How Startups Changed the Language of Indian Advertising
A slightly unhinged push notification travelled further than most TV commercials. How startups rewrote the voice of Indian advertising.
There is a specific tone that entered Indian advertising sometime between 2015 and 2020, and once you notice it, you cannot unhear it. It is a little sarcastic, a little too online, comfortable making fun of itself before anyone else can. It came from startups, and it changed how every brand in the country, including the century-old ones, learned to talk.
The push notification that became a voice
Zomato did not invent brand personality in India, but it did something few brands had done before: it let the personality live in the smallest, most disposable piece of copy a company produces, the push notification. A slightly unhinged 2am message about ordering biryani travelled further on screenshots and social shares than most television commercials of the same year. The brand voice was not built for a thirty second film. It was built for a fourteen word notification, and that constraint made it sharper.
Swiggy followed a similar instinct, treating its Instagram captions and customer service replies as part of the creative product, not an afterthought handled by a junior social media executive.
The founder as the front of the ad
CRED took a different route and made it just as influential. By casting retired legends like Rahul Dravid and Kapil Dev in deliberately absurd, self-aware films, it signalled that a fintech app could have a sense of humour about its own category, something banks had never dared to do. Around the same time, D2C founders started appearing in their own ads and Instagram videos, not as a cost-saving measure but as a trust signal. A founder talking to camera about why they built a product reads as more credible to a younger audience than a celebrity reading a script never could.
What this replaced
The old model of Indian brand voice was built for interruption: a jingle or a hoarding that had to grab attention in a crowded, mostly one-directional media environment. The startup model was built for a feed, where the ad has to survive being scrolled past by someone who did not ask to see it and can mute, skip, or unfollow in one motion. That changes the writing itself. Long, polished copy gives way to short lines built to be re-read and shared. Reverence gives way to self-deprecation, because a brand that can laugh at itself feels safer to a scrolling audience than one that takes itself seriously.
A brand's tone of voice used to live in a thirty second film once a quarter. Now it lives in every notification, every reply, and every caption, every single day.
The cost of borrowing a tone that is not yours
The obvious risk, visible on nearly every brand's Instagram page today, is that this voice got copied faster than it got understood. Dozens of legacy brands now write captions that sound like they are trying very hard to sound like Zomato, without the underlying product experience or customer relationship to back it up. The tone worked for the startups that pioneered it because it grew out of a genuinely new kind of company, one without decades of formal, corporate communication behind it. Bolted onto a hundred-year-old FMCG brand with no other change in how it actually treats customers, the same jokes read as borrowed rather than earned.
The startups that changed the language of Indian advertising did not just write better one-liners. They proved that voice has to come from somewhere real inside the company, or the audience notices the gap within a few posts.