Agencies behind ‘I love you Rasna’, ‘Utterly Butterly’ and ‘Daag Acche Hain’ sign off

New Delhi: When Omnicom announced on December 1, 2025, that it would retire the DDB, FCB and MullenLowe brands globally, it did more than change a few logos on reception walls. 

In India, the decision effectively dimmed more than six decades of advertising memory. The agencies that took Rasna from a small concentrate to a national ritual, turned detergent “dirt” into a badge of pride, gave Amul its cultural voice, and made Lifebuoy and Tata Tea synonymous with purpose.

The Indian story begins far from Madison Avenue. On March 25, 1980, in a 500-sq-ft office in Ahmedabad with 15 employees and Rs 40,000 in capital, AG Krishnamurthy started Mudra Communications. The first client was Vimal. The belief was that advertising could be an instrument of social and economic change in a newly liberalising India.

Over the next three decades, Mudra helped shape the middle-class imagination. Its breakthrough came with Rasna in the early 1980s. The “I love you Rasna” jingle took a struggling soft drink concentrate and turned it into a national habit, building a brand that still trades on that memory. Mudra later helped launch McDonald’s in India, localised Samsung, and partnered with Reliance Infocomm during the telecom revolution. In 2011, Omnicom took a majority stake, and the agency became DDB Mudra Group, part of the DDB Worldwide network, operating out of 15 cities and reaching deep into India’s towns and smaller markets.

Under the December 1 restructure, the DDB brand is to be retired worldwide and its operations, including DDB Mudra in India, folded into TBWA over the next 18 months. For an agency born in a cramped Ahmedabad office, it is a quietly dramatic end.

If Mudra was the insurgent, Ulka was the strategist that mentored much of India’s early industry. Founded in 1961 by Bal Mundkur and his wife, Ann, Ulka, “meteor” in Sanskrit, was built on a clear spine of marketing insight. In 1963, Mundkur brought in his brother Bhaskar from Hindustan Lever. He introduced a disciplined, research-led approach that anticipated account planning in India by decades, making Ulka a training ground for a generation of planners and marketers.

In 1997, Foote Cone & Belding acquired a majority stake; a decade later, after a global merger with Draft, the agency became part of Draftfcb and finally rebranded as FCB Ulka in 2014. That partnership produced some of the most enduring work in Indian marketing. For Amul, FCB helped evolve the “Utterly Butterly Delicious” universe and later campaigns that linked the brand to India’s white revolution. For Kansai Nerolac, jingles such as “Jab ghar ki raunak badhani ho” turned a paint brand into shorthand for aspiration and home pride. For Zodiac, Ulka created the bearded “Zodiac man” at a time when beards were still considered unkempt in mainstream advertising.

On December 1, that entire line, from Lord & Thomas in 1873 to Ulka in 1961 to FCB Ulka, was compressed into a single decision. FCB is to be folded into BBDO globally; its 152-year-old parent name will be retired.

Lintas’ Indian story began even earlier. As Lever International Advertising Services, it started life as the in-house advertising arm of Lever Brothers, effectively becoming the voice of Hindustan Lever’s soaps and home-care brands from the late 1960s onwards. Over time, it spun out as Lintas India, merged with Lowe in 2000 to become Lowe Lintas, and then MullenLowe Lintas Group after a merger with US-based Mullen in 2015. By the mid-2010s it was consistently ranked among the world’s most effective agencies, with around 600 people across multiple Indian offices and a client list stacked with HUL, Tata, Tanishq and other blue chips.

Its impact is visible far beyond case studies. Surf Excel’s “Daag Acche Hain” redefined how Indian parents looked at mud and stains, from something shameful to a sign of an active, curious childhood. Lifebuoy’s “Help a Child Reach 5” turned handwashing into a national health message. Tata Tea’s “Jaago Re” made a tea brand the voice of democratic awakening. Tanishq campaigns around remarriage and inter-community unions pushed social boundaries while selling jewellery. All of this now sits inside TBWA’s new Indian structure. The Lintas name, whose roots as an advertising brand go back to the turn of the 20th century, is being retired globally.

While three historic names are being taken off the masthead, McCann, BBDO and TBWA survive.

McCann Worldgroup India comes into the merger as one of the country’s most consistent performers. Under Executive Chairman Prasoon Joshi, McCann has built work that blends scale and cultural sharpness, from “Thanda matlab Coca-Cola” to Happydent’s palace commercial and a stream of campaigns across Nestlé, Perfetti, Reliance, government and social causes. Prasoon’s induction into the International Advertising Association Hall of Fame in 2025 underlined the network’s profile. For Omnicom, keeping McCann intact preserves both significant revenue and a relationship with India’s most influential creative voice.

BBDO India, meanwhile, is smaller in scale but punches far above its weight in reputation. Set up in 2008 by Josy Paul, who famously says the agency was started from the backseat of a car, BBDO has built its philosophy around “acts, not ads” and “brand movements”. Whisper’s “Touch the Pickle”, which picked up the inaugural Glass Lion Grand Prix at Cannes, challenged period taboos, while Ariel’s long-running “Share the Load” series turned household chores into a gender equity conversation and topped global effectiveness rankings. For Omnicom, BBDO is the flagship creative brand it wants to align the wider group around. Folding FCB into BBDO’s global network is part of that bet.

TBWA India has always sold itself on “Disruption”. It has produced bold work such as “Blink to Speak” for Asha Ek Hope Foundation, a communication system for people with paralysis that won a Grand Prix at Cannes. Now, with both DDB and MullenLowe Lintas being folded into it, TBWA is evolving into a super-network that will be expected to house multiple distinct cultures under one disruptive philosophy. In practical terms, it becomes the landing zone for much of the talent, business and legacy from DDB Mudra and MullenLowe Lintas.

Behind the creative drama lies a spreadsheet logic. Between Omnicom and IPG, there were six global creative networks. Maintaining all six meant duplicated regional leadership, overlapping footprints, conflicting P&Ls and parallel tech investments. It also created awkward conflict maps, where one agency might be blocked from a pitch because a sister network sat too close to the category.

For Indian CMOs, the story is not purely negative. On one side, the new Omnicom promises a more powerful back-end: the integration of its Omni platform with Acxiom’s data assets gives brands access to billions of verified IDs with attached media and commerce signals. For large marketers managing complex portfolios, a unified data spine can, in theory, enable better cross-category insight, sharper audience targeting and more efficient media allocation. A single relationship managed by a “Client Success Leader” and supported by a global growth team could, if it works as designed, make it easier to tap into creative, media, CRM, commerce and PR teams across markets.

The philosophies that defined DDB Mudra, FCB India and MullenLowe Lintas. Mudra’s belief in advertising as social transformation, Ulka’s strategic rigour, Lintas’ purpose-driven storytelling, cannot simply be cut-and-paste into new networks without losing something in translation.

Conflicts will also need careful handling. McCann, BBDO, TBWA and the absorbed entities all have deep portfolios in FMCG, auto, BFSI and tech. Where there are overlaps, someone will eventually have to move. European competition authorities, in clearing the global merger, underlined that clients can switch agencies relatively easily because of bid-based mandates and low lock-ins. In India, where relationships can be personal but contracts are often flexible, nervous advertisers will not hesitate to look elsewhere if they sense instability.

Ultimately, the question hanging over the Indian market is not whether Omnicom can hit its synergy target. It is whether the price of doing so, in terms of creative identity, local nuance and institutional memory, will prove worth paying.

On paper, Omnicom can now tell a clean story: three global creative pillars, one unified media organisation, one data and AI engine, and clear verticals in health, PR, commerce and precision marketing. In practice, it has chosen to erase three agency brands that, more than most, helped define how India thinks about brands, culture and social change.

DDB Mudra showed that a business started in a small Ahmedabad office could, through ideas, produce national brands. FCB India proved that strategic insight and cultural sensitivity could sit together, that butter, paint and shirts could become expressions of identity, not just products. MullenLowe Lintas demonstrated that selling soap or tea could go hand in hand with moving the needle on public health, democratic participation or social norms.

That is the ledger Indian advertising will be weighing, long after the integration decks are filed away.