Every October, Indian brands face the Halloween question: participate or sit it out? Most choose to participate through orange packaging and plastic pumpkins. ITC Candyman chose translation instead.
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The Problem with Cultural Copy-Paste
Children in India are growing up with pumpkins, witches, and brooms as their vocabulary of horror. Halloween presents itself neatly packaged, complete with established iconography and retail-ready rituals. The imagery works. Kids understand it. But here’s what that imported vocabulary doesn’t do: it doesn’t inform them about the spectacular tradition of horror we’ve had all along.
The dayans and chudails, the bhoot banglas and haunted havelis, the Ramsay Brothers’ lurid VHS cassette sleeves that gave an entire generation nightmares – all of it sits there, culturally rich and utterly unused. At the same time, brands chase the foreign festival with generic spooky messaging. What ITC Candyman understood is that Halloween isn’t the opportunity. Reintroducing children to India’s own horror canon through a modern, participatory lens, that’s the opportunity.
Making Halloween Desi
Candyman didn’t add Hindi text to Western designs. They excavated India’s visual and narrative language of fear and translated Halloween’s essence (playful scares, seasonal treats, shareable experiences) into imagery that resonates across generations. The execution reveals something about how technology and tradition can collaborate rather than compete.
Halloween presents itself neatly packaged, complete with established iconography and retail-ready rituals. The imagery works. Kids understand it. But here’s what that imported vocabulary doesn’t do: it doesn’t inform them about the spectacular tradition of horror we’ve had all along.
AI agents were trained on the distinctive style of B-grade Bollywood horror from the 90s – that lurid Ramsay Brothers aesthetic. Illustrators then refined the AI-generated work by hand.
The result was imagery that felt authentically Indian whilst achieving the scale modern campaigns require. This matters because it challenges the lazy binary between AI and human creativity. The most culturally resonant work doesn’t choose between technology and tradition, it orchestrates meaningful collaboration between them. And in doing so, it preserves what generic global aesthetics tend to flatten.
Heritage as Competitive Advantage
In a globalised market where everyone’s chasing the same seasonal retail opportunities, deep local knowledge becomes differentiation. Think about what brands typically do with festivals: they create one campaign that’s meant to work everywhere, then ‘localise’ it by swapping out language and maybe a few surface details. The result is work that feels culturally meaningful nowhere. It’s the marketing equivalent of that friend who says ‘namaste’ at you and thinks they’ve bridged cultures.
“Think about what brands typically do with festivals: they create one campaign that’s meant to work everywhere, then ‘localise’ it by swapping out language and maybe a few surface details.”
Candyman went the other direction. They recognised that India didn’t need Halloween, it required a new occasion to celebrate the ‘scaries’ it already loved. By mining their own cultural canon rather than importing someone else’s, they created something that couldn’t be replicated by any global brand with a localisation budget.
That’s the competitive advantage. Heritage isn’t nostalgia or obligation. It’s the unfair advantage of actually knowing something deeply while everyone else is skimming Wikipedia. It’s understanding not just what resonates, but why it resonates, who it resonates with, and how to make it feel immediate rather than antiquated.
For Indian brands, this should be obvious. We have centuries of stories, visual languages, and cultural codes that global brands can’t access without feeling like tourists. Yet most campaigns still chase Western templates and wonder why they generate awareness without affection. The brands that will win aren’t those with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones with the deepest cultural literacy and the confidence to use it.
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The Larger Question
Here’s what the Candyman campaign asks the industry to consider: How many of our ‘global’ campaigns are actually culturally meaningful anywhere? We’ve built an entire marketing ecosystem around the idea that scale requires sameness. To be global, you must be generic. That cultural specificity is expensive, complicated, and ultimately limiting. So we create work that could run in any market because it’s designed for no market in particular.
This isn’t just about festivals. It’s about whether brands understand the difference between making noise and making meaning.
But what if the opposite is true? What if true global success comes not from creating one campaign that works everywhere, but from developing the cultural fluency and creative flexibility to make every market feel like the work was created specifically for them, because it was?
This isn’t just about festivals. It’s about whether brands understand the difference between making noise and making meaning. ITC Candyman made Halloween Indian not by rejecting it, but by recognising what it could be: an excuse to celebrate what was already there. That’s not localisation. That’s not adaptation. That’s translation in its truest sense, carrying meaning across boundaries while preserving emotional essence.
And in 2025, that might be the only kind of marketing worth the effort.
