What Went Behind the Scenes of Swiggy’s #GenieHaiNaa

Spilling the tea on Swiggy’s latest for Raksha Bandhan by Rishi Sheth, Sr. Creative and his 16-year-old brother

At Dentsu Webchutney, we’re all each other’s biggest cheerleaders. Which brought us to the tradition of flooding our WhatsApp groups with the latest and greatest work from our teams.

Last week, Team Swiggy released their film for Raksha Bandhan, and what follows was sent as an intro to the film. Which led to our groups being flooded with Lols, Awws, and heart reacts in stickers.

In the middle of it all, our Rishi sent this message on the making of the film. Take it away, Rish!:

“My brother (16) typed this message as I dictated it to him comfortably wrapped inside my blanket, (Ok it’s actually a ‘SOLAPUR’ wali super-comfy chaddar which has the perfect texture, thickness, size, and weight to put you to sleep, especially during work hours) but Idk what to call it in English. Hence, blanket. Convenient.

Speaking of convenience, Genie is a service from Swiggy that allows one to send stuff anywhere in the city. Food, charger, keys, empty tiffins, gifts, clothes, Rakhi, or literally anything you need delivered.

The client said Rakshabandhan was like ‘The BigBillionDays’ for Swiggy Genie. They were expecting order numbers to spike up as they had seen on other festive occasions earlier. They said it would be great to have an engagement campaign, but also said they weren’t married to it. So we went with a film. Rejected. “This is not Swiggy TOV”. We went with another film. Rejected. “This is not very Rakshabandhan”. And another one. And another one.

After 4 rounds of getting films and social amplification ideas turned down, when Arihant and I and the rest of the team were almost about to give up, Yatharth pointed us to this beautiful insight, which was right in front of us all the time, but nobody saw it - “Younger siblings are the default genie in every home.” So true! Think of those times your sibling had to get you a glass of water just because they were born a few years after you. Haha.

5th meeting. and while we were (probably) a little tired of presenting new Rakshabandhan routes by now, all of us believed in this one and knew we had to sell it. So we sold it. And that too, too easily. A wise person once said “good ideas don’t need a lot of selling” and it’s true. It checked all their boxes. Idea, script, social, all good to go.

But wait. LOL. Rakshabandhan is in 7 days! Paniccccccccc! Which is where came in Tasha, Joel, and Meher who worked their magic to get the film approved, produced, shot, and edited, with music and VFX and 10 rounds of feedback; while the rest of us worked on the articulation and social and captions and post-copies and hashtags in the background.

After about 3 weeks of thinking about Rakshabandhan, infinite Teams calls, watching close to 30 over-emotional Rakhi ads, 3 decks, 10 meetings, 1 day of the shoot, our baby was finally ready to meet the world. It’s here.

And that’s just the film. Along with it, we worked on hundreds of words of copy and about fifty artboards and revisions on top of all that. None of which could have been possible without guidance and aashirwaad from my favourite guru Sanket Audhi. Thanks to GD Prasad’s music recommendation and Srishti Shetty for being there constantly. Thanks for watching. Thanks for reading.

Credits: Yathartha, Meharunnisa, Sanket, Pratyush, Tasha, Srishti, Rishi (me), Rishabh, Vaishali, Pruthvi, Sneha, Shikha, Director, Editor, JioFiber, WeTransfer…

… and many many more who cannot be named thanks to my slippery memory. All of the Swiggy team. Apologies for the misplaced punctuations and typos. My brother is just 16. Come onnn.

Do let us know what you think, mai external validation ka bhookha hoon :)”

A wholesome story behind a wholesome film. Webchutney is pretty wholesome that way 🤭.