What a backlash costs and what it buys: Monisha Mudaliar on the GIVA campaign

Somewhere in the last few years, the ad campaign quietly changed shape. It used to be a script, a shoot, a media plan and a hope that the message landed. Now, increasingly, the plan is the reaction. Brands don't need the audience to like the ad. They need the audience to argue about it. A hashtag, a boycott call, a political leader weighing in, a celebrity trending for the "wrong" reasons: all of it is reach, and reach is currency, regardless of whether the sentiment attached to it is warm or furious. 

Outrage, it turns out, is one of the cheapest media plans advertising has ever had. You don't buy the impressions. The internet donates them, for free, out of anger. GIVA's recent Raksha Bandhan campaign with Kriti Sanon is the latest case study, whether the brand intended it to be or not.

The campaign set out to do something fairly simple: widen the definition of sibling to include the four-legged members of a household. Instead, the conversation veered almost immediately into questions of cultural appropriateness, what Kriti Sanon was wearing, and eventually, into the more charged territory of religious and traditional sentiment. GIVA pulled the campaign and put out a statement affirming its "highest regard and deep respect" for Indian culture, traditions and festivals. It's worth pausing here to ask what exactly was being defended.

Raksha Bandhan, at its core, is about a bond: the protection, teasing, affection and quietly competitive gift-giving that siblings build a relationship around. It is not, and has never been, about a dress code. One sister ties a rakhi in a heavy silk saree; another does it in shorts and a T-shirt on a lazy morning; a third ships a rakhi across continents because distance won't let her be there in person. None of these versions is more or less authentic than the other. 

The ritual holds its meaning because of the relationship it marks, not the outfit worn while marking it. So when an entire campaign gets reduced to a debate about a neckline, something has gone quite wrong with what we, as an audience, chose to notice.

But did the brand get it wrong, or get exactly what it wanted?

Here's a theory, and I want to be upfront that it is only that: a theory, not an accusation, and one I can't prove from the outside.

What if none of this was a misstep? What if the neckline, the pet-as-sibling framing, the casting of an actor who reliably draws both a loyal fanbase and a vocal set of critics, was never a miscalculation, but the campaign's actual engine? Look at what the ad achieved once it was "pulled": a jewellery brand had a national actor's outfit trending, political commentators weighing in, prime-time explainers, and days of earned media that would have cost a fraction of that in a paid plan. A brand doesn't need the ad to survive for the ad to have worked. It needs the conversation to survive. By that measure, this campaign didn't fail. It behaved exactly like a campaign is designed to when the real goal is attention, not applause. It shouldn't have been about the dress. But did the brand intentionally make it about the dress, knowing exactly which sentence in the film would get clipped and reposted?

This isn't a theory invented for GIVA. It's a fairly well-worn playbook in Indian advertising, and the receipts go back years:

- Fabindia's 2021 Diwali campaign named its collection "Jashn-e-Riwaaz," using an Urdu phrase for a Hindu festival. #BoycottFabIndia trended within hours, and the brand quietly renamed its campaign, but not before the controversy had put Fabindia's Diwali collection in front of far more eyeballs than the collection itself likely would have earned on its own.

- Manyavar's bridal label Mohey ran its "KanyaMaan" campaign with Alia Bhatt, questioning the ritual of kanyadaan. It drew praise from some for challenging convention and accusations from others of attacking tradition, a split reaction that, either way, kept the brand in every marketing conversation that wedding season.

- Sabyasachi's Mangalsutra campaign, which paired the marital symbol with a bra and a shirtless model, was accused of sexualising a Hindu tradition and eventually withdrawn, but not before becoming one of the most talked-about fashion campaigns of that year.

The pattern across all of these is identical: a ritual or symbol gets reinterpreted just enough to offend a section of the audience, the offence itself becomes the distribution channel, and the brand gets to look apologetic while the algorithm does the media buying for free. 

Marketing researchers have long noted that some advertisers lean into this deliberately, working on the theory that any exposure is good exposure, even when the "proper" reasons for using controversy don't apply to their product at all.

None of this means GIVA did the same. Plenty of people in the industry would argue the opposite, that pulling an ad has real costs: a shaken creative team, a client asking uncomfortable questions, a brand's name sitting next to words like "backlash" and "insensitive" in search results for months. That's not a small price to pay for a theory. Most controversies of this kind are probably closer to a brand misjudging a room than a brand manufacturing one.

I say this not as a defence of Kriti Sanon, nor as an attack on the people who found the ad objectionable, nor as a claim that GIVA orchestrated any of this. Offence is real and personal, and no one is obligated to justify what troubles them. 

But there's a difference between a brand listening to genuine sentiment and a brand flinching at volume, and there's a further difference still between flinching at volume and knowing exactly how much volume an ad would generate before it ever went live. Those three get treated as the same thing far too often, and the cost of that conflation is either the quiet erosion of a brand's willingness to say anything interesting at all, or, if the theory holds, the quiet normalising of manufactured offence as a media strategy dressed up as an accident.

Indian brands are operating in a moment of contradictions: a country redefining family, gender and tradition in the same breath that it clings tightly to older visual codes of respectability. Navigating that isn't easy. But if every attempt to tell a slightly new story gets flattened into a debate about hemlines, brands will simply stop trying. They'll retreat to the safest, most predictable version of every festival, every relationship, every idea, because "safe" never trends for the wrong reasons. Unless, of course, a brand has already worked out that trending for the wrong reasons is the whole point, and cheaper than anything a media planner could have booked.

The question worth asking, long after this particular ad has been forgotten, isn't whether GIVA was right to pull it. It's whether we, as an audience, are still capable of engaging with an idea before deciding what someone was wearing while presenting it, and whether we'd even be able to tell the difference between a brand that got caught off guard and a brand that knew exactly what it was walking into. I don't have that answer. I'm not sure anyone outside GIVA does either.

Monisha Mudaliar, is founder, Monz Media.