Gresbond’s Calculated Cringe: When Low-Brow Humour Wins Awards

Whilst Gresbond by Kajaria’s digital campaign may have secured the “Outstanding Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year” at the ET Leadership Excellence Awards 2025, its victory raises uncomfortable questions about what passes for brilliant marketing in contemporary India. The ten-film series, anchored by the tagline “Gresbond Se Lagaya Hota, To Aisa Nahi Hota,” represents a particular strain of Indian advertising that mistakes volume for virtue and crude situational comedy for cultural resonance. tribuneindia

The Formula Behind the Façade

The campaign’s structure follows a predictable template:

1. A serene household moment.
2. A sudden mishap—a broken tile from a dropped puja lota, kitchen tiles loosening after a blender’s jiggle, or a family portrait crashing to the floor.
3. The punchline lands with metronomic regularity:“Gresbond Se Lagaya Hota, To Aisa Nahi Hota.”

This relentless repetition feels less like storytelling and more like an assembly line of digital slapstick.

What the industry hails as “humour-led storytelling” is, in truth, formulaic content production designed for quick consumption. Each ad follows the same beat: mishap occurs, consequence unfolds, tagline arrives like clockwork. The supposed “comic style and language of internet humour” reads more like corporate mimicry of viral content than genuine cultural commentary.

The Cringe Coefficient

The fundamental issue isn’t that the advertisements attempt humour—it’s that they deploy it without wit, nuance, or genuine insight into human behaviour. Consider the scenario where a son calls his mother to announce his marriage, causing her to drop a prayer vessel that breaks a tile. The supposed comedy emerges from domestic shock, but the execution feels manufactured rather than organic. youtube

This approach aligns with a broader pattern in Indian advertising where brands conflate loudness with memorability.

All creative energy is coming from independent sources… nothing from advertising.
—Santosh Desai on the industry’s creative crisis

The Gresbond campaign exemplifies this malaise—it borrows the surface aesthetics of digital culture whilst lacking the authentic voice that makes genuine viral content compelling.youtube

The Industry’s Low Bar

The campaign’s commercial success—achieving 4.5 million views and three million unique viewers—shouldn’t be confused with creative excellence. In an attention economy where shock and repetition can manufacture engagement, these metrics reflect distribution prowess rather than creative merit. The brand’s celebration of its “entertainment-first approach” reveals a category so starved of imagination that basic situational comedy feels revolutionary.medianews4u+1

Kajaria’s claim to have “pushed the boundaries of how such functional products can be communicated” rings hollow when examined alongside genuinely innovative campaigns.

The Gresbond advertisements don’t push boundaries; they simply dress traditional hard-sell messaging in contemporary digital packaging.

The “unexpected twist” that their creative partners champion is anything but unexpected when viewed across the ten-film series. afaqs+1

Technical Superiority, Narrative Poverty

Ironically, the product itself addresses a genuine market need. The campaign correctly identifies that Indian construction practices remain wedded to cement despite its limitations—shrinkage, poor bonding with modern tiles, and durability issues. The educational component about adhesive superiority for vitrified tiles and zero-porosity surfaces represents legitimate consumer value.tribuneindia

Yet this substantive message gets buried beneath manufactured scenarios that feel disconnected from real consumer experiences.

Rather than exploring the genuine frustrations of homeowners dealing with tile failures, or the professional challenges faced by contractors, the campaign opts for cartoonish domestic scenes that reduce complex construction decisions to punchline material.

Meme Culture Appropriation

The campaign’s positioning as “aligned with meme culture” reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes digital content genuinely shareable. Authentic meme culture emerges from genuine cultural observations—it crystallises shared experiences through unexpected connections and genuine wit.

The Gresbond advertisements, by contrast, feel like corporate attempts to reverse-engineer virality through focus-grouped “relatability.”tribuneindia

This appropriation extends to the campaign’s social media strategy, where the brand attempts to generate organic engagement through manufactured scenarios.

The result feels hollow—content designed to appear spontaneous whilst following rigid commercial imperatives.

The Award Circuit’s Complicity

The campaign’s recognition at industry awards reveals the insular nature of Indian advertising evaluation.

When campaigns win accolades for “innovative format, digital impact, and effectiveness” despite questionable creative merit, it suggests an industry more concerned with internal validation than genuine cultural contribution.tribuneindia

The jury’s praise for the campaign’s ability to address “a real market gap” conflates functional product positioning with creative excellence.

A campaign can serve legitimate commercial purposes whilst remaining creatively impoverished—the Gresbond series exemplifies this distinction.tribuneindia

Cultural Context and Consumer Intelligence

The campaign’s defenders argue it reflects authentic Indian domestic scenarios, but this defence patronises both the medium and the audience.

Contemporary Indian consumers, particularly the “younger, digitally native audiences” the brand claims to target, demonstrate sophisticated content consumption patterns. They distinguish between genuinely clever content and corporate attempts at manufactured relatability.tribuneindia

The reduction of complex family dynamics—marriage announcements, domestic maintenance, household tensions—to crude comedic devices underestimates audience intelligence.

Rather than engaging with the genuine emotional and practical dimensions of home ownership and family life, the campaign opts for broad caricature.

Beyond the Binary

Acknowledging the campaign’s creative limitations doesn’t negate its commercial effectiveness. The tile adhesive market in India requires consumer education, and blunt-force messaging may indeed drive awareness and trial. The campaign succeeds as product marketing whilst failing as cultural communication—a distinction the advertising industry increasingly struggles to maintain.

The real critique lies not with Kajaria’s commercial objectives but with an industry that conflates marketing effectiveness with creative excellence. When formulaic content production receives prestigious recognition, it signals a profession that has lost sight of its cultural responsibilities.

The Larger Malaise

The Gresbond campaign’s success reflects broader issues within Indian advertising: the prioritisation of metrics over meaning, the confusion of attention-grabbing with genuine engagement, and the reduction of complex cultural dynamics to marketable content.

“In a media landscape where authenticity increasingly matters, campaigns that mistake volume for voice risk long-term brand dilution despite short-term gains.”

The industry’s celebration of this campaign as exemplary digital marketing reveals a profession more concerned with replicating the surface aesthetics of digital culture than understanding its underlying dynamics. Until Indian advertising rediscovers the distinction between genuine cultural resonance and manufactured virality, campaigns like Gresbond’s will continue to win awards whilst contributing little to either creative excellence or meaningful cultural dialogue.