Why Vinod Kunj says regional advertising must be lived, not translated

Advertising tends to work best when it is built around how people actually live, not how markets are defined on paper. As brands have expanded their presence beyond metros, regional advertising has grown in volume and visibility, but not always in depth. Much of it has relied on translation, familiar cultural symbols or broad festive cues, often missing the smaller, lived details that shape how traditions are practised across regions. The result has been communication that sounds local but feels distant.

In recent years, platform data has pushed brands to re-evaluate this approach. Regional-language consumption across digital video and connected TV has surged, making it harder to justify one-size-fits-all narratives adapted late in the process. What remains less clearly addressed is the creative gap: how regional work is imagined, who it is written by, and whether it reflects cultural proximity rather than surface accuracy.

Thought Blurb is among the agencies that have worked extensively on region-led communication across categories such as FMCG, retail, jewellery, banking and housing, collaborating with brands including Parle Products, Reliance Retail, Kalyan Jewellers and others that operate across diverse cultural markets. It has also been involved in building brands like Madhur Sugar, where regional understanding played a role in earning trust within a price-sensitive category. Against the backdrop of renewed interest in regional marketing, Social Samosa spoke to Thought Blurb founder Vinod Kunj about what regional advertising has historically missed, and what it takes to move beyond translation.

When data confirms lived reality

Kunj does not dismiss the role of data in the current regional surge. He acknowledges that platform analytics have made language consumption patterns impossible to ignore. “If you look at Google Analytics or YouTube analytics, you’ll see that consumption of regional content is extremely high,” he says. “People are consuming content in their own languages. So it stands to reason that brands respond to that.”

But he is careful to draw a line between responding and understanding. While many brands are now producing regional-language work, much of it, he feels, remains centrally imagined. “A lot of brands still rely on a master message which gets broadcast in different languages,” he explains. “You can call it translation or transcreation. It’s efficient, but it doesn’t always capture the nuance.”

The challenge, as Kunj sees it, is structural. Advertising in India continues to be shaped largely in metropolitan centres. “A large proportion of advertising comes out of Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata,” he says. “Sometimes the creators of the communication are not fully on top of regional nuances, not because they don’t care, but because they don’t live it.”

Knowing culture versus understanding it

For Kunj, the gap between regional accuracy and regional truth often lies in the difference between knowledge and feeling. “You can have an academic understanding of a festival,” he says. “But do you know how it feels?”

He explains this through personal memory. “If you ask me about Bihu in Assam, I know the performances, the celebrations. But do I know what a person in Assam does first thing in the morning during Bihu? Probably not. Diwali in the South, I know that. My mother would wake me up early for an oil bath. I know that because I lived it.”

This distinction is central to how Thought Blurb tries to approach festive storytelling. It is also why the agency relies heavily on writers and planners who come from the regions they are writing about. “The trick is to get people who feel that festival to create it,” Kunj says. “Otherwise, the nuance becomes academic.”

This approach was reflected in Thought Blurb’s Ganesh Chaturthi campaign for Parle-G. Kunj says that most Ganpati narratives follow a familiar rhythm: Lord Ganpati arrives, stays, and returns after immersion. The roles within that ritual are rarely questioned.

“All of us know Ganpati comes home and goes back,” he says. “But when you are Maharashtrian, you start asking, why is it that the man of the house brings Ganpati home?”

Before building the narrative, the team went back to first principles. “We actually checked,” Kunj says. “We wanted to see if it is written anywhere that only a man can bring Ganpati home. It’s not. There is no such rule in the scriptures.”

That clarity allowed the team to reframe the story gently rather than provocatively. “Ganpati goes back to Gauri after immersion,” he explains. “So we asked, why can’t the mother bring him home?” The idea was not positioned as social commentary. “There is nothing wrong with the existing custom,” he says. “We were not here to correct anything. It’s just another way of looking at it.”

The response, he notes, unfolded organically. “Female influencers started sharing videos of themselves bringing Ganpati home. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t confrontational. It just felt right to people.”

Chhath Puja and the power of absence

The same restraint shaped Thought Blurb’s Chhath Puja campaign for Parle-G, which deliberately stayed away from spectacle. “When we did the Chhath Puja ad, we were speaking primarily to people from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh,” Kunj says, also noting the festival’s relevance across parts of eastern and central India.

The insight emerged from conversations with writers who had grown up observing Chhath. “One writer said, ‘I can’t write this very easily, but I feel it deeply,’” Kunj recalls. “She helped us understand that momentary sense of loss, when you can’t go to the river to offer the arghya.”

That sense of emotional incompleteness became the heart of the film. The response was swift and largely organic. “It got almost 3.5 crore views in about two weeks,” Kunj says. “It started trending on Twitter. Journalists were sharing it without being prompted.”

What followed surprised the team. “News channels started covering it—NDTV, News18, Zee,” he says. “And then a Pakistani YouTube channel showcased it, talking about how Indians still value their traditions. That kind of response only happens when the communication is rooted in something real.”

Working with religion and tradition, Kunj believes, requires clear internal boundaries. “We make it a point not to talk about anything controversial,” he says. “We are not here to change people’s cultural values, rituals or beliefs.”

Instead, the agency focuses on emotions that cut across belief systems. “Awe, devotion, longing, love, these are universal emotions,” he says. “They can’t be contrived. When we do well, it’s because we tap into these emotions honestly.”

Avoiding tropes, not traditions

Thought Blurb’s regional approach often involves stepping away from the most familiar visual shorthand. Kunj cites the agency’s work around Onam as an example. “If you look at 100 Onam ads, 95 will have Mahabali,” he says. “Mahabali has become a blind spot for the Malayalee.”

Instead, the agency focused on how the festival itself has evolved. “The flower rangoli that used to be made painstakingly is now a mat,” he says. “A lot of preparation has turned into procedure. People don’t take the same time anymore.”

A similar approach shaped a Durga Puja campaign rooted in Kumartuli. “A Bengali writer asked a simple question,” Kunj recalls. “When you see the idol for the first time and your eyes fill with tears—what causes that feeling?” The answer, the team felt, lay not in grandeur but in labour. “That’s when we decided to talk about the people who make the murti year after year.”

From emotion to rational trust

Not all cultural insight, Kunj emphasises, is emotional. Reflecting on the agency’s early work on Madhur Sugar, he describes a very different challenge. “Sugar is an extremely price-sensitive category,” he says. “There was a detailed study on what consumers were willing to pay. Four or five rupees could be a deal breaker.”

In that context, trust mattered more than sentiment. “We spoke about hygiene, value, consistency,” he says. “That’s rational communication. Emotion came in later, mostly during festivals.”

Planning regional storytelling 

As the annual plan is laid out and brands allocate disproportionate budgets to high-visibility properties like the IPL, Kunj argues that regional storytelling must be planned upstream, not retrofitted later. “If you stretch your investment a little at the thinking and production stage, you can do a lot more,” he says.

He points to a Parle Marie campaign shot over three days. “The locations and crew were the same,” he explains. “The characters and stories changed. We ended up with multiple language films and broadcast them region-wise.”

The principle, he says, is straightforward. “Behaviour changes region by region. You have to ask where you want to grow, where you want to strengthen your position, and where you need to build trust.”

For Thought Blurb, Kunj believes that process has always started with observation rather than ambition. By paying attention to how people already live, the agency has quietly built a body of work that resists spectacle and, in doing so, often travels further than expected.

As Indian advertising navigates a period defined by scale, speed and consolidation, Kunj’s way of working feels deliberately unhurried. His emphasis is not on keeping pace with formats or platforms, but on staying close to the cultural contexts that shape how people actually receive communication.

For Thought Blurb, that has meant resisting the temptation to flatten regions into languages or festivals into moments. Instead, the work begins earlier and closer to home, by asking who performs the ritual, what has quietly changed over time, and which emotions remain intact beneath the surface. In an industry increasingly driven by optimisation, Kunj’s approach suggests that attentiveness itself can still be a strategy, one that values understanding before amplification, and feeling before format.