There is a sunscreen brand that ran an ad. The copy read: "Who knew 2 fingers could feel this good?" set against a close-up of two fingers slathered in white cream. The ad made the rounds. It was shared, dissected, and then largely forgotten — along with the brand name attached to it.

Double-entendres in advertising aren't new. What has changed is the volume, velocity, and context in which they land. For many brands, innuendo has quietly become the default move in a brainstorming session where someone needs to "make it viral."

That conflation — between attention and virality, between being provocative and being memorable — is where the problem begins. Durex gets away with it because the product IS the brand. When Magicpin runs a 69-rupee paneer wrap ad with suggestive copy, it generates noise but not affinity.

The brands that stand the test of time aren't the ones that made you stop. They're the ones that gave you something worth looking at.

I have a possibly unhealthy habit of screenshotting ads. I've spent enough time sitting at the intersection of content strategy and performance marketing to know that a creative gone wrong isn't just an aesthetic problem — it's a signal. Something in the pipeline broke.

Last month, I found the break twice — from two renowned brands: Skyscanner and OpenAI. Both are running campaigns in India. Both have smart creative teams and healthy media budgets. The intent is right. But the Hinglish copy has errors that only become obvious when you say the words out loud.

OpenAI's Codex campaign reads: "Code gen se zyada, Codex aapko ship karne mein madad karta hai." The word "gen" — as in code generation — is pronounced with a soft J sound in English. Hindi phonetics don't make that deal. Hindi is refreshingly, almost ruthlessly literal. No Goking!

Then there's the ChatGPT Business ad with "AI ke sath teji se laanch karein." Laanch. For launch. This is something no one says — not in Hindi, not in Hinglish, not even in the exaggerated English accent Indians do when they're being theatrical.

The pipeline almost certainly looked like this: Brief in English → AI translation → design adapts → ad ships. Fast. High volume. But translation is not transcreation. One is a technical task. The other is human judgment — and that's the part that doesn't have a dashboard metric.

What's missing is one more gate in the workflow. A regional copy review that costs a fraction of the campaign budget and protects the rest of it from the quiet damage.

A few months ago I was visiting Bangalore for the first time. New city, long days, late nights, questionable life choices. And one day I stumbled upon Swish.

I opened up the package and the copy made me pause. The straw came in a package with copy that read: "This straw sucks!" I thought to myself — that's bold.

Many orders followed. Each came with some quirky product copy that made me smile. At one point I was ordering in just to discover more of it. Then came the postcards. Coincidentally, I was leaving Bangalore in 2 days.

This is a marketing lesson in itself: good branding isn't always about being louder. Sometimes it's about being unexpectedly delightful when nobody is expecting it.

Also, if anyone from Swish is reading this: the postcards survived the trip. They're now proudly displayed on my fridge. The late-night shenanigans are still going strong.