Square Yards, Probus, and ONE VISION stand out in Ganpati Utsav PR Roundup

Every year, the festive marketing calendar hands brands the same ten days and the same brief, in spirit if not on paper: show up, look festive, don't offend anyone. Most brands take that brief literally. A handful take it as a starting point. That gap, between showing up and actually participating, is the only useful way I found to sort through this year's Ganesh Chaturthi marketing.

Presence is the easy version. A modak emoji, a Ganpati silhouette, a "Bappa Morya" caption, sometimes a discount code stapled on for good measure. It isn't wrong, exactly. It just isn't anything. It's the marketing equivalent of showing up to a family function, touching everyone's feet, and leaving before the food comes out. Technically present. Not really there.

Participation is a different ask. It means finding an actual behaviour inside the festival, something people do without thinking about it, and building the brand into that moment instead of next to it. A few brands managed this well.

Probus Insurance told its Ganesh Chaturthi story from the point of view of the mandap itself, a silent observer of ten days of community life. For an insurance brand, that's not a decorative idea, it's the whole pitch. Insurance is fundamentally about being the quiet, watchful thing in the background that shows up when it matters. Giving that role to the mandap and letting the metaphor do the work, instead of a voiceover explaining it, is the difference between a clever idea and a clever ad about the idea.

Zepto and Fevikwik found their moment in something quietly lovely rather than dramatic: the small household that just wants to bring home a small Ganesh, decorate him, and stick him together with whatever needs sticking along the way. It's not a campaign built for the grandest mandap in the city. It's built for the one-room celebration, the first-time host, the person who just wants their own little Bappa on their own little shelf. That's what makes it immersive rather than clever for clever's sake. Nobody has to be sold on the idea of celebrating small. They just needed a brand to notice that small celebrations deserve care too, not just the big ones.

Square Yards is the one I'd tell any PR person to study closely, because it stacked two different moves rather than settling for one.

The first is a film built around a single line from a kid: "par mera toh ghar nahi hai,". It lands inside a festival about welcoming Bappa home, spoken by a voice for whom home is still the aspiration, not the given. Real estate brands reach for emotional storytelling every festive season and most of it drowns in the same beats: family, warmth, arrival. A child's plain sentence naming the exact thing the entire category sells cuts through because it doesn't perform the emotion. It just states the gap.

The second move is the one worth studying as pure PR craft rather than creative. Square Yards partnered with Zepto to distribute mini Ganpati idols and plantable, seed-embedded wish cards along with festive orders. On paper, that's a distribution tactic. As a story, it's something else entirely. "Square Yards wishes everyone a Happy Ganesh Chaturthi" isn't news, it's the wallpaper this whole piece keeps warning about. 

"A real estate company turned Ganesh Chaturthi wishes into something that can grow" is news, because it hands a journalist an angle instead of a quote to file away. And it hands them several: sustainability, responsible celebration, real estate innovation, community participation, the running "what are brands doing differently this year" story every trade outlet writes anyway. One physical action, riding on someone else's delivery network, produced more usable angles than most brands managed with a full production budget.

Flipkart and Swiggy, both of whom also ran Ganesh Chaturthi creative this year, sit closer to presence than participation: competent, on-brief, entirely forgettable festive content that hits every checkbox and asks nothing new of the audience. Not bad work exactly, just safe work, and safe is precisely the thing this piece keeps arguing doesn't survive past visarjan.

And then there's the one that might have out-participated all three of them. Iconic by ONE VISION, which runs India's largest DOOH screen at SAS iTower in Hyderabad, didn't run a campaign about Ganesh Chaturthi so much as it handed the campaign over to the city. The ask was simple: send in a photo of your Ganesh idol, a group photo with your Bappa, your association's name, your locality, and a contact number. The most unique entries would get displayed on India's biggest screen.

There's no script here, no agency-written insight, no brand mascot inserted into someone else's festival. The idea is the mechanism itself: thousands of neighbourhood mandaps, each one already the centre of someone's ten days, suddenly have a reason to compete for a spot on a 6500 square feet screen. The brand's only job was to build the invitation and get out of the way. That's about as close to pure participation as festive marketing gets, because the content isn't about the festival, it is the festival, just handed a bigger stage than it already had.

Very different categories, very different formats, one shared instinct: find the ritual first, attach the brand second.

The Category Stretch Test

The more interesting question this year came from brands with no obvious business being anywhere near a religious festival. Insurance, crypto, mutual funds. Ganesh Chaturthi doesn't naturally hand these categories a hook the way food or fashion gets one for free. So the test worth applying to each of them is simple: did the metaphor get earned, or did the brand just want a seat at the festive hashtag table? Probus passes this test cleanly, for the reason above. Protection is what a mandap quietly offers a neighbourhood for ten days, and protection is what an insurance brand is meant to offer a family for a lifetime. The metaphor isn't decorative, it's structural.

CoinDCX and Aditya Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund both ran Ganesh Chaturthi creative this year too, and honestly, the trade coverage of "best festive campaigns" barely described what either of them actually said beyond the category tag. That's not automatically a strike against the work itself, I haven't seen the full films. But it is diagnostic of something. The well-worn move for financial brands in festive season is to lean on Ganesha as the remover of obstacles and repackage that as a metaphor for financial discipline, clearing the obstacles between a saver and their goals. It's a fine metaphor. It's also one that's been reached for enough times that it needs a genuinely specific execution to land as participation rather than presence. If a round-up of "campaigns to watch" can't tell you what made yours interesting beyond which industry you're in, that's the test failing quietly, not passing.

That, more than any single bad ad, is this year's actual miss. Ganesh Chaturthi 2026 didn't produce a controversy, no brand got dragged for getting the festival wrong. The failure mode this year is quieter and more common: forgettable execution that technically clears the festive-calendar checkbox and disappears from memory by the next scroll. Controversy at least tells you a brand said something. Wallpaper tells you a brand said nothing, very carefully.

The brands worth studying this Ganesh Chaturthi weren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the most unlikely category. They were the ones who found a ritual small enough to be true and built the whole idea around it. Everyone else will get their ten days of presence. A few will get participation. Only one of those is worth remembering past visarjan.

By Monisha Mudaliar, Founder, Monz Media