The hoarding that answered back: Amul and the topical ad

Most advertising asks for attention. This campaign earned it by commenting on the day, which is a different and harder thing.

Written by the Colleviate Strategy desk

The artwork in this series is original and shows fictional brands. We have not redrawn any real campaign, mascot or slogan, and no national symbol appears. The piece beside this essay is a 1960s-style hoarding for a fictional butter.

What happened in 1966

According to the brand's own account and trade-press retellings, Sylvester daCunha's agency, ASP, won the Amul butter account in 1966. Television and print were costly, so the agency chose outdoor hoardings. The art director, Eustace Fernandes, and daCunha built a mascot meant to appeal to mothers and children. The first topical hoarding, reported as “Thoroughbread”, showed her as a jockey in the racing season. The tagline is credited to the daCunha family, with Nisha daCunha's “Utterly Amul” extended by Sylvester to the form we know. Sources disagree on whether the first hoarding appeared in 1966 or 1967, and on exactly how the account reached the agency, so we say “1966” because most of them do.

The campaign is described by the brand and in the press as the longest-running advertising campaign in the world, and as holding a Guinness record. We haven't seen the record's own listing, so we pass that on as reported.

What a topical ad does

An ordinary ad repeats. A topical ad is a different animal: it changes as the country does. Each hoarding takes something the street is already talking about and puts the butter beside it. The ad stops being a message from a company and becomes a column in a daily paper that happens to be a billboard. Somebody in 1966 got to write a pun for a living and call it strategy, and the rest of us have been jealous ever since.

Two critics, two readings

Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the culture industry offers pseudo-individuality: small surface differences on a standardised product. The topical hoarding seems an obvious case. The product and the mascot never change, and only the pun does. Raymond Williams's magic system points the same way: the butter is dressed in the glow of whatever the news happened to be.

Now concede what they would miss. The joke is public, signed and open to argument. It doesn't hide that it is an ad. It uses the form of an editorial to say the one thing an advertiser has to say, which is that it is paying attention. That is our reading, not the critics' own. It is also why the form lasted: a standardised product with a visibly human voice is a harder thing to resent.

What it asks of a brand today

Three things. A mascot with a point of view that doesn't change. A cost structure that lets you produce on the day, which in 1966 meant cheap outdoor. And a willingness to be public. Most brands have the first and fail the other two, which is the argument in what a campaign owes the culture it borrows from. For where the idea comes from, see the brief is not the idea.