Stop calling raw data ‘insights’, says Perfetti’s marketing chief Gunjan Khetan

New Delhi: For Gunjan Khetan, Director – Marketing, Perfetti Van Melle India, the biggest problem in modern advertising is not Gen Z’s attention span; it is the quality of stories brands tell.

“I fundamentally do not believe that there is an attention deficit issue in the generation,” Khetan said in a candid conversation with BestMediaInfo Editor Akansha Srivastava on the latest episode of the BestMediaInfo podcast. “The larger challenge is with brands and creatives and the kind of stories they are able to craft to be able to hook attention long enough with that audience,” he added.

According to him, the long-form vs. short-form debate misses the point. He said, “A great story will always find its place and attention. Humanity has evolved as storytellers. So that is really ingrained in our DNA. We always love great stories.”

Perfetti’s own 40–60 second films, he pointed out, see strong completion rates among young audiences when the story works.

‘Creative is not the business; it is a tool to deliver the business’

Calling back to the era of Piyush Pandey and Prasoon Joshi, Khetan said the icons of Indian advertising understood both storytelling and business.

“In all my experience, the one thing that always works is good storytelling… but the storytelling has to be around the brand,” he said, criticising films that go viral but leave no memory of the brand. “You are advertising a brand, not advertising a story.”

“Creative is a tool to deliver the business. Creative is not the business,” he stressed.

Citing the classic Fevicol work of Piyush Pandey, he said the magic lay in the way the product benefit sat at the heart of the story: “Story is so powerful. But the story is all about things getting stuck… the brand benefit is right in the middle of that story.”

At the same time, he warned against the opposite extreme where the “brand manager writes the script” and the brand is plastered everywhere without drama. “The brand benefit needs to be the centre of the drama and the storytelling. It shouldn’t be just a small part, but the hero of the story,” he said.

Agencies’ weakening understanding of clients’ businesses

Khetan said one big shift he has seen over the years is a weakening of agencies’ upstream understanding of client business.

“Where agencies can do better is before you end up at that stage, which is creative; we need to understand the business first,” he said. “Creative is a tool to deliver the business. Creative does not exist in isolation.”

Recalling his Complan days, he spoke of Leo’s Arvind Sharma as an example of how deep that partnership once ran. “He used to spend days in our office, fighting with us on why we should do things and not do things. And he would do a lot of homework before he landed up at our work.”

On what makes a good modern creative brief, Khetan’s answer was clear: single-mindedness.
“There should be one thing very, very clear in the brief, which is what is the message the brand needs to give,” he said. Marketers, out of love for their brands, often want to say five different things. “The magic of storytelling would be around one thing… Find that one thing that will create magic for your brand and put it in the brief.”

He also pushed marketers to stop calling data “insights”. “Insights and data and facts are vastly different,” he said, adding that decks that present widely known numbers as “insights” are a waste of time.

On new-age creative shops such as Enormous, Talented and The Womb, he said the work is “absolutely phenomenal” and he would “any day” love to work with them. But Perfetti’s long history with agencies like McCann and Ogilvy means they are now “equal guardians” of its brands. “It’s like two parents,” he said, making it hard to “divorce” from such partners.

‘Cringe’ content, pop culture and why brand-fit matters more than FOMO

On the rise of so-called “cringe” trends among Gen Z, from “Ganji Chudail” to viral audio memes, Khetan was pragmatic.

“What we call as cringe content, in my opinion, is a way for a generation to come together and speak the same language,” he said, likening it to the in-jokes and codes that confused parents of earlier generations as well.

Brands, he said, have no reason to look down on such trends, but they must be careful. “As long as your brand is fit with the story or the idea, you can definitely do it. But if your brand has no connection with this fad or this story or this idea, then consumers will be able to see through it.”

He also cautioned marketers about chasing fads too late. “A lot of these things also peak very fast and fall very fast. So as brand managers, we need to be careful about what we are putting money behind. And are we one of the first movers? Or are we coming in towards the end, towards the tail of this movement?”

Perfetti, he said, “always goes ‘brand-out first.’” “We never look at content to decide what we want to integrate in. We always go brand out first… what is the idea of the brand? And if something fits in with that narrative, we do it.”

Humour, offence and cancel culture: ‘We don’t overthink this’

Perfetti’s brands – from Centre Fresh and Centre Fruit to Happydent – are known for humour-led advertising. In an era of instant outrage and cancel calls, Khetan said the company refuses to be paralysed.

“Straightforward answer is we don’t overthink this,” he said. “I can tell you if I do anything today, and I get 10 people to react to it, some people will like something, some people will not like it, and that’s completely fine.”

He cited Happydent’s cleanliness-focused work as an example. Some viewers felt it “generalised” Indians as litterers. But for Khetan, the larger truth stands: “Can India be cleaner? Of course it can. Does the government have all the responsibility for cleaning India? Absolutely not. Do citizens have the responsibility of cleaning India? Absolutely, yes.”

“As long as a large number of people are able to get what the brand is trying to sell, a single-minded message, and that makes them buy the product, it should be fine for us,” he said.

If brands and agencies begin to design work to offend nobody at all, he warned, “then I’ll put so many boundaries on my creative agency that they will come up with a very templated, fixed creative, which would be incredibly boring when it hits TV.”

Beyond TVCs, Perfetti extends its ideas into pop culture through stand-up comedy, music events, festivals and properties like Kumbh, but always with brand positioning in mind. He pointed to a Happydent stand-up comedy initiative for the deaf community as an example of purpose-led humour rooted in the brand’s “shedding light” platform.

Khetan described AI and adtech as a major but under-leveraged opportunity for FMCG marketers, saying Perfetti already uses AI-led bidding for programmatic optimisation and is testing tech to mass-produce tactical creativity while keeping human-led storytelling at the core for big campaigns and within clear brand guardrails. He expects AI’s “uncanny valley” in films to narrow in a year or two.

Looking ahead, he called 2025–27 a highly dynamic period as technology and AI reshape marketing, even as the fundamentals of consumer relevance and conversation remain unchanged. His advice to young marketers is to focus on learning, be patient about career growth, avoid comparisons with peers, and see themselves as co-creators of India’s future by finding small ways to make a long-term difference.

Watch the full podcast here: