How Indian Brands Are Using Culture as a Media Plan
Amul has been reacting to the news since 1966. Why the rest of the industry is only now catching up to using culture as its media plan.
Amul has been posting a topical cartoon reacting to the news since 1966. For most of that history it looked like a charming, low-cost oddity, a butter brand doodling on current events instead of buying television time. It now looks like the earliest version of a media strategy every marketer in the country is trying to copy: using the culture people are already talking about as the distribution channel, instead of paying to interrupt them with something unrelated.
The insight nobody wanted to admit for decades
The reason this took so long to become standard practice is simple. A campaign built around a cricket match, a festival, or a viral moment is inherently unpredictable and hard to plan a quarter in advance, which makes procurement and legal teams nervous. It is much easier to book a media plan for a scripted thirty second film than to keep a team on standby, ready to respond to a cricket win or a trending topic within the hour. Amul's in-house model, small team, fast approval, decades of institutional trust in that team's judgement, was almost impossible for a large FMCG brand with layers of sign-off to replicate.
What changed to make this scalable
Social media removed the two biggest obstacles: production cost and distribution cost. A reactive post no longer needs a shoot, a jingle, or a media buy to reach millions of people. It needs a fast idea, a design template, and a brand account with an existing following. That is why the last decade has seen an explosion of brands trying to insert themselves into cricket wins, film releases, and festival weekends with a quick graphic or line, chasing the same effect Amul had been quietly building for fifty years.
Amul was never really in the butter advertising business. It was in the business of being part of the day's conversation, and the butter happened to be what it sold.
The difference between culture and noise
The uncomfortable truth is that most brands attempting this today are producing noise, not culture. A generic graphic congratulating a cricket team, indistinguishable from fifty other brands posting the same message within the hour, adds nothing to the conversation and is forgotten within minutes. What made Amul's approach work for decades was a genuine point of view buried in the joke, a specific, sometimes risky take on the news rather than a safe congratulatory message everyone could have written. Culture as a media plan only works when the brand actually says something, rather than simply showing up to prove it noticed the same headline as everyone else.
Why this is harder to sustain than it looks
The other cost rarely discussed is the toll on the team producing this content. Being ready to respond within the hour to a cricket win, an election result, or a celebrity announcement means someone is effectively on call for the brand's cultural relevance around the clock. Amul's model has worked because it built a specific, small, empowered unit for exactly this job over decades. Brands trying to bolt real-time cultural response onto an existing social media team, with the same approval layers as a scheduled campaign, usually end up either too slow to matter or too anxious to say anything with an actual point of view. Culture moves in hours. Most brand approval processes still move in weeks.