During Diwali – India’s busiest time of the year, delivery app Swiggy launched their campaign, ‘Why Is This A Swiggy Ad?’ through OOH, front-page print ads and social media. A campaign consisting of just one single picture that got India buzzing with their own fan-theories, livestreams & online debates, all wondering why this actually was a Swiggy ad. It is now Swiggy’s most successful UGC campaign so far, reminding us of what advertising is really about: getting attention. Attention that saw 800,000+ people participate and made us India’s top searched question on Google during campaign week.

Swiggy – India’s #1 food-delivery app, valued at $11 billion, is on a journey towards transforming itself into an everyday super-app for millions of Indians across 500+ cities. What started out as a food-delivery business 8 years ago, now delivers groceries (Instamart), picks up & drops anything (Genie), offers deals and reservations at restaurants (DineOut) and even curates homegrown consumer brands (HandPicked). So much so, that Swiggy has become the poster-child of India’s tech start-ups with a consistent history of launching innovative services and features.

So instead of running the Diwali rat-race for media space during its busiest season, how could Swiggy remind its audience of how much they already love & know Swiggy? Or, do they really?

Objectives:

1. Generate earned media for Swiggy’s myriad services and features

2. Increase brand preference during the year’s highest business season

3. Maximise the potential of the brand’s pop-cultural relevance

‘Why is this a Swiggy ad?’ (#WITASA) – an elaborate yet simple thought experiment designed to tap into the Indian consumer’s (already existing) everyday Swiggy subconscious.

A week before Diwali, Swiggy dropped an intricately designed, puzzling creative over social media, billboards & print across India. The image was filled with dozens of clues, easter eggs, Diwali & pop-culture references and an avatar of Swiggy’s beloved advertising mascot: ‘the Gulab Jamun Uncle’, along with a simple question - Why Is This A Swiggy Ad?

Swiggy asked consumers to come up with creative fan-theories trying to make sense of it all and reason publicly using #WITASA why their theory made sense. Did the peculiar elements in the image have anything to do with each other? Was Swiggy launching a new feature? What was the uncle doing in outer space? What was this ad for? The best fan-theories would win ₹1,00,000 ($1200) each.

Our younger, internet-first (and most relevant) cohort of audiences don’t want to be advertised-to anymore, but they’re willing participants in fan-culture. So we reverse-engineered our advertising & got them to do all the work based on their own memories & associations with Swiggy. We correctly relied on them to co-create our advertising & its meaning with us - ultimately getting 800,000+ people interpreting their own Swiggy ad. It was an earned-media masterclass.

Luckily, there are clear traces of Swiggy across everyday life in India. The brand’s relevance in mainstream culture ran deep. Leveraging this, we encouraged creator influencers & their fans to go wild with their fan-theories and take their imagination to the extremities of what was possible by Swiggy - indirectly establishing our many services. A food app, sure. But, what else could this ad mean? Ultimately, if it made them think deeply of Swiggy, our job was done.

We launched through a series of billboards, print and our website, all displaying the same puzzling #WITASA artwork. Images of these placements soon started going viral on Indian social media, backing our earned-media strategy. Critically, our influencer execution was led by gamer and pop-culture creators whose fans were already tuned to appreciate the gamified nature of this campaign. So, all we had to do was ask the question and they obliged.

Over five days, our social channels promoted the ‘craziest-wackiest-can’t-believe-I-didn’t-think-of-this’ theory submissions, replying in real-time to each theory stirring the pot further. This generated traction resulting in more user-generated fan-theories meaning more interpretations of why it was a swiggy ad. This was reverse-engineered and viral PR.

Ultimately, winning theories were revealed by the fan favourite ‘the Gulab Jamun Uncle’over an 18-minute video while also calling out 100s of other theories he wanted to reject, generating even more virality.

A single picture that made the internet speak a thousand words - #WITASA is now Swiggy's most successful user-generated campaign ever. The puzzling nature of the campaign's CTA, all the fan-powered content and the influencer coverage around it helped 'Why is this a Swiggy ad?' become India's most searched question on Google for 3 days with even Google couldn't help but take part in guessing with a theory.

#WITASA went everywhere - from Twitter threads, 3-scroll LinkedIn posts, mind-boggling explainer videos, fan pages, and at one point - hundreds of thousands of people on a livestream discussing the ad.

Featured headlines & quotes:

1. Inception-esque

2. A celebration of creativity

3. Work like this makes us believe that advertising is truly a part of pop culture

4. Turns the basic premise of advertising on its head

5. Reminds us of what advertising is really about: getting attention

6. A masterclass in creativity

7. Encouraged people to study its ad like it was art

8. Creative Greed

Results:

80K+ user-powered theories

700,000+ concurrent users discussing on Livestreams

100% uptick on positive sentiment

603% increase in brand mentions

35.5Mn Reach among Indian Gen-Z

1000% increase in engagement on Twitter

500% increase engagement on Instagram

In India, food, language and customs change every 100 kms. ‘Why Is This A Swiggy Ad’ needed to showcase our in-depth understanding of India - through the elements in the artwork that referenced food cultures of different cities, the Indian culture of one-upmanship, Bollywood and even Diwali.

While designing the artwork, a challenge was to pick elements that would resonate with maximum people across all walks of life in India. For example - NASA’s image of India on Diwali from space, depicted on our campaign image, is a hoax WhatsApp forward that everyone receives around Diwali.

We had to choose recognizable elements that would make people go ‘Oh, that’s why it's a Swiggy ad!’ We also needed to show our understanding of the nuances and psyche of the Indian market - helping each user to tie those elements together in their own unique way and see their own Swiggy ad.