BTS look into the campaign that made India say ‘That’s me!’

Let me start with a confession: the idea for ‘Dimaag Pe Rakhe Lagaam’ didn’t come from a brainstorm, a brief or a boardroom. It came from something far more ordinary and far more universal. It came from watching people overthink.

As marketers, we’re trained to look for tensions that sit quietly in the background of daily life. Overthinking, though, wasn’t quiet. It was loud, everywhere, and somehow invisible at the same time. Whether it was someone rewriting the same message five times, debating a food order like it held national importance, or a mind constantly thinking because a boss had replied “Ok” – a moment Indians confessed triggers worst-case assumptions, as our data later confirmed – the patterns kept repeating themselves.

But recognising a tension is one thing; understanding its depth is another. That’s where the idea of the India Overthinking Report was born.

We partnered with YouGov to understand how often these small mental spirals play out in everyday life, and the results instantly showed us we were looking at something much larger than a quirk. The findings were striking not because they were dramatic, but because they felt so familiar. 

The report revealed that 81% of Indians spend over three hours a day overthinking, and 63% think it is tougher to decide what to order than whom to vote for, a statistic that summed up how easily we get caught in tiny decision loops every single day. Even in places meant to be spontaneous, like Instagram Stories, overthinking found a home. The report showed 35% of people overthink Stories, debating filters, timing, and music more than the post itself.

What the report really did was take an everyday behaviour we all casually recognise and reveal just how widespread and cross-generational it truly is. Suddenly, the cultural truth became a quantified reality. We weren’t just tapping into an observation. We were holding up a mirror to the country.

And that mirror became the foundation of the campaign: Dimaag Pe Rakhe Lagaam.

Where the idea snapped into place

Center Fresh has always stood for freshness. The brand has been known for its funny, humorous and clutter-breaking commercials. What the report gave us was a sharp way to connect that product truth to a cultural truth: Overthinking is an everyday challenge, and Center fresh can help you snap out of it.

Once that clicked, everything else started aligning naturally.

We explored multiple scenarios, characters, and worlds. But two scripts kept rising to the top — each funny, each relatable, each capturing a different shade of the overthinking habit. And then came the classic marketer’s overthinking moment: which one do we choose?

The irony wasn’t lost on us. The campaign about overthinking was making us overthink.

Inside the team, this dilemma became our own miniature spiral, a small but poetic reflection of the insight itself.

The director, the twist, and the unexpected win

During the PPM, our director sat with both scripts and offered a subtle but meaningful reinterpretation of the Naughty Boy film. It wasn’t a dramatic overhaul; it was a small behavioural nuance about the boss calling back to clarify about the deleted message in a very hilarious way that tightened the entire narrative, making the protagonist’s reactions feel even more natural. 

That shift brought a new energy to the film and gave it a distinctive, mischievous charm that elevated the story instantly.

The addition didn’t just improve the script; it defined the tone of the entire campaign.

This is the part of BTS that often goes unnoticed. Creativity rarely arrives in big strokes. More often, it reveals itself in these fine adjustments: a line, a pause, a behavioural cue, added at the right moment by someone who sees the story from a slightly different angle. For us, that moment happened right there in the PPM.

Controlled chaos and unscripted wins

Every campaign has that one line everyone ends up repeating. For us, it was: ‘Dimaag pe rakhe lagaam!’

The irony? No one on set actually managed to follow it.

The scenes felt so close to real life that the reactions came naturally. A deleted text. A fallen 500 rupee note. A moment of hesitation. An unnecessary spiral. None of this needed exaggeration. The actors instinctively leaned into behaviours they had seen, lived, or laughed about in their own circles.

One moment stood out, during the deleted-message sequence, someone from the crew remarked, “Arey ye toh mere saath bahut bar hua hai,” and the entire unit burst into laughter. That recognition, that instant identification, is exactly what we hoped the audience would feel. And that’s when we knew we had captured something honest.

Letting insight lead the culture

We launched the campaign the same way we created it, insight first. Instead of just releasing the TVC, we released the India Overthinking Report by Center fresh. It felt important for the conversation to begin with what the country genuinely experiences every day. And the decision paid off.

The report’s findings sparked conversations far beyond our expectations. What began as an insight quickly turned into a cultural talking point with coverage across publications and socials. A high-impact feature on ‘The Lallantop’ with Saurabh Dwivedi and Zakir Khan gave the narrative the perfect push: sharp, relatable, and rooted in everyday behaviour. From there, the insight travelled organically, reaching over 2.4 billion cumulative views.

By the time the TVC went live, the audience already knew the behavioural truth behind it. They had seen the insight, related to it, and shared it long before the film dropped. That’s why the TVC didn’t need to explain overthinking; it simply needed to mirror it. And the response reflected that. The film’s narrative struck a relatable chord and reached over 362 million people across India through earned media. 

The film didn’t need to explain overthinking. It simply needed to show it. And audiences instantly saw themselves in it and had applauded it for its funny, refreshing storytelling.

Looking Back

What made this campaign resonate wasn’t humour alone. It was honesty. Overthinking isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t show up as a crisis. It shows up in the smallest, most ordinary moments, the moments where the mind quietly jumps ahead of reality and imagines the worst long before anything has even happened. It follows people through their day in ways they barely notice, building loops out of things that never needed one.

And in that world, Center Fresh’s role became beautifully simple. A small pause. A minty reset. A moment that brings you back to yourself before the spiral takes over.

If I had to summarise the journey in one sentence, it would be this: We didn’t try to overpower the insight, we met it where it already lived. That clarity made all the difference.

And that’s why when the campaign finally reached people, it didn’t feel like advertising. It felt like a mirror held up gently, a moment where the country looked at the film, saw their own little spirals, and instinctively said, “That’s me.”

This Campaign Confessions article is penned by Gunjan Khetan, Director – Marketing, Perfetti Van Melle India.