An Inside Look at Bollywood's Great Marketing Circus

If you’ve seen actors getting strategically papped, appearing on podcasts, attending events, having footage from their interviews land on motivational Instagram pages, getting turned into a meme (while being cool about it) and constantly showing up on your social media feed — chances are you’re deep in the marketing blitzkrieg of Hindi movies, which runs on a simple formula: News is organic, but content is created.

Till 2019, a year before everything halted due to COVID-19, the traditional marketing cycle for a film involved city tours, visits to malls, college festivals, endless media junkets, and several on-ground events such as trailer and song launches. But when the world emerged anew after the pandemic, something shifted.

“Before the pandemic, a film’s communication mostly relied on trailers, songs, hoardings and media publications through interviews. Google was used for amplification and Instagram was an afterthought,” a marketing executive known for mounting major film campaigns told The Hollywood Reporter India on condition of anonymity.

“Post-COVID, everything went digital, where the makers and the stars realised that they could control the narrative, erase media, replace journalists with influencers and get into paid partnerships.”

According to multiple industry insiders, the game-changing marketing campaign that set the tone for what was to follow was Shah Rukh Khan’s Pathaan in January 2023. The Siddharth Anand directorial kicked off its campaign in late 2022 with a teaser, followed by two songs and then finally the trailer, just 15 days before the film released. It was unprecedented.

In all of this, Yash Raj Films (YRF) didn’t do a single on-ground event in the country and, crucially, had not involved the media through any interviews.

What they also did, an industry insider noted, were in-house interviews, where the cast and crew spoke only about the film, and put that video out on their official YouTube channel.

“That way, YRF benefited from the views their videos got and had a firm grip on the narrative that was going out — because they were the ones setting it,” the insider adds.

What YRF pulled off was the textbook example of old-school marketing, where they let their assets do the talking digitally, whereas on ground, they started putting up standees in cinema halls and hoardings across cities at least a month in advance before the 25 January release.

At least three other big commercial films that attempted to pull off something similar with varying results months before Pathaan hit the screens were the Ranbir Kapoor–headlined Brahmāstra: Part One – Shiva and Shamshera, as well as the Aamir Khan–starrer Laal Singh Chadha — all in 2022.

For Shamshera, Kapoor did media interviews as well as a focused month-long campaign of dancing and making reels with Instagram influencers. While Aamir, who played a Sikh army man in Laal Singh Chaddha, unofficially kickstarted the campaign in April by celebrating Vaisakhi with Punjabi influencer Ruhee Dosani. Both films tanked.

“The team of Brahmāstra also kept media at bay, with limited to no interviews, but made the campaign bigger by banking on its VFX-heavy visuals, focused on Marvel-like worldbuilding and made Ranbir and Alia [Bhatt] visit temples. Every communication aligned with the film. No one was dancing with influencers, or at least, that wasn’t the only mode of communication,” the insider says.

“The result was visible when the film took an opening of over ₹30 crore. Everything had clicked, the assets had reached the masses and the on-ground publicity had made noise. Because in India, the mass pockets are still star-driven, not Instagram-heavy,” the insider adds.

But going on a multi-city tour for film promotions isn’t a feasible option for many in the current Bollywood economy, where films are tanking and the overall health of the industry has taken a hit. With fewer blockbusters, cost-cutting has become a priority.

A marketing head, who spearheaded the campaign of a commercial film last year, said the cost of city promotional tours varies: It depends from city to city, on the cast that’s travelling, the mode of transport, and the entourage attached. It can be anywhere between ₹10 lakh to ₹50 lakh. If the cast is flying in a charter plane, the cost shoots up to over ₹1 crore.

If makers decide to book a PVR auditorium for the launch of their trailer or songs, the average cost is around ₹3 lakh, depending on the property. “In Mumbai, PVR Icon is more expensive than PVR Juhu, which is more expensive than the newly opened PVR Lido,” the marketing head explains.

Instead of putting in an average of ₹30 lakh for city promotions, makers feel a better idea is to get into multiple digital tie-ups, which reduce costs and increase “visibility”. That’s when the industry started investing their time and money in podcasts.

According to well-placed film-publicity sources, several stars as well as producers find podcast interviews a “safer” route to reach out to people as there will be no “informed, political or controversial” questions. The nature of an average podcast conversation is more about the person’s journey, their lows and battles, and their rise. It is designed to evoke sympathy and change a narrative — rarely involving any tough questions, about the artistes or the industry they work in.

“It is, if one looks at it, an extended PR exercise that works both ways. The talent benefits from having their journey out, while the podcaster benefits from their presence. In most cases, some of these are carefully crafted paid collaborations,” a PR executive, who has facilitated such interactions, shares.

“Which is why, now, the podcast culture is slowly starting to lose relevance. The audience also has an appetite for vanilla-content consumption and will not react to it as strongly as they did two years ago. The other problem is that these podcast interviews benefit the talent only, not the film they are promoting.

“The viewer might get to know a lot more about the star, but very little about the film. The producers were initially happy with this as it was a safer alternative, but it didn’t help them at all. The podcast viewer or listener may not be your ticket-buying audience, and it is important to know the difference,” the publicist adds.

Loveyapa, the big-screen debut of Aamir Khan’s son Junaid Khan and Khushi Kapoor, had a massive digital campaign rollout, with the star kids being spotted everywhere — dancing with influencers, sipping coffees and attending public events. The same month in February, an individual alone embarked on a widely discussed publicity campaign: Urvashi Rautela.

Rautela was promoting the Hindi release of her Telugu film Daaku Maharaaj and pretty much dominated the pop-culture space of the internet for at least three weeks. She commented on Saif Ali Khan’s stabbing incident and somehow made it about the success of Daaku Maharaaj and how she was gifted a diamond ring and a watch.

The Internet caught on to it and she instantly went viral. Apologies were issued, but the actor, instead of being careful with her media interactions, upped her game as she went all out to promote herself. From the biggest publications to influencers’ pages, Rautela was unmissable.

When asked how much of what she said in her interviews was guided by production houses or PR teams, Rautela tells THR India that “nothing was dictated” to her.

“There was no strategy behind it. It was just me being happy and sharing a light-hearted moment. I genuinely believe that everyone, not just me, should celebrate their wins, no matter how small. We live in a world full of scrutiny, especially as artistes. That’s all that it was — just a natural, joyful exchange with the media,” she says.

The marketing head, analysing how Rautela relied on traditional media and steered the conversation around her and the film, says it was a “fabulous” move because she was unabashed, operating with a sense of authenticity that stood apart from the highly controlled and often “bland” interactions of other artistes.

They say, “If you look at her interviews, no matter the question, every statement ended with how she was elated by the success of Daaku Maharaaj. So, the film was promoted widely. When Netflix didn’t include her in the first poster of the film ahead of its streaming debut, weeks after she wasn’t the trending topic, there was a discourse on her again through jokes and memes.

“It is one of the rare campaigns that people will remember. Of course, not that the Hindi version of the film was a blockbuster upon release. But that’s the thing. Nothing of this translates into footfall, it translates into awareness. The golden rule to remember in today’s time is that all of this circus is for two things: visibility and content.”

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