How Happydent's Palace Lit a Kingdom With Teeth
The brief was ordinary and the client was reasonable. Happydent White was a chewing gum that whitened teeth, the brand had a perfectly good international commercial about a girl going on a date with a brighter smile, and Perfetti Van Melle India asked its agency to follow it. What came back instead was a palace at night, lit entirely by human beings with gleaming teeth.
The Brief, and the Refusal
Rajesh Ramakrishnan, now managing director at Perfetti Van Melle India, has described the original ask without any retrospective mythology attached.
The brief, he said, was to bring to life the product benefit itself, a chewing gum that brings shine to the teeth. In fact, he said, they had requested the agency to follow their international commercial, which had a linear story of a girl going on a date and using the product to have a whiter, attractive smile.
Prasoon Joshi at McCann Erickson India did not do that, and his reasoning was cultural rather than creative.
He has said that he always felt a functional approach to gum that acceptably whitens your teeth would not be a solution for our country, which has paan and supari as part of the culture, and that he therefore followed his gut and exaggerated the benefit to the hilt.
That is the entire creative decision, stated plainly. In a country where a great many people chew paan, promising slightly whiter teeth is not a promise anybody is waiting for. The claim had to become so enormous that nobody would evaluate it as a claim at all.
Ramakrishnan describes the same logic from the client's side. Joshi's cultural insight, he said, was that in India the whiteness of teeth is not the priority, and therefore the global copy will not work, so the strategy was to use outrageous imagination and hyperbole to exaggerate the benefit and put forth the message in a surreal and imaginative manner.
How It Was Actually Made
The film was directed by Ram Madhvani of Equinox Films, and this is worth stating firmly because the credit is very often given to the wrong person. It was not Prasoon Pandey of Corcoise Films. The confusion comes from Prasoon Joshi's first name, and it has been repeated widely enough to become a standard error in Indian advertising retrospectives.
Madhvani, who would later direct Neerja, has talked about the production in terms that make it sound considerably less magical than the finished film.
The shoot took three days. The post took four months.
The palace is in Panvel, Maharashtra, not Rajasthan, for the reason most things in advertising happen the way they do, which is budget. The human streetlights were performed by traditional Mallakhamb practitioners from Shivaji Park in Dadar, with several of the dance postures by dancers from Kerala, and they were not composited in. There is no green screen doing that work.
Madhvani has been candid about what he was difficult about. His cussedness in ensuring the right quality of teeth light, he said, drove everyone up the wall.
He also tells a story that explains something about how the film feels. They had built the wooden bridge in Panvel, and his brother Nrupen had just bought a new cycle whose front wheel had come off, so that went into the film.
That detail is the film in miniature. It looks like an enormous piece of world-building, and parts of it are whatever was lying around.
The Music, and What It Won
The song is not decoration and the awards record proves it.
The qawwali was composed by Shantanu Moitra, sung by Kailash Kher, with lyrics by Prasoon Joshi. The hand-claps came about by accident: Madhvani has said the claps one can hear in the ad film for the qawwali are by Vishal and Shekhar, the composer duo, who were recording next door and were pulled in.
At Cannes Lions in 2007, Palace won two metals in Film. A Silver Lion in Sweet Foods and Snacks, and a Bronze Lion for Best Use of Music.
It is necessary to be exact here, because this is the single most misreported fact about the film. Palace did not win a Cannes Grand Prix. It did not win a Gold. It did not win a Film Craft Lion, a category that did not exist until 2012.
We know why it missed Gold because the jury president said so at the time. Bob Scarpelli, then chairman and chief creative officer of DDB Worldwide, explained that the device of teeth shining enough to throw light had been done, and on that basis the ad did not have enough votes to win a Gold Lion.
That is a genuinely useful piece of history, and more interesting than an invented Grand Prix. The idea was not unprecedented. What was exceptional was the execution, which is exactly what a Silver in category plus a Bronze for music describes.
India took three Film metals in total that year, two of them this film.
What It Did Not Do
A number of impressive business figures circulate about Palace. Doubled brand awareness and market share. Share rising from 6 per cent to over 25 per cent. Ninety per cent ad recall.
None of them survive checking. They trace to student coursework and slide decks, not to a company filing, an agency effectiveness case, or any trade report.
The more honest answer came from the client. Asked what the film delivered, Ramakrishnan pointed at something other than sales: apart from the love the commercial received, he said, it also inspired many future marketers to join and work for Perfetti Van Melle India.
That is a real and unusual benefit, and it is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a deflection. A famous piece of work changes who wants to work on the brand, and that compounds over years in ways a quarterly sales number does not capture.
Madhvani, for his part, has been unsentimental about the whole thing. He has said he has never been to Cannes, and that the year the festival was abuzz with the commercial, he did not go. His summary of what the film was worth is that Palace is certainly remembered, which is more of a reward than anything else.
He also offered the driest possible verdict on the product he made a masterpiece for. The gum itself, he said, was not much good for cavities.
Why It Kept Being Remembered
The film's afterlife has been longer than its campaign.
In December 2015, The Gunn Report named it one of the 20 best commercials of the 21st century so far, from a public vote of 1,754 respondents on work released between 2000 and 2015, and it was reported as the only Indian entry on the list. No specific rank within the twenty was published.
The industry reaction at the time gives a sense of how it is regarded domestically. Josy Paul, chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO India, said recognition like this comes once in a century. Santosh Padhi, then chief creative officer and co-founder of Taproot India, called it one of the best crafted television commercials the country has produced.
In 2023, it won a public vote run by Storyboard18 against thirty-one other Indian commercials.
Nearly twenty years after it aired, for a chewing gum, in a category nobody thinks about.
The Rest of the Craft
The production credits on Palace are worth setting out in full, because the film is routinely described as a triumph of imagination when it was at least as much a triumph of logistics.
The storyboard artist was Chetan Sharma, co-founder of Animagic India. The cinematographer was Hemant Chaturvedi. The film was commissioned at 60 seconds and delivered at roughly 85, and the client accepted the longer cut, which is why the version that survives runs the length it does.
Ram Madhvani has said that the film premiered on the television weekend premiere of Bunty Aur Babli, a detail worth attributing to him rather than stating flatly, since that film's theatrical release was in May 2005 and the dates sit slightly awkwardly against a 2006 production.
The whole thing took around six months from start to delivery, of which three days were the shoot.
That ratio is the story. Almost all of the work was in post, getting the quality of light coming off the teeth to a standard Madhvani was willing to accept, which is what he was referring to when he said his cussedness about it drove everyone up the wall.
The T-Shirt, and Two Versions of It
One anecdote from Cannes 2007 has attached itself permanently to this film, and it exists in two incompatible versions.
In one, John Hegarty wore a shirt reading Happydent for Titanium. In the other, Trevor Beattie wore, and then gifted to Prasoon Joshi, a shirt reading Happydent For Grand Prix.
Same festival, same joke, different person and different slogan, and the two accounts cannot be reconciled from the available sources.
It is worth flagging rather than picking a version, because this small piece of folklore is almost certainly the origin of the film's most persistent factual error. A novelty T-shirt campaigning for a Grand Prix, retold enough times, becomes a Grand Prix that was won.
It was not. The film took a Silver and a Bronze in Film, and the jury president explained on the record why it went no higher.
The afterlife has been kinder than the jury was. Beyond the Gunn Report listing in 2015, the film won a public vote run by Storyboard18 in 2023, beating thirty-one other Indian commercials.
Which is a reasonable summary of where Palace sits. The industry's judges thought the central device was borrowed. The public has never stopped voting for it.
Why It Built India
Palace belongs in Campaigns That Built India because of what it proved about craft.
Indian advertising has never lacked ideas, and it has rarely lacked cultural insight. What it lacked for a long time was international confidence in its execution. The assumption, held inside the industry as much as outside it, was that Indian work could be clever and locally resonant but that the finish would give it away.
This film was made for a mass-market chewing gum, on a budget that could not afford Rajasthan, in three days, using acrobats from a Mumbai park instead of visual effects. And it went to Cannes and came back with two metals in Film, in a year when the entire country won three.
The other thing it settled is more useful to anyone making advertising now. The client asked for the international commercial. The agency said the international commercial would not work here, and explained why in cultural terms rather than creative ones, and the client let them go.
Every part of that chain had to hold. If Joshi had accepted the brief, or if Perfetti had insisted on the global copy, or if Madhvani had agreed that four months of post on a gum ad was excessive, there would be nothing to remember.
A palace lit by human beings, in a country where the promise of whiter teeth means very little.
Somebody decided the honest answer to a small product claim was to make it enormous, and then somebody else spent four months making the light look right.
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