Rahul daCunha, Keeper of Amul's Sixty-Year Voice
Very few brands have had the same family answer the question of what they should say about the news for almost sixty consecutive years.
Most advertising relationships between a brand and its agency last a few years before a review, a new CMO or a merger ends them. The relationship between Amul and the daCunha family has lasted since 1966, through two generations of the same agency, which makes it one of the longest unbroken creative partnerships in the history of advertising anywhere.
The father who found the girl
Sylvester da Cunha, Rahul's father, was managing director of the agency ASP when he won the Amul account in the mid-1960s and was asked to help position the brand among mothers and children. Working with art director Eustace Fernandes, he went through photographs of more than seven hundred babies before settling on ten-month-old Shoba Tharoor as the visual inspiration for what became the Amul Girl, the polka-dotted mascot who has commented on Indian news and culture ever since. Da Cunha founded daCunha Communications with his family in 1971 and ran the Amul relationship for close to three decades. He died in June 2023 at the age of ninety-two, mourned across the advertising industry as one of its defining figures.
A son who chose to inherit it
Rahul daCunha joined the family agency in 1993 after a decade working at other agencies, Lintas and Contract among them, a deliberate choice to build his own credentials elsewhere before stepping into a business that carried his father's name and his father's most famous creation. He has now run the creative side of the Amul topical campaign for over thirty years himself, making the combined da Cunha stewardship of a single brand's voice stretch close to sixty years across two people.
Very few brands have had the same family answer the question of what they should say about the news for almost sixty consecutive years.
What changed and what did not
Rahul has spoken publicly about how the speed of the campaign changed with the arrival of digital media, with the internet surfacing what audiences are actually discussing in real time in a way that a print or hoarding-only era never could. What has not changed is the underlying discipline the campaign has always required: a strong, sometimes risky point of view on the news of the day, delivered fast enough to still be relevant, without ever straying into territory, religion among it, that could damage the brand rather than build it.
A parallel life outside advertising
Unlike most advertising executives who stay within the industry, Rahul has maintained a genuinely separate career as a playwright, theatre director and photographer for the same three decades he has run the Amul account, a balancing act his father also managed in his own generation as an advertising professional with serious theatre credentials. That outside creative practice appears to be part of what keeps the topical campaign from calcifying into formula, since it is being run by someone whose creative instincts are also being exercised somewhere the client never sees.
The rarest kind of brand builder
Rahul daCunha is not a founder and did not invent the character that made his family's agency famous. His contribution is continuity itself, keeping a single, distinctive, risk-taking brand voice alive and current across three generations of Indian audiences, without letting it either fossilise into nostalgia or drift into something the original creator would not recognise. Few agencies get to test whether a brand voice can actually last sixty years. Fewer still have kept it in the same family that whole time.