Advertising's new creative King kaun: Can Tanmay Bhat be the next Piyush Pandey?
Why are CMOs and brand managers so eager to give Bhat their marketing money and brands to play with? Can he be the next face of Indian advertising? Let's find out.
In India, when you think of advertising, more often than not, you think of a man and his moustache - Piyush Pandey. Ogilvy's boss Pandey has been the face of Indian advertising for an entire generation of marketers and audiences. Having sprinkled his magic on some of the most iconic advertisements of our time, be it Cadbury, Fevicol or Asian Paints, Pandey’s career is a legacy left for fresh recruits to learn from not just at Ogilvy but in the Advertising and Marketing industry. A well-known cricket fan and a masterful cricketer himself, he has had one of, if not the most incredible innings in Indian advertising.
But like in the game of cricket, captains change with time and generations.
Now there is another upcoming moustache-less face in the space. A favourite of marketers, he is often said to have the Midas touch. Every campaign he and his agency work on is considered absolute gold. Hit after hit, viral after viral, the sweet glaze to the ad-donut, Tanmay Bhat.
Bhat and his agency Moonshot have created a name for themselves in a rather short period of time. While Tanmay Bhat has been a popular figure amongst the youth of India for a while, he rose to mainstream fame in Indian advertising for his work for fin-tech brand CRED. Yes, we all remember those CRED ads that became oh, so popular for their vagueness and the gundagiri of Rahul Dravid. More on that later.
Bhat is a popular Indian stand-up comic. One of the biggest names in India’s stand-up comedy culture. He along with three of his close friends - also comics, founded AIB (All India Bakchod) back in the day. He then entered his influencer era. Began with gaming, moved on to vlogs and reaction videos. He is one of India’s biggest content creators and influencers today.
Coming back to CRED, a campaign written by Bhat and Devaiah Bopanna among others, featuring a series of advertisements that started with Indian cricketer Rahul Dravid. The campaign went on to feature multiple personalities in never seen before avatars, including legendary cricketers from India’s 1983 World Cup winning team, Olympic gold medalist Neeraj Chopra and singers Shaan and Sonu Nigam, among others.
Bhat and his team worked on other ad campaigns for popular brands that followed, which turned just as viral, if not more. From IPL campaigns for Disney+ Hotstar and Smallcase featuring SRK and MS Dhoni, to the Lenskart ads with Karan Johar, to seeing chess grandmaster Viswanathan Anand sweating his glands off for Subway and the most recent parody on Indian TV soaps for BoldCare, featuring Ranveer Singh.
According to Siddharth Banerjee, CEO Univo Education, one of the corner stones of advertising is creation of awareness and Moonshot has been able to create that hammerblow of attention and buzz via bold and unconventional stories often using celebrities in offbeat situations.
"What would be interesting to see is that they can create consumer preference and brand love - where there could be other creative magnifiers. That spectrum of work would truly make them a challenger to the current agencies” says Siddharth Banerjee, CEO Univo Education and one of India’s leading marketing minds," Banerjee added.
Ad purists may scoff at Bhat's approach to brand building, but there's no denying his immense popularity and growing influence in ad circles, as marketing heads clamour to get Bhat to work on their brands.
But why? Why are CMOs and brand managers so eager to give Bhat their marketing money and brands to play with?
One word, suffices for now - virality. The new holy grail of content. From what traditional ad agency leaders tell us, all brand managers want "kuch viral" these days. Instant hits are what they seek as marketing tenures get shorter and quarterly performance takes precedence over the long-term.
“Our job is to persuasion what persuasion is to magic. Just magic alone won’t work,” said Bobby Pawar, former chairman and CCO, Havas India.
“Brands go to Tanmay because they realise that this guy delivers hits. He was a stand-up comedian first and a bloody good stand-up comedian he is. So he obviously understands humour better than anyone else in advertising. Anyone who is a stand-up comedian is highly intelligent and highly emotionally intelligent,” Pawar added
"Kudos to Tanmay and his team. They have indeed created some of the most shareworthy work over the last couple of years. It’s been laugh out loud funny. And it has built rapid awareness for new brands. Tanmay is a great comic, so I can expect it to continue. The only watchword I have is that awareness is not the only thing a brand needs to succeed. What it needs to do is persuade people that it can play a more rewarding role in their lives. And persuasion best happens when there is an alchemy of logic (strategic solution) and magic (creative expression). Neither is as effective without the other."
“At a time when agencies are walking away from creativity, there's this guy who's just winning everything on the basis of his creativity,” he said.
“Tanmay Bhat is the poster boy of pop culture. He dives deep into data and has his ear to the ground. The company he keeps is mostly of creators or CEO’s. So ideas and idea buyers surround him. Humour cuts across all audiences and with that being his silver bullet he is slaying all the demons of traditional advertising,” said Roshan Abbas, founder, Kommune India.
In this digital age, it is essential to make an impact on the audience in a short frame of time. And Bhat delivers on that perfectly. His background as a content creator gives him the knowledge he needs to understand what audiences like and dislike. What will work and what won’t. Almost every brand manager, it seems, wants someone like that.
“We are content creators first. We have been writing and creating for the internet (AIB etc) for close to a decade now. So I think we understand the audience, their triggers, and the attention economy because we have been doing this for so long,” said Devaiah Bopanna, who co-founded Moonshot.
“Tanmay is still one of the biggest and most popular YouTubers in the country. He creates content across genres - gaming, tech, memes and popular culture. So he has first hand knowledge and access to understand how the youth think. He is one of the few YouTubers/content creators to have stayed at the top for a decade now. He understands re-invention and the ever-evolving writing styles like nobody else in the business,” added Bopanna.
Could Bhat be the next big name in Indian advertising? Could he potentially play an innings that comes close to that of ad-legend Piyush Pandey? There are a lot of factors and variables to consider here. But, one thing is for sure. Based on Bhat’s current trajectory and string of successes, he is sure to leave behind a legacy of his own in new age marketing for new age marketers to learn from and follow.
"The comparison with Piyush is very premature. The legend of Piyush wasn’t created in a year or even a decade. It wasn’t created by one famous one campaign or three. It is his amazing body of work over an amazingly long period of time. I should know, I was part of his team when the Piyush tsunami was but a wave. So let’s not go skinny dipping with Tanmay in the pool that belongs to legends. The time to maybe have this discussion if he continues to be on this roll for another five to ten years," said Pawar
Tanmay Bhat on hearing about the comparison being made between him and Pandey by industry folks said, "A comparison between me - an absolute newcomer and a legend like Piyush is absolutely unfair. I studied advertising in college and folks like Piyush Pandey and Prasoon Joshi were stalwarts who inspired me to be a part of advertising in the first place. I think my career in the world of advertising is just beginning and I’m just very very lucky on 2 fronts: I get to work with some very very gutsy founders and brands. And secondly I have an extremely talented team - Puneet Chadha, Deep Joshi and Vishal Dayama have been working with me and Devaiah Bopanna for almost a decade now, and honestly they do most of the heavy lifting. But since my name gets the clicks, I suppose I am often given credit for their work :)"
