Iit’s an advertising campaign that hasn’t changed its brand basics ever since it started 46 years ago. Every hoarding is eagerly looked forward to, every tongue-in-cheek message it puts across is an SMS and email forward. It has entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the “longest running ad campaign in the world”. Rahul DaCunha — the creative director of DaCunha Associates — has followed in the footsteps of his father to make the Amul Butter brand campaign one of the most iconic and recalled.

Cholbe na, cholbe na

The Amul butter campaign is not a recent phenomenon, but is a story that has been around for the last five decades. In the 1960s, there wasn’t a lot of media available to advertisers. There was no television. At that time, my dad (Sylvester DaCunha) felt that the outdoor media needed to be explored because it was largely unused.

He was, at that time, asked by Amul to do a campaign for Amul Butter. Then, ads for food products, most often, showed only stills of food. But he wanted the butter brand to reach out to children. So, he along with cartoonist and illustrator Eustace Fernandes came up with the idea of having an animated little girl who would appeal to kids. And that’s how the Amul girl and the line “Utterly Butterly Delicious Amul” was born.

From 1966 when they came up with the idea till about 1969-70, the messages on the hoardings were very few and far between. Most of them were also not of a very topical nature. The emphasis, as far as the messages were concerned, remained on keeping it cute.

Interestingly, when we decided to go topical, it was for a message that had Bengal at its core. The Naxalite movement was very big at that time and Cholbe na, cholbe na was their slogan. So, dad came up with this line: “Bread without Amul Butter, cholbe na cholbe na”. That became the first topical and unintentionally controversial Amul hoarding. And everyone just sat up and said: “Hey, this works!” We then started commenting on current events and that’s what we have been doing for close to half a century now.

Now, more than 40 years in the business, we have become much more current, much more cutting-edge in our messaging. In the ’60s, it was just about five hoardings across the country; today we have Amul billboards in 100-plus cities and towns.

In fact, our job, in a way, has become easier now because India has become a much more controversial country. I think there is a lot of news, often bad news, around. The country is on the edge, we are now a far louder nation than we have ever been. And our hoardings also reflect that change. Someone said something very nice to me the other day. He said: “You know in all the madness... the fact that the Amul hoardings are still there is some sort of a comfort factor.”

Now we change our message every three days, as opposed to when we started out, when it would be just once a month. Three days literally means finishing one and moving on to the next immediately. And we have never run out of ideas. That just goes to show how much is happening in this country.

We often go multilingual. That means we have separate hoardings for different regions on the basis of any topical event that may have happened there. Like when (Sourav) Ganguly was not picked for the Indian team, we did a hoarding only for Calcutta, only for Ganguly. We try and go regional as much as we can.

My writer Manish Trivedi has been writing the Amul hoardings for the last 15-16 years. Typically, every Monday morning, Manish and I sit and shortlist all the events and people who have made some sort of news in the past week. We zero in on five or six potential topics for the week. Next, we sit and look at region-centric news. For example, both KKR and Kings XI Punjab are doing better in the IPL than they did last year. So, automatically, we did a hoarding for KKR only in the east. Then in Mumbai, there was a recent controversy regarding paani puri and we did a hoarding on the same only for the city.

Hoardings have been our primary source of advertising for Amul Butter. In places where there are no hoardings — like in Delhi — we have print advertisements. And the hoardings are also present on the backs of the Amul packs.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

It’s been five decades since we have had the same campaign roadmap for Amul Butter, but we have never thought of changing. It works for us, so why even look at anything. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

There have been millions of campaigns that have run into controversy. In the ’90s, there was this whole controversy about Jagmohan Dalmiya. We ran a hoarding about him that said “Dalmiya mein kuch kaala hai”. He got really upset and threatened to sue us.

We live in tricky times where Indians can’t laugh at themselves anymore. We could make fun of people 10 years ago and they would take it in the right spirit, but now that isn’t the case. So we always have to be very careful. What has worked for us is that we have never laughed at whatever we have messaged about. We take serious issues and twist them around, but we have never been malicious.

There have been some who have really liked what has been said about them. Last year, when Rahul Gandhi travelled by local train in Mumbai we did a hoarding that said “Chalti ka Naam Gandhi”. And Rahul loved it! He asked for a copy and we sent it across to him. We did a hoarding on M.F. Hussain and he liked it so much that he actually took a picture of himself in front of the hoarding! When there was a biography being written on Shah Rukh Khan, his office called for all the Amul hoardings that had featured him.

Amul has never interfered in our creative work. They have been totally unquestioning, giving us the freedom to do what we want.

The Amul campaign has run 46 years. There’s a Facebook page on Amul Butter where the fan count has reached nearly a lakh. So, we are now attracting a whole new audience now, the younger lot. This is one campaign that has really stood the test of time, it’s so relevant even today.