Deconstructing GCPL’s media strategy with Harshdeep Chhabra

The fight for consumer attention has never been more complex. With audiences splitting their time across television, streaming, and a growing number of digital touchpoints, FMCG brands are rethinking how they plan, buy, and measure media. 

For Godrej Consumer Products Limited (GCPL), the answer has been to pair first principles of marketing with a technology-first, data-led execution model, one that has helped the company steadily climb the advertiser rankings.

GCPL has seen a ~2.5x increase in ad spends between 2021 and 2023, rising in the Pitch Madison Advertising Report rankings from 17th in 2021 to 5th in 2023. As per BARC and GRP share data, the company is now ranked third on linear TV, and is the only Indian-origin brand in the top five. This growth, says Harshdeep Chhabra, Head- Global Media, GCPL, is underpinned by a “relentless focus on brand building” as a driver of business performance.

From developing proprietary tools like MASH to in-housing programmatic operations across 20 countries, GCPL has built systems designed to respond to market shifts and evolving consumer behaviour in real time. 

Rooted in first principles

GCPL’s media strategy draws from the marketing science outlined in Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow, applying these fundamentals with a data-led, scalable execution model. The five principles at the core are:

• Every buyer matters

• My buyers are similar to my competitor’s buyers

• Continuity in advertising helps drive brand growth

• Keep reinforcing memory structures

• Brand building drives higher growth vs. promotions

From these fundamentals flow the company’s core media rules. As Chhabra explains, the aim is to maximise reach by targeting “source of growth households” and building for medium equivalence; fund adequately in line with business affordability and media competitiveness; be continuous with reach spread through the year and weighted for seasonal relevance; build distinctive assets by maximising “green” brand properties and using tech plus creativity to disrupt and engage; and prioritise brand building through thematic rather than purely promotional advertising.

These rules are grounded in what GCPL calls consumer truths: meeting consumers, visiting markets and media owners to observe trends first-hand, testing ideas quickly, and scaling up the ones that work.

Unifying a diverse portfolio

Applying first principles consistently becomes even more challenging in a company with GCPL’s breadth of categories. The solution, Chhabra says, lies in a consumer-first lens defined by the company’s GAGA format: geography, affluence, gender, and age.

“You’re trying to reach out to those consumers. Let’s say, for example, the consumer of Fab detergent is pretty similar to the consumer of Cinthol. So, the unification is happening at a consumer level, down to re-averaging for geography, age, affluence, and gender.”

The backbone of GCPL’s media operations

At the core of GCPL’s media transformation is MASH, short for Media Allocation and Spends Harmonisation, the company’s proprietary media planning tool. According to Chhabra, MASH has tripled the number of campaigns GCPL runs each year.

“MASH takes three things into consideration, business data at a granular GAGA level, media consumption data, and the cost of media. When these three talk to each other is where we are able to allocate our budgets.”

Before MASH, GCPL ran around 10 campaigns a year, with brand managers and agency planners caught in multiple iterations, limited data sharing, and processes that stretched over days. With MASH, that cycle has collapsed into minutes.

Alongside MASH, GCPL’s central programmatic desk in India enables a three-member team to manage campaigns across 20 countries, a sharp contrast to the pre-inhousing setup, where 16 agency staff handled just one market.

​​From media planning to programmatic buying and even AI-led creative production, GCPL has been steadily expanding its in-house capabilities. The approach, Chhabra says, is as much about protecting intellectual capital as it is about cost efficiency.

“What we realised over a period of time is that there is a certain amount of information that is safest when it is seen in our ecosystem. There are certain secret sauces that we are building. A lot of times when we work with external partners, there is a risk of best practices moving from one place to another. We realised in-housing is important because some of the secret sauces belong to us.”

Chhabra is clear that the decision to in-house is strategic. 

“It’s not that we are obsessed with in-housing. But we also don’t want to be so heavily dependent on outsourcing that it impacts both our costs and our top-line ambitions. The part that we can share, we are happy to work on with external partners.”

That balance plays out in how GCPL works with Essence Mediacom, which acts as the company’s front face for procurement in programmatic buying. “We are buying across 50 different countries, and Essence Mediacom is a partner for that,” Chhabra explains. The partnership is built around what GCPL calls the “four Ts”:

1. Trading – handling procurement and negotiations.

2. Troubleshooting – offering competitive intelligence and consumer insights.

3. Talent – bringing in specialist skills and training GCPL’s teams.

4. Technology – leveraging the agency’s investment in analytics and optimisation tools.

This in-house push extends to GCPL’s content factory and AI lab, designed to create campaigns at speed and in multiple formats for different markets. Together, MASH, the programmatic desk, and the content factory form the backbone of GCPL’s media operations.

Shifts and constants in GCPL’s Media Playbook

While the infrastructure and principles provide stability, Chhabra says the tactics are constantly evolving. He maps out ten major shifts redefining GCPL’s approach:

1. From lowest cost per reach to lowest cost per attentive reach.

2. From efficient mass reach to hyper-local, and now hyper-personal reach.

3. From fragmented supply to 3+1 key platforms for mass audiences.

4. From one message for all to many messages for many.

5. From only Hindi to local languages and now local dialects.

6. From exclusive first- and second-party data to democratised “every party” data.

7. From artificial intelligence to artificial imitation, and then artificial imagination.

8. From reservation buying to programmatic cross-platform media buying.

9. From competition reach tracking on TV to cross-medium tracking.

10. From awards for innovation to awards for attributable growth.

Not everything is in flux. Chhabra says some fundamentals will remain unchanged:

1. Internet usage will stay dominant.

2. Connected TV will keep growing.

3. Pay TV penetration will continue to decline.

4. Linear TV will remain a medium for older, more affluent audiences.

5. India will stay a single-TV household market.

6. TV consumption will stay consistent among its audience.

7. Reach-based planning will remain the mainstay for FMCGs.

8. The company will stick to its first principles.

9. Media owners will remain partners, not just vendors.

10. GCPL will be clear on what they don’t want to be:Only procurement-led, fame-obsessed and crusaders for a medium 

For Chhabra, the balance between what changes and what stays the same is what keeps GCPL’s media engine resilient. The shifts signal agility, a readiness to adapt to new platforms, formats, and audience behaviours. While the constants ensure the company doesn’t lose sight of what truly drives brand growth.

What’s next for media planning

Looking ahead, Chhabra sees technology and integration as the twin forces that will fundamentally reshape media planning. He highlights key disruptions on the horizon.

Chhabra predicts a future where measuring advertising impact seamlessly across multiple screens, TV, mobile, desktop, and streaming platforms, will no longer be a basic necessity.

“One thing that will happen for sure is cross-screen measurement will become a norm, and wall gardens will get broken,” he says. Currently, many platforms operate in silos, limiting the ability to track and optimise campaigns holistically. Breaking down these walls will enable marketers to understand consumer journeys end-to-end, allowing for smarter allocation of budgets and more precise targeting.

Additionally, the role of technology is evolving beyond just data and analytics. Chhabra points out that rapid content creation and deployment will become a core competency for media teams.

“The role of technology in making sure that things are happening at a lot faster pace, both in terms of content creation and in terms of content deployment,” he explains. This means brands will be able to respond in near real-time to market signals, trends, and consumer behaviours, producing more relevant and timely advertising across formats and channels.

Furthermore, Chhabra anticipates the rise of platforms that blend entertainment with seamless shopping experiences, akin to TikTok’s model.

“The third big disruptor is when we see something TikTok-like come into India, it’s not just entertainment, it’s also shop.” Such platforms transform passive content consumption into active commerce opportunities, creating new touchpoints for brands to engage consumers with shoppable video content and influencer-led campaigns.

While much attention focuses on digital and private broadcasters, Chhabra points to the public broadcaster Doordarshan as a ‘dark horse’ in the media landscape.

“The dark horse in all of this is Doordarshan. Quite keen to see what happens over there.” With its vast reach, particularly in rural and semi-urban India, any strategic pivot or modernisation at Doordarshan could open new avenues for advertisers and reshape media dynamics in ways not yet fully understood.

These anticipated shifts highlight why GCPL’s focus on integrating technology and in-housing is central to gaining deeper control and agility in a fragmented media landscape.

By blending data-driven tools with foundational marketing principles, the company is positioning itself to respond swiftly to changing consumer behaviours and market dynamics.

As new technologies and measurement methods emerge, GCPL’s evolving approach reflects a broader industry challenge: balancing innovation with consistency to engage audiences effectively across diverse platforms.