7 Navratri and Durga Puja ads India’s brand leaders should study

01 · Seven festive picks worth studying

Navratri and Durga Puja are no longer just a media spike. In 2026, the strongest campaigns are treating the festival as an invitation to earn cultural relevance, not just outspend the category. Afaqs! has shortlisted seven campaigns that do this well, covering paints, detergent, AI, biscuits, tea and heritage restoration.

• Asian Paints returns to Kolkata with Mon Jitey Nilo, bringing back its Gattu mascot to suggest that the shared joy of building pandals and gathering communities matters as much as winning a trophy.
• Safed Detergent follows a mother who notices a young boy working at a tea shop while shopping for her son, and gifts him a kurta for the festival. The film ties the brand’s stain-removal promise to empathy, equality and festive happiness.
• Google Gemini puts singer Falguni Pathak at the centre of its #TyohaarMaxxingWithGemini campaign, showing the AI assistant handling the many moving parts of Navratri preparation.
• Birla Opus Paints follows a young woman returning to India and gradually warming to her family’s Durga Pujo through food, rituals and shared time in Duniya Ko Rang Do.
• Britannia Marie Gold flips the script with participation: My Pujo Moment of Gold invites consumers in West Bengal to share their festive memories for a chance at gold coins and vouchers.
• Tata Tea Gold uses Ekshathei Gold to chart a mother and son across two life stages, with a cup of tea as the quiet connector behind their wish for more time together.
• JSW Dulux takes on heritage in the third edition of Let’s Colour, restoring the nearly 250-year-old Kundu Bari in Kolkata ahead of Durga Pujo while retaining its cultural rituals.

02 · The pattern behind the picks

None of these films leads with product features. Each one opens with a specific human or cultural tension and then gives the brand a distinct job.

Safed Detergent connects stain removal to empathy. Google Gemini becomes the assistant that simplifies festive preparation. Tata Tea Gold turns tea into a prompt for more time together. JSW Dulux lets restoration prove the brand’s respect for heritage. The emotional register differs, but the method is consistent: start with the ritual, not the product.

Asian Paints and Birla Opus share an interesting inversion. Both centre on the feeling of building or returning to a celebration, rather than the perfect end result. The reward in Mon Jitey Nilo is community participation, not a trophy. The reward in Duniya Ko Rang Do is the slow accumulation of memory through food and shared ritual.

03 · What brand leaders should do next

The takeaway for India’s CMOs is not to chase every festival on the calendar. It is to choose one specific ritual your brand can own, and then prove it.

That could mean solving a preparation task, as Gemini does. It could mean turning a product benefit into a human value, as Safed does. Or it could mean inviting consumers to contribute their own stories, as Britannia Marie Gold does with its West Bengal activation.

The least effective festive work tries to compress every emotion—family, food, ritual, spectacle, celebrity—into a single film. These seven picks are a reminder that precision beats volume in a crowded festive window.

Source: Afaqs!

Mad About Marketing Desk The strategists and writers at Mad About Marketing, writing up what we see in the work every week.