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. Create recall value 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, newspaper front pages and a website. All displaying the same puzzling #WITASA artwork. Users simply had to share their theories through text/image/video on our social to win ₹1,00,000 ($1200).

Over the week, Swiggy went wild featuring the ‘craziest-wackiest-can’t-believe-I-didn’t-think-of-this’ theories on our social channels, replying in real-time to each theory stirring the pot and getting users to break their heads for answers even more.

With no closure in sight, #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. Was there even a right answer?

Ultimately, unique winning theories were revealed over an 18-minute video all while establishing what everyone kind of realised by the end of the week. That if it made you think of Swiggy, it’s a Swiggy ad.

A single picture that made the internet speak a thousand words - #WITASA is now Swiggy's most successful user-generated campaign ever. And they pulled it off without making the campaign about Diwali but simply making users 'live the spirit of Diwali': to get together, discuss, laugh, ponder, collaborate and have a blast with a 'Swiggy ad' as an excuse. It became India's most searched question on Google for 3 days, even Google couldn't help but take part in it with a theory.

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