There is something uniquely Indian about knowing exactly what your neighbour is doing. Who bought the new television? Why did the cousin come over? What was that parcel? And why wasn’t I invited to that party?
Flipkart and Netflix’s recent ‘Entertainment Ka Pardah’ campaign takes this familiar habit of nosiness and turns it into a comic spectacle, making the awkwardness itself the entertainment. It is funny because it is uncomfortable. And it works because, somewhere between the exaggerated characters and embarrassing situations, audiences recognise themselves or someone they know.
That recognition points to a larger shift underway in Indian advertising. Traditionally, Indian ads have preferred to show us at our best—aspirational, confident, successful and endlessly improving. Increasingly, however, brands are discovering that the people and narratives consumers recognise instantly may be far less polished. The nosy neighbour. The overbearing mother. The embarrassing friend. The person who says the wrong thing. The brand ambassador that can laugh at themselves. The common thread is not simply humour; it is recognition.
Keren Benjamin, Associate Vice President - Brand Planning and Lead, Capital Z, White Rivers Media, elaborates, “Awkwardness creates instant recognition. In social feeds crowded with polished advertising, a painfully familiar moment makes people think ‘I’ve done that’, earning attention, shares and conversation.”
And in an environment where attention is increasingly difficult to buy, that involuntary moment of recognition may be worth more than another beautifully produced aspirational film. Solidifying this observation, Abhijat Bharadwaj, Chief Creative Officer, Dentsu Creative Isobar remarks, “Anybody can write a smiling family at a dining table. Only someone who has genuinely lived in an Indian building knows the neighbour who watches your window like it's a serial. Flipkart and Netflix built a whole campaign on exactly that, and the reason it lands is that you can't Google your way to that observation. You have to have been the person peeping, or the person being peeped at. Ajio does the same thing with the chappal (in their 2026 Mother’s Day campaign). A mother throwing a slipper is not a beautiful insight; it's an uncomfortable one, and that's precisely why the whole country recognises it instantly.”
Abhishek Raut, Senior Creative Director, Gozoop Creative frames this shift in light of consumers being able to spot when an ad is trying too hard to look perfect. “We are surrounded by perfectly-lit people, perfectly-timed reactions and perfectly-written lives. Real life, unfortunately, has none of these things. That’s why awkwardness works. The moment someone embarrasses themselves, gets caught doing something weird, or says the thing everyone was thinking but nobody wanted to say, people recognise themselves in it. It makes the brand feel like it has actually met a human being, rather than a focus group.”
And in an environment where attention is increasingly difficult to buy, that involuntary moment of recognition may be worth more than another beautifully produced aspiration film.
The same principle extends naturally to roasting-led or self-deprecating humour. Take for example, Boldfit’s campaign with Samay Raina and Suhani Shah, where the two lean on familiar truths to drive a point. Komal Aggarwal, Senior Brand Manager, Boldfit comments, “Consumers today respond to brands that understand the reality of their everyday lives, not just the idealised version of them. Self-roasting and situational humour work because they take those awkward, familiar moments that people experience but rarely talk about, and turn them into something culturally relatable.”
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Further disclosing the vision behind the campaign, she says, “At Boldfit, we’ve seen how humour can make a message feel more human without diluting the brand’s purpose. Our work with Samay Raina and Suhani Shah was built around this idea- when people recognise themselves in a piece of communication, the connection becomes far more natural, memorable and shareable.”
Often times, brands turn the joke inwards rather than simply observing awkwardness around them. By acknowledging their own quirks, limitations or contradictions, brands can lower the institutional distance between themselves and consumers.
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Palmonas’ campaign with Shraddha Kapoor and Amrita Rao, who was announced as the brand ambassador, is a reflection of this insight. “In our recent campaign featuring Shraddha Kapoor and Amrita Rao, we drew on the inherent irony of Shraddha, who is also a co-founder of Palmonas, introducing someone else as the face of a collection. Rather than overlooking that moment, we made it central to the narrative. The campaign also drew on a familiar cultural reference, presented in a fresh context. For us, humour is most effective when it is rooted in shared experiences and emotions that audiences can immediately relate to. When a campaign feels authentic and recognisable, it is more likely to move beyond being just an advertisement and become something that audiences enjoy, engage with and share,” a brand spokesperson notes.
One of the most popular recent examples of self-deprecating humour can be found Vijay Sales’ collaboration with Biswa Kalyan Rath, after the former referenced the brand in one of his stand-up comedy acts. “Our Vijay Sales campaign with Biswa Kalyan Rath built on an existing joke about the brand’s simple logo. Rather than inventing a new premise, we had staff repeatedly steer Biswa back to the products whenever he got distracted by it. The humour worked because audiences already understood it,” Benjamin emphasises.
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She believes that self-roast can be a sign of brand confidence, but only when the brand knows what it can afford to laugh about. “Roasting is powerful because humour lowers the walls between people and brands. The moment a brand is willing to laugh at itself, it becomes less institutional and more human. It feels like there is a person on the other side of the conversation. And we naturally find people who can laugh at themselves more endearing and accessible than people who are constantly trying to impress us. But you should never roast the thing people fundamentally need to trust you for,” Benjamin says.
Is aspiration dead?
The growing appeal of embarrassment, awkwardness, imperfection and self-deprecating humour inevitably raises a larger question: is the aspirational Indian ad losing its hold?
Not necessarily, industry experts say.
Ritika Shriram, Brand Strategist at Talented notes that consumers are becoming less impressed by polished advertising, but not because they have raised their bar for craft. “It is because one style of polish has been overused across categories for the better part of two decades, and repetition turned it into a recognisable genre instead of a story. What stops the scroll now is culture-first, slice-of-life work, because it isn't selling you a better life, it's handing you back a piece of your own.”
Citing Flipkart's campaign starring RD Sharma, she says that there was no usual larger-than-life budgets or A-lister celebrities. Instead, a mathematics author every 90’s kid quietly feared fronted Flipkart’s annual Big Billion Days campaign. “It returned a memory and audiences did the marketing for us.”
“We are suffering from a kind of ad-blindness at the moment. Polish has become commoditised so our brains have learnt to scroll straight past it. Embarrassment breaks that pattern,” Shriram says.
Bharadwaj also reinforces the idea that polish is not proof of anything now. “Fifteen years ago, a beautifully shot film told you the brand was serious, because that kind of production was expensive and rare. Today, a kid with a phone and a decent grade can get 80 per cent of the way there. So, gloss has stopped being a signal. When everything looks good, looking good buys you nothing. What people respond to now is evidence that you actually know them, and that's a harder thing to fake than a nice frame.
This essentially does not mean that Indian consumers are not aspirational anymore; but what they consider aspirational has changed. “For a long time, advertising gave us a fairly narrow picture of an aspirational Indian—urban, polished, cosmopolitan and culturally fluent in very specific ways. Social media has started breaking that hierarchy down,” Benjamin remarks, adding, “People still want beautiful things, interesting lives and access to new worlds. But they increasingly want to see those worlds inhabited by people who feel culturally closer to them. I don’t think this is a move from aspiration to authenticity. It is a broadening of the idea of aspiration itself. We’re moving from aspiration as looking up to aspiration as looking around.”
Social media is arguably the biggest force behind this recalibration. On platforms where creators build audiences through personality, spontaneity, inside jokes, self-roasts and unfiltered observations, ‘relatable’ has become a cultural currency in its own right. Consumers are no longer just passive audiences for carefully constructed brand worlds; they are constantly exposed to people who look, speak and behave more like themselves.
As Bharadwaj points out, “A generation grew up online where self-deprecation is the price of entry. You roast yourself before anyone else can, and that becomes the safest social position to occupy. Brands spent years being the last people in the conversation still speaking in press release voice while everyone around them was laughing at themselves. Some have finally caught up.”
Awkwardness, embarrassment and self-deprecating humour are giving Indian advertising a new way to cut through polished, increasingly predictable communication. But the shift is not about replacing aspiration with relatability. The real opportunity lies in knowing when these creative devices are rooted in authentic cultural insight, and when it is simply another creative formula. If every brand starts chasing awkwardness or humour, the very surprise that makes it work could quickly disappear.
