On Friday, over the usual drink, I showed Vermajee the latest Rungta TMT advertisement featuring Shah Rukh Khan, Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt. He watched it to the end, then raised his glass and said, “Cheers to the brave whistleblower who must be laughing now.”
I looked at him. “Which whistleblower? Where does this come from?”
“The one who knows told us how some of the script actually got written.”
That was an interesting thought.
The advertisement begins with the brand owner presenting an idea to the three stars. The idea is simple enough: bring Shah Rukh Khan, Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt together and make them dance to Hookah Bar.
Naturally, the celebrity stars are not impressed.
After all, if you have Shah Rukh Khan, Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt sitting together, you cannot possibly waste the opportunity on somebody else’s idea.
So they start pitching their own.
SRK brings in Don. Ranbir turns SRK’s own dialogue against him and moves towards Rockstar. Alia tells Ranbir, “O nadan parinde, baith ja,” and brings Jigra into the conversation. SRK gets his turn again.
It becomes less of a commercial and more of a Bollywood family WhatsApp group, where everyone has watched everyone else’s films and believes that makes them qualified to critique the script.
And then, after all this intellectual property has been cheerfully cannibalised, the original idea prevails.
They dance to Hookah Bar for the TMT brand.
At this point, I could almost hear the whistleblower’s laughter.
The whistleblower copywriter, with a specific objective, wrote the script and understood one very important thing about celebrity advertising: the easiest way to make three superstars interesting is to stop treating them like superstars.
Let them compete. Let them believe their own filmography can answer every creative problem. And that is where the ad becomes fun. The three stars are not merely endorsing Rungta. They are weaponising their own celebrity. And because each of them has enough cinematic achievements to fill a streaming platform, they have plenty of ammunition.
This is also why the film avoids becoming another TMT advertisement in which a serious-looking engineer stands beside a steel rod and tells us about strength, durability and trust.
We have seen such films repeating this tag many times.
The Rungta film instead makes the category the joke. TMT advertising normally wants to make steel look heroic. This one makes steel advertising look slightly ridiculous and is definitely much more entertaining.
Somewhere the agency team must be having a particularly good laugh.
Because let’s suspend reality and the hard work advertising does and, for a moment, imagine the meeting.
Someone says, “Let’s get Shah Rukh, Ranbir and Alia.” And off-course everyone agrees.
Then someone asks, “What will they do?” And suddenly the silence is thicker than the Delhi fog in December.
Then somebody, perhaps dangerously, says, “What if they pitch their own ideas?” The brand owner utters the line that every agency creative dreams of hearing: “Let’s do it.”
Of course, in the real world, there would have been presentations, feedback, client comments, brand guidelines, celebrity approvals, legal checks and probably several rounds of “Can we make it a little more mass?”
But we don’t need to see any of that, and it’s fine. The beauty of the film is that it jumps directly to the madness.
Osho once wrote extensively about creativity, rebellion and breaking away from the predictable. I wonder what he would have made of advertising. I am sure that he would have discovered that the greatest act of rebellion in advertising is not producing a new idea; it is getting the client to approve it.
That’s why Vermajee praised the whistleblower, because that person in the room knew this entire piece is an elaborate joke on the business of advertising itself.
The celebrity thinks he has a better idea. The next celebrity thinks he has a better idea. And the third celebrity wants to steal the thunder by proving both of them were wrong.
The brand owner watches patiently. At the end, everybody does exactly what was suggested in the first place. It is almost philosophical or, as Vermajee would say, “That is advertising.”
The film has been created by The Script Room, with trade coverage describing the campaign as a humorous take on the TMT category and its familiar advertising conventions. With stars like that, there is always a risk that Shah Rukh Khan, Ranbir Kapoor, and Alia Bhatt will be remembered more than the brand.
But perhaps that is the price of putting three celebrity stars ( note we have 33% Women representation) in a room discussing script ideas. You cannot invite a tiger, a lion and a leopard to sell the jungle and then complain that nobody noticed the trees.
What I like about this advertisement is not that it is clever. It knows it is clever and doesn’t try too hard to prove it. The agency and the brand threw the three stars in a room, their inflated egos fuelled by their filmographies, to have fun.
I suspect the whistleblower is still laughing, knowing whose idea it really was and if this is how the idea was finally approved, I have only one question.
Who was brave enough to blow the whistle and say, “Guys, this might actually work”?
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