The Brief
A home-services brand — interior, painting, renovation, maintenance — wanted to grow brand awareness in the metros. They had strong operations. Good NPS. Repeat customers who loved them.
Their problem: nobody talked about them until they needed them. Home services is a category that lives in search, not in conversation. You look for a plumber when your tap leaks. You don't think about home renovation brands on a Tuesday afternoon.
They needed to break out of consideration-only marketing and into everyday cultural conversation. Their marketing head put it plainly in our first meeting:
"We want people to know our name before they need us. Right now, they find us on Google when they're already mid-crisis."
Why Standard Influencer Campaigns Wouldn't Work
We killed six different campaign concepts in the strategy phase.
The ones that didn't make the cut:
- A home makeover series with mid-tier influencers (done by every brand in the category)
- A "real homes of India" documentary (culturally true, commercially invisible)
- A celebrity ambassador deal (expensive, forgettable within 6 months)
- Sponsored content across 40 micro-influencers (reach without recall)
The brief needed something with genuine entertainment value. Something that a publication would cover without being paid to. Something that people would share because it was interesting — not because they'd been asked to.
The Format We Created
Home Swap — a lifestyle format where two celebrity best friends swap homes and redesign each other's spaces using the brand's services, before a final reveal.
The ingredients we knew had to be right:
Real relationships. Not two celebrities who'd met twice and been told to act friendly. We cast pairs who had genuine, well-documented friendships with actual shared history — people who would disagree on design choices in real ways.
Real creative control. Each celebrity had a full design brief for their friend's space but had to work within a defined scope and timeline. The tension between ambition and constraint was built into the format.
High production value. Shot like a premium documentary, not a branded YouTube video. We brought in a director whose last two projects had been streamed on OTT platforms. The visual language had to signal: this is content, not advertising.
Honest editorial. There was no script. There was no shot list that the brand approved. The cameras followed what happened. Not everything that happened was flattering to the brand's services — we kept it in anyway.
The Production
Pre-production took three weeks. Casting took another two — we spoke to 14 celebrity pairs before landing on the right two for Season 1.
Shoot ran over six days across two homes. Post took four weeks. Final cut: two 34-minute episodes.
Distribution plan:
- Full episodes on YouTube (brand's channel and co-hosted on both celebrities' channels)
- 6-minute highlight cuts on Instagram
- 90-second reveal moments released 48 hours before each episode as standalone Reels
- Celebrity-side posts on release day — organic, not scripted
What Happened
The reveal Reel from Episode 1 crossed 4.2M views in 72 hours.
Six entertainment publications covered the show in its first week — not the brand, the show. The brand appeared in every piece because it made the show possible, but the coverage was driven by the celebrity angle, the design choices, and one moment of genuine on-camera friction that made for good television.
Final numbers across the 8-week release window:
- 28.4M impressions across owned and earned channels
- 620+ media mentions across entertainment, lifestyle, and home design publications
- 4.8M YouTube views combined across both episodes
- Brand awareness lift of 31% among 28–40 year olds in surveyed metros (client measurement)
- Enquiries through the brand's website increased 340% in the two weeks following Episode 1
What the Client Said
"The press team kept asking us which agency did the PR. We didn't do any PR. That's the point."
The brand commissioned Season 2 before Season 1 had finished releasing.
The Principle This Proves
Earned media is not a distribution strategy. It's an output of quality.
Brands spend enormous budgets trying to manufacture press coverage for content that isn't interesting. The coverage doesn't come, and the brand concludes that earned media is unreliable.
The real conclusion is different: earned media reliably follows content that is genuinely interesting. Press covers things worth covering. Audiences share things worth sharing.
The job was to make something worth talking about. Everything else followed.