For a few years now, Indian festive advertising has been quietly rewriting who gets to sit in the family frame. The formula used to be simple—an entire household, three generations deep, arranged around a festival table. That frame is loosening. Brands are now telling smaller, more specific stories: friends as chosen family, a grandparent and grandchild, a single parent, and more often than not, a pet.
The shift tracks a real behavioural change, not just a creative one. According to Wazir Advisors data cited by Prardhana Chillarige, Creative Director at Gozoop Creative, India had 39.2 million pets in FY25, up from 28.5 million in FY20, with the number projected to touch 60.5 million by FY30; the pet-care market itself, worth roughly ₹10,300 crore in 2025, is expected to nearly triple to ₹ 25,000-26,000 crore by 2030. More than 90% of today's pet parents are first-timers, and the average pet parent has moved from the 40-60 age bracket to 18-30—a shift, Chillarige links to fewer siblings, later marriages and more DINK (Double Income No Kids) households.
Bollywood, she points out, never really treated pets as incidental—Tuffy in Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! had real responsibilities; Raja, the parrot in Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon had opinions—but what has changed is the vocabulary itself, with owners now calling themselves ‘hoomans’, ‘paw-rents’ and ‘fur-moms’. Wherever Indians build relationships, she says, rituals of love tend to follow, and that is what has made pet parenting worth a brand's attention.
Saurabh Jain, CEO of Zigly Pet Care, sees the same shift from the ground. Pet care in India, he says, has moved well past meeting a pet's basic needs into treating them as family, visible in the toys, gourmet meals, grooming and premium stays pet parents now plan around, and in pets increasingly getting a seat at weddings, birthdays and vacations. Zigly's own International Happy Pets Day event this year drew over 2,500 pets across its centres, which Jain reads as proof that pet parents are seeking real experiences for their animals, not just products. Pet care, in his words, is no longer a need-based category—it has woven itself into how families live, celebrate and spend time together.
It was into this widening definition of family that a Raksha Bandhan campaign from jewellery brand GIVA, starring Kriti Sanon, arrived—built on the idea that the bond of protection at the heart of the festival extends to pets too. The film showed Sanon tying a rakhi to her dog alongside her brother, a small but pointed extension of exactly the trend Chillarige and Jain describe: pets moving from the margins of festive advertising to its emotional centre.
The idea did not thrive on the Internet. Within days, the campaign was facing backlash over Sanon's outfit—a bralette-style blouse worn with a cape and draped skirt, which a section of viewers called inappropriate for the occasion. Actor and BJP MP Kangana Ranaut began the criticism, accusing the campaign of having Sanon tie a rakhi ‘in a bikini’ and calling the ad ‘intentionally creepy.’ Sanon pushed back publicly, saying the festival was a promise of protection she and her brother extended to their dogs too, since ‘they are family.’ GIVA held its ground briefly, framing the film as a celebration of pets as family, before withdrawing the campaign from all platforms once the backlash showed no sign of dying down.
For Abhijat Bharadwaj, Chief Creative Officer at Dentsu Isobar, the trouble was never the pet. People genuinely do tie rakhis to their dogs, he says, and that behaviour is real—but a real behaviour spotted as a trend is not the same as a story worth telling, and too many brands rush to make an ad out of the former without asking what they are actually adding to the latter. His sharper objection is to the craft: the styling, he says, belonged in a different film from the one the audience was watching, and that seam is felt even when it can't be named. The deeper miss, in his reading, was the script itself—an idea with an obvious, unmade destination. A sister alone on Rakhi because her brother is far away, a dog sensing something is off and sitting with her, the rakhi then tied to him not as a gimmick but as a stand-in for a bond that is missing—same product, same insight, same festival, minus the argument. Festive advertising rarely fails for want of a bad idea, Bharadwaj says; it fails when a decent idea is left unfinished and the gap gets filled with production value instead.
Ad veteran Abhijit Avasthi of Sideways Agency comes at the same tension from a different angle, starting well before the brief is written. Not every brand needs to show up for every festival or tradition, he argues, and the instinct to treat any occasion as content is one that smart marketers need to actively curb; the ones worth picking are the ones authentic to the brand and its user, where the fit is natural rather than manufactured. Beyond that, he sees no formula—how far an agency and marketer push a reinterpretation of tradition is a judgement call, not a science, and freshness for its own sake, done simply to provoke rather than because it is genuinely felt, tends to show.
On the takedown itself, Bharadwaj's view follows from his read of the ad: a craft problem, not a culture problem, and one that a sharper script would have made largely unarguable, since a fully realised emotional idea leaves little for critics to fasten onto. Avasthi takes a broader, more forgiving line on brands caught in this kind of storm. In the social media era, he says, pushing a tradition even slightly invites a debate from one side or the other—traditionalists accusing a brand of eroding custom, progressives accusing it of pandering to the old guard—and a brand that has been authentic and acted with the right intent should largely tune that noise out rather than treat every wave of backlash as a verdict. His caution is less about whether to hold firm and more about earning the right to: don't dump on every occasion that comes along, he says, pick the ones that are truly yours, and do something charming and authentic with them.
Between the two views sits the actual lesson of the GIVA episode: the instinct to widen the festive family frame to include pets was never the problem, and the data backs the instinct. What Raksha Bandhan 2026 tested was everything that comes after the insight—the judgement on when to push a tradition, the discipline to follow an idea to its emotional end rather than let styling and spectacle stand in for it, and the composure to tell the difference between backlash that reflects a real miss and backlash that is simply the cost of being seen.
