Aerocity found serious food-safety, hygiene, storage and licensing violations, including cockroaches, mouldy/rotten produce and inadequate pest control.

No commissioner became the story. The institution simply did the work.

In fact, And perhaps that is the less exciting story we actually need more of, across the country.

There’s just not enough enforcement when it comes to food safety in India. That is why it feels so welcome when we read these reports from Bengaluru, Delhi or Mumbai. It is also why they instill a certain fear when we discover that famous hotels and the dark stores of quick-commerce companies we buy from every day can have such poor hygiene and food-storage practices.

That fear is not necessarily a bad thing. We question more, analyze more, demand more… and overall awareness levels go up.

Of course, Maharashtra did produce the bigger headline – 3,137 establishments inspected between May 25 and July 31, 165 licences suspended and Rs. 55.72 crore worth of unsafe food seized or destroyed.

The news from last week was also that the Bombay High Court came down heavily on FDA officers in Maharashtra, asking them, “Do you think you (FDA) are a Lord …you can do anything?“. Why? For skipping due process in the name of speed and visibility!

So, this is not merely a theoretical concern about personality-driven enforcement. The Bombay High Court has flagged precisely the sort of institutional safeguards that can get lost when speed becomes the overriding virtue. In the case of five restaurants at the Mumbai Cricket Association’s BKC premises, the court found that the FDA had responded to an earlier direction to reconsider the matter with what it described as a “mechanical” and “pedantic” order, rather than applying its mind and taking the “pragmatic” approach the court had asked for.

The judges questioned why the department was acting in such “undue haste”, stressed that regulatory orders must give reasons, and warned of contempt proceedings when the FDA appeared not to follow the court’s directions. In the separate Cipla matter, the FDA had scheduled a personal hearing on a state government-declared public holiday, rejected an adjournment request and proceeded with licence cancellation! The High Court held that the procedure had to respect natural justice and ordered the process to be restarted. The point is definitely not that the FDA should be soft. Instead, it is that strong enforcement is not the same thing as instant enforcement. A regulator’s legitimacy comes not merely from having the power to act, but from exercising that power through a process that is predictable, reasoned and capable of surviving judicial scrutiny.

And this is where the communications story becomes an institutional one.

Karnataka’s 720-hotel sweep (including its own legislature’s kitchen) barely made national news. Mundhe’s 104-outlet drive did, because it had a named hero, while Karnataka’s did not. It sn’t as if one state enforces and the other doesn’t. But only one state’s enforcement campaign has acquired a face.

And there is a subtle but important problem with that.

If citizens start tagging one commissioner every time they find a cockroach in their food, that is certainly a compliment to the commissioner. But it is also an indictment of the institution that they no longer expect to work without him.

That is the real danger of personality-led regulation: not celebrity, but dependency.

Institutions accumulate memory. Inspection protocols, laboratory capacity, trained inspectors, case histories, data systems and enforcement precedents can survive any number of transfers. Personal brands simply cannot.

A strong regulator should make the institution stronger, not make the regulator indispensable. Because if the model is: one exceptional officer leading to aggressive action leading to public attention, which leads to compliance… then what happens when that officer is transferred?

The real institutional model should be: rules leading to manpower that lead to consistent inspections which lead to penalties backed by data and this repeating in a sustained enforcement cycle.

The commissioner should be replaceable. The enforcement should not be.

So the actual test of whether Maharashtra’s crackdown works or not hasn’t happened yet. It may happen on the day Mundhe is transferred for the 26th time in his career, and we find out whether “Safe Food Safe Maharashtra” was ever policy, or just one officer’s personal brand, borrowing the state’s letterhead.

Mundhe may have most definitely demonstrated the extent of what is possible if one honest and committed individual sets their mind to simply doing their job. But the real success would be if Maharashtra FDA can keep doing it after Mundhe leaves, and if Karnataka, Delhi and every other state can do the same without ever needing a “Mundhe moment”.

India doesn’t need one superstar food-safety officer in every state. It needs food-safety institutions that don’t need a superstar to do their job.

We don’t need to build cults around regulators. We need to build institutions that don’t need superstar regulators.

Even Tukaram Mundhe agrees.

The post Tukaram Mundhe’s 26th transfer first appeared on beastoftraal.com.

Visibility is an advantage, not an obligation: High-profile founders (Zomato) and reclusive ones (Swiggy) can both build enduring, market-leading brands – execution and reliability matter just as much as fame.

Additive vs. Expansive branding: Founder visibility succeeds when commentary constantly routes back to the core category (additive); it risks brand equity when it drifts into unrelated hot takes or general creator content (expansive).

Tone dictates trajectory: The distinction between vocal founders isn’t volume, but accountability versus combativeness – as shown by the contrasting market perceptions of Ather and Ola.

The long-term test is still underway: Internet-native founder branding in India is barely a decade old; today’s most-cited D2C success stories are only halfway through proving long-term brand durability.

The ultimate test is decoupling: A founder-led brand matures through a 4-stage lifecycle; true success means the company’s brand equity continues to compound even if the founder steps back or goes silent.

10 years ago, selling a consumer product in India meant hiring a celebrity. Today it increasingly means putting the founder in front of the camera instead, and, as advertising veteran Sandeep Goyal argued in a recent Business Standard column, for good reason. His diagnosis is worth starting from: India is a high-context, relatively low-trust market, so people buy into people before they buy into logos and brand names. A face is accountable in a way an anonymous entity isn’t.

Sandeep traces that shift to two other forces beyond trust. One is the content explosion (via Reels, LinkedIn posts, podcasts, YouTube videos, etc.) which means distribution is no longer bought on television, but earned by talking, and no one can tell a company’s story better than the person who started it. The other is capital: venture investors, in his framing, don’t just fund products anymore, they fund personalities, because “founder-market fit” has become as important to a raise as the business model itself. A founder who can sell on camera raises money faster, hires talent faster, and moves product faster.

Sandeep’s examples for this are hard to argue with. Boat went from a bootstrapped brand to India’s top audio company with Aman Gupta as its inescapable face. Mamaearth was built on its founders’ “new parents” story. Fintech founders at Razorpay, Zerodha, and Groww became educators first and executives second, and their threads on how UPI actually works routinely outperform anything an ad budget could buy. There are a lot more examples beyond Sandeep’s article too. Shashank Mehta and The Whole Truth. Revant Himatsingka and Only What’s Needed. Namita Thapar and Arth/Emcure.

Access, as Sandeep puts it, has beaten advertising. Community has beaten celebrity. Story has, in many cases, beaten product.

But there’s a genuine problem sitting below this success story, and Sandeep doesn’t smooth over it either: the same founder visibility that builds a brand can also become its single point of failure. His phrase for it is that you can’t scale a person – a founder can only do so many podcasts, handle so many crises, survive so many controversies before the personal starts contaminating the corporate. One bad divorce, one ill-judged post, one prolonged silence, and the brand can feel like it’s gone quiet with them. When a founder is the brand, HR issues become PR issues, and personal life becomes boardroom agenda.

This is precisely the fork Sandeep’s column arrives at. Having spent most of its length building an enthusiastic case for the vocal founder, it closes on an almost opposite note, with his argument being that the brands built to last two decades won’t be the ones with the loudest founder, but the ones where the founder eventually steps back, lets the product speak, and lets the community carry the story forward. Read on its own, that reads like a contradiction: the same piece that spent 800 words proving visibility wins ends by implying silence is what actually lasts.

It is not really a contradiction, though!

It is two different claims wearing one costume, and pulling them apart is where my post here wants to pick up from where Sandeep leaves off.

The question is never about “should founders be loud or quiet?”. My point is around, ‘what kind of loud, and what kind of quiet, actually determines whether a brand outlives its founder’s need to perform?’.

Founder-led is not one thing

Before getting to examples, it’s worth separating three things a founder can do with a public presence, because from the outside they look identical (because all involve similar tools, like posting, podcasts, interviews) but strategically they are not the same at all:

1. Being the face of the company. Visibility, full stop.
2. Building a personal brand that adds value to the company’s brand. Personal branding, properly defined, understood, and executed.
3. Becoming a content creator who happens to own a company. Essentially a media business.

The third is where things get dangerous, because a founder can become genuinely excellent at generating attention for themselves to the point where that attention stops transferring to the brand. That’s the real paradox of founder-led branding: the founder can become the company’s greatest distribution asset, and its greatest dependency, at the same time. Which mode a founder is operating in (and not how loud they are) is the variable that actually predicts what happens over 20 years. India’s startup landscape already has two live, long-running experiments that make this concrete.

Zomato vs Swiggy: a near-controlled experiment, and both sides win

Deepinder Goyal has spent close to two decades as one of Indian startup’s most recognizable faces. He has a point of view on food culture, logistics economics, city-level consumption patterns, among others… a presence inseparable from the Zomato (now Eternal) story. Crucially, that presence has stayed additive: even when a post doesn’t mention the company, it’s structurally about the world Zomato operates in. You rarely have to ask why the Zomato founder is talking about something – the answer is usually implicit.

Sriharsha Majety and Nandan Reddy, who built Swiggy into the co-leader of the same category, are close to the opposite case. Sriharsha in particular has been openly described as reclusive, in explicit contrast to Deepinder’s habitual visibility. Sriharsha himself has said, in one of the few interviews he’s given, that he never built Swiggy to make himself a public figure, and that he doesn’t worry about his own status the way some founders do. No large personal following, no recurring commentary – just the product and operations do the talking.

By the numbers this is close to a controlled experiment. Foodiebay/Zomato was founded in July 2008; Swiggy in December 2013. One has/had a vocal founder, one with near-invisible founding team, competing in the same category, for well over a decade. Both ended up leading it: Zomato/Eternal holds roughly 55–58% of food-delivery gross order value against Swiggy’s 42–45%, and both are now listed, profitable-or-nearly-so, and dominant. Swiggy is founder-built, not founder-dependent, and it still won.

There’s a wrinkle that sharpens this rather than complicating it. In February 2026, Deepinder Goyal stepped down as MD and CEO of Eternal, handing the top job to Blinkit’s Albinder Dhindsa and moving to the board as vice chairman, citing a pull toward “higher-risk exploration” better pursued outside a listed company. The company he built his personal brand alongside for eighteen years is now run day-to-day by someone else. It’s close to the ideal case study for the very tension the Business Standard column gestured at: the vocal founder built the brand, then, by choice, not scandal, stepped back, and the brand did not blink.

Neither posture is “more correct”, however. Zomato/Eternal’s moat leans on attention and cultural relevance; Swiggy’s leans on pure execution and reliability. Different assets, not different quality tiers. Which raises the sharper question that gets skipped when the debate is framed as loud-versus-quiet: what does founder visibility actually do for a brand that product, community, and marketing can’t do on their own? If the answer is “a lot”, then such visibility is worth building. If it’s “not much”, there’s no reason to manufacture a personality that isn’t already there.

Ola vs Ather: same “vocal” label, opposite outcomes

If Zomato-Swiggy shows vocal and silent can both win, Ola-Ather shows something different: not all vocal is the same vocal.

Bhavish Aggarwal is relentlessly online (somewhat muted only recently) and by most measures more visible than almost any Indian founder. But a meaningful share of that visibility has come from combative, not accountable, moments: publicly demanding an apology from an unnamed auto journalist over leaked pre-launch images and threatening to cut off media access altogether; a widely covered public spat with comedian Kunal Kamra over customer complaints about scooters piling up unserviced at dealerships; a “western illness” remark on gender pronouns that drew sustained backlash, and his repeated (first, second) trolling of auto journalist Hormazd Sorabjee. The volume is high. The tone is frequently negative, and once a founder is this fused with the brand, the two identities stop being separable. What Bhavish says, Ola is understood to have said.

Tarun Mehta at Ather has taken close to the opposite approach – not silent, but selective, speaking mostly through structured moments (launches, funding milestones, EV policy positions) rather than unscripted combat, and staying close to the category when he does. The commercial gap has widened accordingly. As of July 2026, Ather held the No. 3 spot in India’s electric two-wheeler market with roughly 14.9% share; Ola Electric had slipped to fifth place, at around 6.9%, down from double digits just months earlier.

None of this proves Ather’s quieter founder caused its rise, any more than Ola’s vocal founder single-handedly caused its decline… product, service record, and dealer network matter enormously. But it does demonstrate that founder visibility is neither a substitute for product nor a guarantee of reputation. When visibility turns abrasive, the founder’s personality starts contaminating the brand’s personality. The variable that matters isn’t loud-versus-quiet. Rather, it is what the loudness is spent on, and whether it’s building trust in the founder or spending down a reserve of goodwill on fights that have nothing to do with the product.

The 20-year math needs a historical reset

The Business Standard column’s closing framing (brands that last 20 years) deserves to be taken literally, because the number implies a starting point, and the starting point matters more than a casual read allows for.

20 years back from 2026 is 2006. It was the year Twitter launched, and the year Facebook opened registration beyond its original campus restrictions. The iPhone didn’t exist until 2007. None of that translated into founder-led personal branding as a real business-building mechanism in India at the time: smartphone adoption was in its infancy, data was expensive, and the creator economy didn’t exist in anything like its current form. The real acceleration came later, through the late 2000s and early 2010s as social platforms matured, and then decisively from September 2016, when Reliance Jio’s free-data rollout reset the economics of internet consumption in India altogether.

In other words: for most of the last 20 years, there was no infrastructure for a founder to self-build a personal brand independent of mainstream media and traditional PR. Founder-led brand, in the internet-native sense that’s usually meant (Reels, LinkedIn posts, X spats, podcast circuits) has really only been possible in India for about a decade or lesser, not twenty years. Which means the honest 20-year test can’t be applied to 2006-era brands. It has to be applied to companies founded around the mid-2010s, judged against 2036, not 2026, and by that standard, today’s most-cited proof points (Boat, Zepto, Mamaearth) are only roughly halfway through the test.

Which is exactly what makes Zomato and Swiggy useful again, not as social-media-era founder brands, but as the closest thing India has to a completed longitudinal run, spanning the pre-social and social eras both. 18 years for Zomato, 12 for Swiggy. That one vocal founder and one near-invisible founding team both cleared 18 and 12 years in the same category, and both built category-defining businesses, should make anyone suspicious of a universal rule that founders must become media personalities. Founder visibility is an available strategic advantage, not a strategic obligation!

Additive branding vs expansive branding

Here’s the distinction that explains why some vocal founders compound goodwill and others burn it, and it has nothing to do with how often they post.

Additive personal branding is when everything a founder says, however wide-ranging it sounds, ultimately routes back to and reinforces the category and the company. Deepinder Goyal talking about Indian food culture, logistics, or Blinkit’s operating model is, structurally, always about Zomato/Eternal, even unbranded. It adds to the reservoir and rarely spends it down, because the founder rarely wanders outside the zone where the brand has a stake.

Expansive personal branding is the opposite move: the founder treats the platform as a general-purpose soapbox, where the company is present but a minority share of the total output. Shantanu Deshpande at Bombay Shaving Company is a useful example, and a genuinely clever one, because much of his expansiveness is deliberate strategy rather than drift. His YouTube podcast, The BarberShop with Shantanu, was explicitly conceived as a marketing vehicle, built around founder-led, unfiltered content rather than slick advertising, on the theory that hearing from him adds more to the brand than any ad could. But his LinkedIn presence also regularly wanders into commentary well outside grooming, like entrepreneurship, work culture, ambition, and the wider life of a founder, and some of which (his widely discussed “grind culture” post, for one) has travelled far beyond BSC’s category.

That’s not automatically wrong. Expansive commentary can build a bigger personal following faster than additive commentary ever will. But it carries more surface area for controversy, because the founder is now personally answerable for opinions that have nothing to do with the product they’re accountable for building.

Additive branding is lower-risk and slower-compounding.
Expansive branding is higher-risk and can spike faster, in either direction.

Example:

PS: Of course, that wasn’t Shantanu’s last post at all

At what point does a founder stop being a brand ambassador and start becoming a creator? Once that shift happens, the incentive structure changes: a creator optimizes for attention, a founder should optimize for the company, and the two overlap but are not identical.

The founder-as-content-creator trap

This is the sharpest failure mode, and it isn’t about volume at all. It’s founders who stop building a personal brand in service of the company and start behaving like content creators who happen to run a company.

Shark Tank India has accelerated this pattern visibly: a founder appears on television, becomes meme’able, starts getting podcast invitations, accumulates a following, and discovers that personal visibility is itself an asset, distinct from the company’s. Soon they’re being asked about leadership, money, careers, productivity, India, AI, life, and it all becomes a virtuous-or-vicious circle of attention leading to more invitations leading to more attention, in which the company becomes almost incidental to the personality.

Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu is a useful, different-flavored example of the same underlying question.

His public commentary (on rural employment, education, India’s development model, indigenous technology, and of course, Indian politics) genuinely extends well beyond Zoho, and it’s intellectually substantive rather than opportunistic (though one can argue that his political perspectives do support the ruling regime, and hence is/can seem opportunistic). But it raises the same test: if Sridhar writes about ruling party policies, does that strengthen Zoho, specifically? Possibly, if there’s a connecting link. Does a large independent audience built around his general worldview belong to Zoho, or to Sridhar personally? The honest answer is usually “both, partially”, and it’s rarely 100% transferable back to the business.

None of this means these founders are wrong to have wide, vocal interests, or that their audiences don’t value the range – plenty of it is genuinely valuable public commentary, depending on how much you like them, of course. It means the founder’s personal brand and the company’s brand have partially decoupled: the follower is there for the person’s opinions, not necessarily as a signal of trust in the product or the company. That’s a legitimate creator strategy. It’s just a different game from the one “founder-led brand” is supposed to describe, and conflating the two is where the phrase starts to lose its usefulness.

A lifecycle, not a contradiction

Seen this way, the apparent contradiction that closed the Business Standard column isn’t really a contradiction. It may be describing a lifecycle that most founder-led brands pass through, whether or not the founder plans it that way:

Stage 1 — the founder supplies trust. Nobody knows the company; the founder explains why it exists.

Stage 2 — the founder supplies distribution. The founder’s audience lowers the cost of getting attention.

Stage 3 — the founder supplies meaning. The founder’s personality becomes part of what the brand stands for.

Stage 4 — the brand supplies its own meaning. Customers, employees, and communities tell the story without needing the founder to.

That 4th stage is the real test, and it’s also close to a diagnostic test any founder can run on themselves: If you stopped posting tomorrow, what would happen to your brand?

“Our reach would fall, but the brand would carry on” is healthy.
“Our engagement would collapse and nobody would know what we’re doing” is a warning.

And “actually, my personal following is bigger than the company’s” is a different warning altogether… evidence that what’s been built isn’t founder branding, but a separate media business with a product company attached to it.

What actually predicts durability

Remove all the false binary, and four variables do the work, in my opinion, and they map closely onto the diagnostic I already extensively use in my personal branding workshops: depth of category expertise, range of relevant topics, and the distinctive color a founder/person brings to how they say it, all filtered through whether what’s said can survive scrutiny.

1. Topic discipline: does the founder’s visibility route back to the category (additive), or has it drifted into general commentary (expansive, or full creator mode)?
2. Tone under pressure: when the founder speaks on something sensitive, does it read as accountable, or as combative and defensive?
3. Decoupling readiness: has the company built enough product and operational credibility to survive the founder going quiet, changing role, or leaving — the way Eternal has just had to prove, in real time, with Deepinder Goyal’s own move to the boardroom?
4. Selectivity: is visibility deployed at moments that matter, or is it constant noise regardless of relevance? Deepinder is especially very effective here. His personal responses have mattered a lot in how Zomato has weathered some crisis situations, wrought by their own rash ideas in marketing and operations. There’s a big difference to a logo explaining a blunder and apologizing for it, and a founder doing it, as part of their ongoing online content.

Zomato and Swiggy both pass on these terms, despite opposite founder postures. Ather passes and Ola largely fails, despite both founders being unmistakably “vocal”, in very different ways. That’s a much better lens than loud-versus-quiet, and it points to a better question than the one the founder-led-brands debate usually asks: Can the founder become famous? Vs. Can the founder’s fame compound into the brand, and can the founder eventually become less important without the brand becoming less valuable?

A founder can be the company’s most powerful distribution asset without being its only distribution asset.
A founder can be the most recognizable face of a brand without making the brand inseparable from their personality.
A founder can build a large personal following without turning the company into a subsidiary of their personal media presence.

The best founder-led brands will therefore not necessarily have the loudest founders, nor the quietest ones. They will have founders who understand why they are speaking, what territory they have earned the right to speak about, and how their visibility can add equity to the company rather than merely equity to themselves.

The post Founder-led brands: Is there a winning formula? first appeared on beastoftraal.com.

Zomato released a print ad that split the internet: “That’s a Zomato ad” vs. “I thought it was X”, where X is any brand with prominent use of red in marketing communications.

Here’s the detail nobody discussing this has mentioned: the ad ran in exactly one edition of one newspaper – The Times of India, Delhi. Not the national edition. Not The Hindu, Hindustan Times, or any regional paper. One city, one morning.

That single fact should reframe the entire debate, because everyone arguing about whether the ad “worked” is measuring the wrong thing.

For context, Zomato does national ads in multiple newspapers and multiple editions of The Times of India quite often.

And this ad has the hallmark (in terms of tone, design, use of red, the white text, font, etc.) of Zomato’s usual cockiness that grates some people.

The waste-of-money argument has a data problem

The most common take: this was an expensive front-page buy that most readers couldn’t decode, therefore wasted money. The evidence offered is always the same: a scroll of posts on LinkedIn, X, and Instagram from people saying they didn’t recognize the brand, or guessed Airtel, Kotak, HSBC, Coca-Cola, or BookMyShow before finding out.

That evidence has a built-in blind spot. Someone who saw the ad, immediately thought “Zomato”, and turned the page has zero reason to post about it. There’s no story there. The people who post are, almost by definition, the ones who were confused, annoyed, or delighted to finally crack the misdirected clue – the use of “bank statements” (as against using, for instance, ‘stomach’) and the number 18. Silence isn’t in the sample. You cannot read comprehension rates off a feed that only captures the confused and the vocal.

That doesn’t prove the ad “worked”. It proves the “most people didn’t get it” claim is unfalsifiable in either direction – nobody actually knows the real split, and treating a scroll of screenshots as a survey is the same move regardless of which side makes it.

Why one edition of a single newspaper, not fourteen across multiple newspapers

If Zomato’s goal was mass recall (that is, make all of India register “Zomato turned 18”) this was a strange way to do it, surely. A national brand with something to say to the whole country runs the ad nationally, in every major paper, in regional languages. Zomato ran it in Delhi. Once. In English.

That’s not the media plan of a brand trying to maximize reach. It’s the media plan of a brand trying to seed a debate in one city with a single print ad and let it travel online. This is exactly what happened. Every version of this discussion online eventually resolves the same way: someone points out that Zomato was the only major brand turning 18 that day, a fact one Google search away, and the mystery collapses.

The ad didn’t need everyone to get it from the page. It needed enough people to not get it immediately, post about it, and get corrected in public. That correction is the actual media event, and it costs nothing beyond the original single edition print buy.

Was this also a mildly cynical trick, using confused readers as unpaid distribution? Sure. Marketing built on manufactured confusion for algorithmic reach isn’t a new playbook, and it’s fair to find it grating. But grating and ineffective are different critiques, and most of the pile-on has been making the second claim with evidence that only supports the first.

There is, of course, a silent cohort who saw the red page in that single Delhi edition, guessed wrong (Airtel, Kotak, HSBC, redBus, or Coca-Cola), and simply turned the page. That outcome isn’t ideal in isolation, but it was an expected and acceptable byproduct of the strategy. The ad was never engineered for flawless, universal print comprehension across a heterogeneous newspaper audience. It was engineered for just enough ambiguity in one targeted market to generate the online correction cascade that actually carried the message. A perfectly obvious version would have generated near-zero earned media. But this version traded some wasted or misattributed impressions for disproportionate conversation at minimal incremental cost. Given Zomato’s heavily digital/app-first user base (the people who actually see the brand’s red in context of orders and bank statements daily), the print seeding functioned more as a spark for the platform where their core audience lives and amplifies. The silent misattributors represent the acceptable inefficiency in any earned-media play that relies on mystery rather than brute repetition.

The logo objection undercuts itself

“Why be so arrogant? Just put the logo on it” is a common criticism I encountered in the replies section to my LinkedIn post.

Play that out: a self-congratulatory “we turned 18” ad, logo included, is one of the most skippable print ad formats that exists. Nobody’s milestone-anniversary ad has ever gone viral. Strip the logo and add one taunt (“No logo required. You know who we are ?) and you’ve turned a non-event into a puzzle. The ambiguity is not a design failure that many people are piling on. It is the entire mechanism.

An ad engineered to be instantly obvious would have generated the one outcome Zomato clearly didn’t want: nothing.

Same logic answers the “why pay influencers to explain it” complaint. That’s not lack of confidence at all. It’s a clever backstop. Let the ad work on whoever decodes it unaided and nudge the rest via influencers and an app notification. Why leave 100% comprehension to chance when a cheap second wave gets you there anyway?

The mechanism’s reach extended beyond consumer correction threads. Peer brands chose to play along publicly, turning color overlap from a vulnerability into collaborative wit. For instance, Kotak Mahindra Bank didn’t ignore or complain about the red overlap. They publicly leaned in with a witty reply along the lines of: “Bank statements, food cravings… Red connects us both. Happy 18th Birthday, Zomato”.

When other brands voluntarily extend your cultural moment, you’ve created something worth engaging with rather than merely consuming or ignoring.

This also surfaces the meta layer that appeared in reactions: the ad triggered not just “who is this?” but a broader, higher-quality conversation about brand color ownership and distinctiveness in India (where red is shared by several large players). That’s sophisticated brand-equity discourse usually confined to marketing conferences, not public feeds sparked by a food app’s birthday notice.

On a larger level, there’s something poetically fitting about a brand turning 18 choosing this approach. At 18, humans are wired for daring, risk-taking, and not taking themselves too seriously… pushing boundaries with a mix of confidence and mischief, while still operating within some guardrails. Zomato’s ad does exactly that! It’s a controlled experiment in one city edition rather than a safe, national, logo-forward declaration. It dares to have fun, manufacture a puzzle, and invite the audience into the joke instead of lecturing them with corporate earnestness. Marketing purists may call it arrogant or wasteful. But in doing so, the brand signals it has earned the right to play, precisely because it has spent 18 years relentlessly building the equity (that signature red, that relentlessly irreverent tone) that makes the play land for so many. The milestone became memorable not despite the cheek, but precisely because of it.

What this was actually for

Zomato turning 18 is a functional data point, relevant to employees and investors, irrelevant to everyone else. There was no product news, no standout offer (the app just showed me a routine Rs.180-off banner tied to the 18th birthday), no reason for the public to care. On its own, the milestone wasn’t going to make anyone feel more attached to the brand.

The ad manufactured relevance the milestone didn’t have on its own. How? Not through a simple informational communication, but through a puzzle designed to travel. Whether that’s clever or try-hard is a matter of taste. But judging it as a reach-and-recall buy, then “proving” it failed using a handful of confused/critiquing social media posts as evidence, is answering a question Zomato was never trying to solve.

The post The one thing everyone missed about that Zomato ad first appeared on beastoftraal.com.

Now, after another new video has dropped (this one showing the remarkable process of manufacturing biscuits with Tamil words embossed on them) I’m even more skeptical.

Allow me to explain why.

First, a quick refresher for those outside Tamil Nadu.

More than 2,000 years ago, poet-philosopher ThiruvaLLuvar wrote the ThirukkuraL, a collection of 1,330 couplets that distill profound life lessons into just seven words spread across two lines. Incredibly concise, incredibly timeless.

If you studied in Tamil Nadu, you’ve almost certainly learnt at least a few of them in school. Some have become so popular over the decades that people quote them casually in conversations. Others have found renewed life through movies, literature and public discourse. Whether or not one remembers every KuraL today, the ThirukkuraL remains one of Tamil’s greatest cultural treasures.

Here’s a good resource for ThirukkuraL – in Tamil, English, with simple explanation.

Britannia’s idea is undeniably clever.

Instead of merely printing ThirukkuraLs on the wrapper, the company has actually embossed individual Tamil words directly onto Milk Bikis biscuits. The campaign asks consumers to discover these words, collect the remaining words by buying more packs, reconstruct the complete KuraL and upload it to a microsite to win prizes.

One important detail that I initially misunderstood (and I suspect many others might too) is that a single pack doesn’t contain all seven words required to form a KuraL. The words are scattered randomly across packs. Also, Britannia isn’t using all 1,330 KuraLs. The campaign revolves around just three carefully chosen KuraLs, whose individual words have been distributed across thousands of biscuits.

When I first heard about the campaign, I actually assumed each pack contained seven biscuits carrying one complete KuraL. That would have made immediate sense to me. A child or parent could assemble the verse at home, read its meaning printed inside the wrapper and perhaps even remember it.

But that isn’t the mechanic. And that’s where my skepticism begins.

The campaign’s starting insight, at least in the first film released in June, is that children are slowly becoming disconnected from the ThirukkuraL. The newer film broadens the idea further, showing adults admitting that they’ve forgotten KuraLs too.

In other words, Britannia begins with the premise that interest and familiarity have declined.

Yet everything that follows assumes exactly the opposite.

The campaign expects someone who is supposedly disengaged from the ThirukkuraL to notice a random word on a biscuit, think it’s interesting enough to preserve or photograph, buy more packs, figure out which of the three KuraLs that word belongs to, reconstruct the remaining six words and then upload the completed KuraL on a microsite.

That’s quite a lot to expect from an audience they’ve just described as having lost interest.

Successful collection mechanics usually work because at least one thing is already in your favour.

Either the intellectual property is already deeply loved, like Pokémon cards or the cricket stat cards we used to collect as kids.

Or the reward is immediate, like finding cash, coupons or under-the-cap prizes.

Or the collectible itself has standalone value.

Here, an isolated word like “kaRka” or “natpu” has almost no standalone meaning unless the person already knows the KuraL or is motivated enough to go looking for it.

That’s the contradiction I can’t quite reconcile. The campaign says people no longer care enough about the ThirukkuraL. But the mechanic assumes they’ll care enough to spend time, effort and repeated purchases trying to reconstruct one.

The friction doesn’t end there.

Curious to see how the experience worked, I opened the microsite.

On a desktop browser, I wasn’t greeted with the explanation itself. Instead, I was shown a QR code that had to be scanned using my phone. Fair enough.

But the mobile experience immediately asked for my name, my state (the campaign currently runs only in Tamil Nadu and Kerala) and my phone number. Entering the phone number triggered an OTP before I could proceed further.

Again, I found myself wondering whether this was asking a bit too much from the very audience the campaign itself describes as disengaged.

But interestingly, my biggest reservation isn’t even about motivation or digital friction.

It’s something much more fundamental. The campaign has fused the collectible with the consumable!

Think about the collectible campaigns many of us grew up with: Cricket cards, Gold Spot crowns, Big Fun bubblegum wrappers, etc.

What did they all have in common? The collectible survived after the product was consumed. You drank Gold Spot. The crown remained. You chewed Big Fun. The wrapper was saved.

The product disappeared. The collectible didn’t.

Milk Bikis turns that equation upside down. Here, the collectible is the biscuit itself. Eat it, and you’ve lost it. Keep it, and you’ve defeated the purpose of buying a biscuit.

Yes, you could photograph it before eating it. But then you’ve shifted the collectible from something physical to just another image sitting in your phone gallery.

Great collection mechanics also tend to become social experiences. Children compare collections. Friends exchange duplicates. People help each other complete sets. Entire conversations emerge because the collectible can move from one person to another.

What exactly gets exchanged here? A biscuit? A photograph of a biscuit? A screenshot?

The network effect that powers great collection campaigns feels largely absent because the collectible literally disappears once the product fulfills its purpose.

That’s why most FMCG collect-and-win campaigns separate the collectible from the consumable. The wrapper. The cap. A coupon. A printed code. Basically, something survives/can be preserved/exchanged.

Ironically, if the objective was to rekindle interest in the ThirukkuraL itself, there may have been simpler and perhaps even more effective behavioral designs.

Imagine every wrapper carrying one complete KuraL, with different KuraLs appearing across the range.

Or one line printed on one wrapper and the second line on another, encouraging people to pair and exchange wrappers.

Or QR codes that unlock simple stories explaining the meaning of each KuraL.

Or wrappers themselves becoming collectible cards that children can keep, trade and discuss.

Those mechanics reward collection, and reward engagement with the literature itself.

None of this should take away from what the campaign gets spectacularly right.

Printing Tamil words directly onto biscuits is a remarkable manufacturing achievement. The visual itself is instantly memorable. It’s culturally rooted, beautifully executed and almost guaranteed to generate PR.

Watching the second film, I couldn’t help but admire the engineering that made it possible.

But I also couldn’t shake off another thought. I wonder whether the client and agency became just a little too enamored by the sheer brilliance of that manufacturing innovation (the ability to emboss Tamil words on biscuits) that the behavioural mechanics received comparatively less scrutiny.

Because that’s where I think the campaign falls short. As manufacturing innovation, it’s remarkable. As PR, it’s memorable. As cultural symbolism, it’s beautiful.

But as behavioral design, I think it asks too much from the very audience it begins by describing as disengaged.

And that’s why, despite admiring the ingenuity behind it, I remain skeptical.

The post Britannia’s brilliant idea… and its biggest contradiction first appeared on beastoftraal.com.

I had not considered making a list like this earlier. But someone wrote to me the other day after seeing my Indian ads list if I can also make time for an international ads list too. It wasn’t difficult, but it was time consuming. I keep track of every ad I watch even though I choose to write about very few (relative ratio). And I archive all my notes, so it becomes easy to assemble all the ads, go through them, and pick my favorites.

The 10 that you see below is from a pool of about 4,500-5,000 odd international ads that I watched all through 2025.

The same caveat remains – I do not have access to how these ads performed. That is something available only with the brand team and the agency (media buying) teams. So, I do not bother with what I cannot control and focus on what I can. That is how I reacted to the ads and what made me like them, over many others.

And so, here are my picks for the top 10 international ads of 2025.

—

1- Chicken Licken (Agency: Joe Public)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

Stupendously good use of exaggeration in service of the product! The narrative trusts and respects its audience, does not explain/over-explain and lands the point beautifully. The sheer imagination just before we see the man-hole and after the man enters the man-hole is brilliant! This is the kind of creativity that AI cannot imagine (yet)!

2- King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre (Agency: Publicis Middle East)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

The one ad that touched me THE most in 2025. Like the first ad (above), the narrative (and the run time) trusts the audience to tell its story well, with patience and empathy. I also liked all the creative liberties taken while telling this story – they made me view the ad the second time, this time, not to be wowed by the payoff in the end, but to simply admire the writing that went into this ad.

3- Liga Contra el Cancer (Agency: Cheil Peru)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

This ad’s idea was the most inventive I came across all of last year. It’s a very topical idea, but framed in a completely unique way that is also perfectly meaningful. Cancer is a genetic disease. But the way to frame it as an ‘inheritance’ makes the narrative bold and noteworthy. Inheritance need not always be good (money, property). There are a lot of other things we inherit from our parents and this ad flips the popular notion around inheritance for a great cause.

4- British Airways (Agency: Uncommon)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

Very, very funny, and very relatable too! Excellent use of a quirky creative device to bring to life how jarring office work during a holiday would look like.

5- Netflix (Agency: Isla, Buenos Aires)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

Valentine’s Day campaigns are all about bringing people (couples) together, but this Netflix campaign from Argentina confidently splits them, but meaningfully, in service of an appropriate product feature. Solid thinking!

6- Amnesty International (Agency: BAR Ogilvy, Portugal)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

Phenomenally topical ad idea, and the best use of framing among ads I saw last year. As we see the things we take for granted around us break down gradually and the world going to __, here’s at least one ad that tells it as it is, while also making the narration smart and intelligent.

7- Pella (Agency: Singlethread)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

This ad is a sheer joy to watch! I watched it a lot of times last year Great choice of song and excellent moves by the young girl. Very imaginative way to show an otherwise routne product, in the most exciting and interesting manner mainly because the agency and the client decided not to focus on the product, but on what it enables! Yes, I did have a crib about the sequencing, but I presume that this is the full version of the ad while shorter versions without the jarring sequence we used in actual ads.

8- Dreamies (Agency: adam&eveDDB)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

The best billboard idea I recall seeing last year. It’s not a flat, 2D design, of course, but whatever’s been done (3-dimensionally) is brilliantly in service of the product being sold! This is thinking-out-of-the-box, quite literally!

9- Amazon Audible (Agency: Droga5)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

Strikingly imaginative story-telling for a product that I’m a huge fan of! The narrative brings to life how the product operates in our minds and what happens during the pauses. Even if you have never experienced this product, you could visualize how wonderfully it works inside your head!

10- Apple iPhone (Agency: TBWA\Media Arts Lab LATAM)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

Terrific thinking behind this ad’s narrative – one that thinks up the most extreme use-case for a product feature and concocts a heartwarming human-interest story to land it! Very Apple!

The post The 10 best international ads of 2025 first appeared on beastoftraal.com.