Every brand wants to go viral. Very few can explain, with any precision, why one campaign spreads and a nearly identical one from a competitor disappears without a trace. With the average person exposed to somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 brand messages a day, the campaigns that actually break through follow a pattern that has very little to do with budget, and everything to do with what happens after the first spike of attention fades.
Amul: A Case Study in the Longest-Running Idea in Indian Advertising
Since 1966, Amul has run some version of the same format, a small topical cartoon panel, usually featuring the Amul girl, reacting to whatever is dominating the news cycle that week. A budget announcement, a cricket final, a film release, a political headline, almost nothing is off limits, and the brand has produced a fresh take on it within days, sometimes hours, for close to six decades.
That makes it, by most accounts, the longest continuously running ad campaign in the world. Not the biggest budget campaign. Not the most technically ambitious. The longest running, because the format itself was built to survive change rather than resist it.
Ask someone in India what an Amul hoarding looks like and they can describe it without having seen one that week. The blue and white palette, the pun-driven headline, the Amul girl reacting to the news. That level of instant recognition, built over decades, is not an accident of good creativity. It’s the compounding result of never having to reintroduce the format to the audience.
Why It Still Works
The reason Amul can produce a new topical ad every single week without the format going stale is that the format was never really about any single joke. It was about a reliable promise: whatever just happened in the news, Amul will have something clever and quick to say about it, and it will look unmistakably like Amul the moment you see it.
That promise does two things at once. It gives the brand permission to comment on almost anything, since the format itself signals playfulness rather than corporate messaging. And it means every single execution, good or middling, still reinforces the same underlying brand asset, because the audience isn’t evaluating each ad in isolation. They’re tracking a decades-long relationship with a format they already trust.
Compare that to what happened in April this year, when Dhurandhar 2 handed the internet an unexpected breakout star. Despite Ranveer Singh’s character carrying the film’s central plot, it was a single supporting line, delivered by veteran actor Rakesh Bedi as the character Jameel Jamali, “Mera bacha hai tu,” that actually broke through online. The moment behind it was small, a beat of dry, deadpan affection that landed harder than anything scripted for the lead, and within days it had spun off into a full-blown Instagram trend of its own. Brands from FMCG to healthcare wanted their own version of it, reposting the line with their own product dropped into the frame. A few weeks later, most of those recreations had blurred into a single generic wave nobody could tell apart, screenshots buried somewhere in a monthly engagement report and nowhere in anyone’s memory.
The one brand that got something lasting out of it was Crocs India, which didn’t stop at a quick recreation. It brought Rakesh Bedi himself into a full campaign, built around the same line, but extended into something the brand could genuinely claim credit for rather than simply borrow. That’s the difference between trend participation and trend ownership, and it’s the same underlying principle Amul has been running on for close to sixty years, just compressed into a single moment instead of stretched across decades.
The Anatomy of a Campaign That Sticks
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1
A format simple enough to repeat indefinitely. Amul’s premise, react to the news, stay visually unmistakable, fits in one sentence, which is exactly why it has survived thousands of executions without exhausting itself.
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2
Ownership of the space the moment sits in. A brand capitalising on a moment works when it goes further than a recreation, the way Crocs India did by bringing the actual actor into its campaign instead of just riffing on the line. Everyone else who stopped at a quick recreation blurred into the same wave and got forgotten within it.
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3
Something that rewards a second look. Campaigns that only work on the first glance rarely get shared twice. Amul’s puns often reward a beat of thought before they land, which is part of why people screenshot and forward them instead of scrolling past.
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4
A brand identity strong enough to absorb the risk. Commenting on a sensitive news event, the way Amul regularly does, only works because decades of consistency have already established the brand’s tone. The same joke from a brand with no established identity would read as opportunistic instead of witty.
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5
Infrastructure that can move as fast as the moment. Amul’s ability to produce a relevant ad within a day of a news event isn’t a happy accident, it’s a deliberate creative and approval process built for speed. Crocs turning a meme into a full campaign within weeks required the same kind of readiness. Brands that need three rounds of internal sign-off before a topical post goes out are structurally incapable of this, no matter how good their creative team is.
The Cost of Getting the Timing Wrong
Speed cuts both ways. A brand that reacts to a moment too late looks like it’s chasing relevance rather than participating in the conversation naturally, and the internet is unusually quick to notice the difference. Several of the brands that jumped on the Dhurandhar 2 moment weeks after it had already peaked ended up generating a different, less useful kind of attention, the kind that reads as a brand trying too hard rather than one that’s genuinely tuned in.
This is part of why the infrastructure point above matters as much as the creative idea itself. A brilliant reactive concept that takes ten days to get approved has usually missed its window by the time it ships.
Before You Chase a Trend, Ask
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Does this moment connect to something our brand already, genuinely stands for?
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If we removed our logo, would this still feel unmistakably ours?
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Are we adding to an idea we’ve already built, or starting from zero again?
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Can we actually move fast enough for this to land while the moment is still alive?
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Will this be rememberable in a week, or only shareable today?
Why This Matters Commercially
A viral moment without a narrative underneath it is a spike, not an asset. It shows up in a week’s engagement numbers and vanishes from memory just as fast, leaving behind nothing the brand can point to a year later. A repeated idea, the way Amul has run its format for nearly six decades, compounds into something closer to what Deloitte found trusted, consistent brands achieve, up to a 400% outperformance over less consistent peers in market value.
The commercial difference shows up in what each approach actually buys. A single viral moment buys a week of impressions. A durable format, built the way Amul’s has been, buys decades of built-in relevance, media coverage that comes looking for the brand instead of the other way around, and a level of public goodwill that a one-off campaign, however clever, simply cannot generate on its own.
At Equations PR & Media, we build the idea first, because that’s the part that has to survive long after the moment that made it visible has faded.
