The Amul girl is an advertising mascot used by the Indian dairy brand Amul. The mascot is a hand-drawn cartoon of a young Indian girl dressed in a polka-dotted frock with blue hair and a half-pony tied up. [1] The Amul girl advertising has often been described as one of the best Indian advertising concepts because of its humour. [2]
The Amul girl was created as a response to Amul's rival brand Polson's butter-girl. The idea was conceived in 1967 once ASP (Advertising, Sales and Promotion) clinched the brand portfolio from the previous agency FCB Ulka. It was executed by Sylvester da Cunha, the owner of the agency, and his art director, Eustace Fernandes, on hoardings, painted bus panels, and posters in Mumbai. The mascot, since then, has been mobilized to comment on many events of national and political importance like the Emergency in India in 1976. [3]
In 1966, Amul decided to give their account to the advertising agency Advertising and Sales Promotion (ASP) to work on their advertising campaign. Da Cunha, the managing director of the agency, and Eustace Fernandez, an art director, decided to create something that would grab the attention of every housewife in the country. [4] Verghese Kurien, then the chairman of the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd. (GCMMF), suggested a mischievous little girl as a mascot with two requirements. It had to be easy to draw and memorable, as most of the advertising would be outdoor media which required hand-painting in those days, and the hoardings had to be changed frequently. [5]
In January 2021, Esther Hnamte, a four-year-old child singer from Mizoram, appeared as the Amul girl. [6] Hnamte had become a media sensation with a music video covering A. R. Rahman's "Maa Tujhe Salaam", which was posted on YouTube on 25 October 2020. [7] [8] The poster caricature shows Hnamte in a Mizo traditional attire waving the Indian tricolour, and bears the slogan: "Esthereal performance! Amul vandeful taste." [6]
Amul was seen to come up with an association with Cricket World Cup and Formula-One Racing. Amul was the official sponsor of the Indian team for dairy products for the 2012 Olympic Games. [9]
In 2001, Amul ran an advertising campaign criticizing the Indian Airlines strike; the latter threatened to stop offering Amul butter on their flights unless the ads were pulled. Another advertisement during Ganesh Chaturthi said "Ganpati Bappa More Ghya" ("Ganpati Bappa take more"). The Shiv Sena party said that if the advertisement was not removed, they would come and destroy Amul's office. [10] In July 2011, an advertisement criticizing Suresh Kalmadi led to trouble in Pune, while an advertisement poking fun at Mamata Banerjee in December 2011 led to problems in Kolkata. Subsequently, another advertisement with Banerjee was released all over India except in Kolkata in March 2012. [11]
In 2011, when they came up with "Maine kyaa khaya" ("What did I eat?", where the word "eat" bears the meaning of either directly accepting a bribe or indirectly profiting from an illegal act, in the Hindi language) for Suresh Kalmadi over the 2010 Commonwealth Games scam, they ran into trouble. "He was found guilty, he was in jail, his party had abandoned him. But party workers in Pune actually pulled down the hoarding", recalls a bewildered da Cunha.
There was a laughable protest as well. When they wrote "Satyam Sharam Scandalum!" for Satyam Computer Services Ltd.'s disgraced chairman Ramalinga Raju, he says, "We got a formal letter from the Satyam Board threatening us with dire consequences: all their employees would stop eating Amul butter!"
Sunderlal Bahuguna was an Indian environmentalist and Chipko movement leader. The idea of the Chipko movement was suggested by his wife Vimla Bahuguna and him. He fought for the preservation of forests in the Himalayas, first as a member of the Chipko movement in the 1970s, and later spearheaded the anti-Tehri Dam movement from the 1980s to early 2004. He was one of the early environmentalists of India, and later he and others associated with the Chipko movement and started taking up wider environmental issues, such as being opposed to large dams.
Amul is an Indian dairy brand owned by the cooperative society, Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), based in Anand, Gujarat. GCMMF is controlled by 3.6 million milk producers.
Verghese Kurien was an Indian dairy engineer and social entrepreneur. He led initiatives that contributed to the extensive increase in milk production in India termed as the White Revolution.
Northeast India, officially the North Eastern Region (NER), is the easternmost region of India representing both a geographic and political administrative division of the country. It comprises eight states—Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura, and the "brother" state of Sikkim.
Milky Way is a brand of chocolate-covered confectionery bar manufactured and marketed by Mars, Incorporated. There are two varieties: the US Milky Way bar, which is sold as the Mars bar worldwide, including Canada; and the global Milky Way bar, which is sold as the 3 Musketeers in the US and Canada.
J. Walter Thompson (JWT) was an advertisement holding company incorporated in 1896 by American advertising pioneer James Walter Thompson. The company was acquired in 1987 by multinational holding company WPP plc, and in November 2018, WPP merged J. Walter Thompson with fellow agency Wunderman to form Wunderman Thompson. In October 2023, WPP announced yet another merger in which Wunderman Thompson, along with another group agency VMLY&R, would cease to exist and create a new combined entity named VML. This took effect on January 1, 2024.
Maharashtrian or Marathicuisine is the cuisine of the Marathi people from the Indian state of Maharashtra. It has distinctive attributes, while sharing much with other Indian cuisines. Traditionally, Maharashtrians have considered their food to be more austere than others.
Genelia Deshmukh is an Indian actress who predominantly appears in Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil language films. Described in the media as one of the leading South Indian actresses of the 2000s, Deshmukh has received a Filmfare Award South and two Nandi Awards.
Naa Autograph Sweet Memories is a 2004 Indian Telugu-language romantic drama film directed by S. Gopal Reddy. The film stars Ravi Teja alongside Gopika, Bhumika Chawla, Mallika and Prakash Raj. Though the film had an above average run at the box office, with the years gone by it slowly gathered cult following due to its refreshing content, making and music. This film is a remake of the Tamil film Autograph. The film was also dubbed in Hindi as Thokar by Aditya Music India Pvt Ltd in 2012.
Zedo is a US and India-based advertising technology company that provides several online advertising products and services to Internet publishers, advertisers, and agencies. The company was founded in 1999 by Roy de Souza.
The National Bravery Awards are a set of awards given annually to about 25 Indian children below 18 years of age for "meritorious acts of bravery against all odds." The awards are given by the Government of India and the Indian Council for Child Welfare (ICCW). The award was instituted in 1957.The youngest national award was awarded to Veerangana Jhala in 2022 when she was only 6 years old from a village called Chuda in Gujarat.
Kunal Vijaykar is an Indian Broadcaster, food writer, author, actor, and television personality. He is also a YouTuber and his YouTube channel is called "Khaane Mein Kya Hai".
Tara Deshpande is an Indian actress, writer, former model and MTV VJ. Tara hosted a show called Kab Kyon Kahaan on Zee TV, along with Parth and then with Vinay Jain in the early 1990s. She appeared in several acclaimed films such as Sudhir Mishra's Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin and Kaizad Gustad's Bombay Boys. Since her marriage to an American citizen and moving to Boston in 2001, she lives in the Boston area. Her husband is a graduate of Harvard Business School and is in finance. Tara published her first book at the age of 23, Fifty and Done (HarperCollins). Before entering the world of movies she was a model and MTV VJ and a regular on the Mumbai stage. She played Begum Sumroo in Alyque Padamsee's play of the same name. Her book, A Sense for Spice: Recipes and Stories from a Konkan Kitchen was published in 2012 and Indian Sense of Salad in 2018. She travels between NYC and Mumbai.
Vande Mataram is a 1997 studio album by Indian musician A. R. Rahman. It is Sony Music India's largest-selling non-film album to date. It released on 12 August 1997 by Sony's music labels Columbia Records and SME Records. The timing of the release commemorated the 50th anniversary of India's independence and has been instrumental in instilling a sense of patriotic pride and national unity amongst the people of India. Ever since release, both the album and its title song "Maa Tujhe Salaam" have had a profoundly positive and unifying impact on the nationalistic and patriotic mood of the country.
A number of concerns and controversies surfaced before the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, India, which received widespread media coverage both in India and the rest of the world.
Rajani is an Indian television series which aired on Doordarshan directed by Basu Chatterjee. It had Priya Tendulkar in lead role. It became immensely popular for creating awareness among lax government offices and officials. Shah Rukh Khan and Subhash Ghai had cameo appearances in two episodes. It was written by Karan Razdan and Anil Chaudhary, with the title track being sung by Asha Bhosle.
Michael McCleary is a New Zealand songwriter, composer, performer, producer and director based in Mumbai, India since 2007. He has worked on a large number of advertisements such as for brands such as Levi's, Coca-Cola, Vodafone and films such as Waiting, Margarita with a Straw, Shaitan and Shanghai.
Benjamin Sum is a Burmese singer of ethnic Chin descent. He rose to public recognition following his finish as the runner-up on the fourth season of Myanmar Idol. However, his rose to stardom is attributed to his cover of a Mizo love song "Chhailai Di Lenna" on YouTube in 2021.
Esther Lalduhawmi Hnamte is a child singer and prodigy from Mizoram, India. She became a media sensation in late 2020 when her rendition of A. R. Rahman's song "Maa Tujhe Salaam" went viral. She became the fastest viewer-gaining artists on YouTube among the Mizo people.
Sylvester da Cunha was an Indian advertising professional and theatre personality. He was most famously known for creating the Utterly Butterly advertising campaign and the Amul girl mascot for the Indian dairy cooperative Amul. He also served as a consultant to multinational agencies including the World Bank, UNICEF, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development on various projects linked to food and nutrition.