KFC India’s AI-generated Pujo ad joins the big-brand wave

KFC India has generated a Durga Pujo ad with artificial intelligence, putting Colonel Sanders in Kolkata and promoting its Krispy Momos—available only during the festival. The AI-made spot handles what would traditionally require location shoots, casting a Colonel Sanders lookalike and an animation team for the Midas-touch effects, and may have taken the brand less than a day.

01 · AI moves from D2C experiment to big-brand workflow

The KFC film lands alongside recent AI-generated campaigns from some of India’s biggest advertisers. Hindustan Unilever used AI for a Horlicks protein-beverage brand launch, Tata Consumer Products’ Tata Simply Better applied it to a hexane-free cooking oil campaign, and Hyundai recreated highlights from its 30-year India journey. None of these are scrappy D2C brands testing a cheap hack; they are large, well-resourced advertisers shifting AI from novelty into the production pipeline.

For marketers, three signals stand out:

• Speed is now the pitch: a process that once took days of production can compress to under a day.
• Localisation scales faster: hearing the Colonel speak Bengali fits a city-specific campaign without shooting Bengali-specific footage.
• Distinctiveness becomes the risk: when everyone uses similar tools, campaigns can start to look and feel the same.

02 · The tension between speed and sameness

Prathap Suthan, managing partner and chief creative officer at Bang In The Middle, has warned about that homogenisation: “The market will flood with the same textureless imagery running on the same software, producing the same hollow spectacle, and the audience will do what audiences always do with noise. Scroll past it.”

For CMOs and brand managers, the KFC example is a prompt to ask where AI belongs in the work. AI can compress production time and make regional customisation cheaper, but it should be steered by a clear brand world, distinctive characters and a specific cultural moment—not just a text prompt. The Pujo-only availability of Krispy Momos is a strategy choice; the AI simply executes the film faster.

03 · What brand leaders should do

If AI is now the default for major advertisers, the differentiator shifts from who can generate an ad to who can generate one that doesn’t feel generated. That means keeping human creative judgement on casting, tone and cultural nuance, and using AI for the repetitive, expensive tasks it does well. The brands that treat AI as a production accelerator inside a distinctive brand system will stand out; the ones that treat the tool itself as the idea risk becoming part of the noise.

The lesson from KFC’s Pujo spot is not that AI made an ad. It’s that a big brand chose a specific market moment, a specific product and a specific character—and then used AI to get there faster. The thinking still has to come from the marketer.

Source: Afaqs!

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