During this year’s IPL advertising blitz, a new campaign from super.money quietly slipped into the same creative universe that now defines much of India’s fintech marketing. The film, featuring Salman Khan and Arbaaz Khan, leans into a deliberately chaotic shoot narrative. It’s self-aware, playful and built around a meta joke about making an ad itself. The humour lands first; the product message arrives later.
If it feels familiar, that’s because it is.
Over the past four years, fintech advertising in India has begun to converge around a very specific tone. Bright colours. Absurd celebrity situations. Internet-native humour. Quick edits designed for social media virality.
Scroll through recent campaigns from CRED, Slice, Jupiter and even newer entrants like super.money and the creative grammar starts to blur together.
The category has discovered a formula. And everyone is using it.
The template that worked
The shift can largely be traced back to the cultural impact of CRED.
In 2021, Rahul Dravid, famously calm and disciplined, appeared in a CRED IPL commercial screaming in Bengaluru traffic and declaring himself “Indiranagar ka gunda.” The internet erupted. Memes flooded social media. The ad became one of the most talked-about campaigns of the tournament.
It showed something powerful: finance brands did not need to sound serious to sell financial products.
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CRED doubled down. Later campaigns saw Madhuri Dixit turning into a ninja, Govinda dancing through nostalgia and a series of surreal celebrity crossovers that leaned more on cultural absurdity than financial messaging.
The formula worked. It delivered cultural buzz and brand recall in a crowded category. Naturally, others followed.
A category chasing the same tone
Across fintech advertising today, the pattern repeats itself.
Slice built its campaigns around internet humour and exaggerated youth culture, positioning itself as the anti-bank for Gen Z users.
Jupiter leaned into playful, conversational storytelling about everyday money habits rather than traditional financial advertising tropes.
Even infrastructure players like Razorpay experimented with storytelling formats designed for social media circulation. One IPL campaign featured 37 startup founders appearing in a film celebrating the broader startup ecosystem.
The creative language across these campaigns varies slightly. But the underlying tone is strikingly similar: witty, self-aware and culturally plugged in.
The IPL amplification
Fintech companies are among the fastest-growing advertisers in India’s sports ecosystem. As competition intensifies, marketing budgets have expanded dramatically. The IPL has amplified this convergence.
According to filings and industry reports, PhonePe spent Rs 455 crore on marketing in the first half of FY26, up from Rs 307 crore during the same period the previous year.
With dozens of apps chasing the same digital consumer, visibility has become a marketing arms race.
The IPL offers instant reach but also rewards entertainment over explanation. Ads must grab attention within seconds, often between overs and during social media scrolls.
For newer entrants like super.money, humor becomes a way to cut through that clutter.
“At super.money, right from our launch in 2024, we have been clear and consistent about the creative direction we want to take as a brand,” a company spokesperson said. “We have stayed rooted in a Gen Z and young India-first approach, and that philosophy reflects across every customer touchpoint — from our product experience and UI/UX design to our rewards structure, social media presence and advertising campaigns.”
The company says its intent is not to blindly replicate a trend.
“For us, the objective is not to chase formats simply because they are trending in the category. Instead, we stay focused on what super.money stands for and how authentically we can communicate that to our users.”
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“Younger consumers today can instantly tell when a brand is trying too hard to sound relevant or borrow internet culture without authenticity. For us, the real differentiator is not just the format of communication, but the consistency of the philosophy behind it.”
Creative professionals argue that such campaigns are often designed for the early stage of brand building.
“A brand at the awareness stage must prioritise attention,” says Javaad Ahmed, creative professional at Talented Agency.
“Supermoney’s Salman Khan ads knock it out of the park when you judge it from that lens. If they did look similar to any other advertising, then they wouldn’t stand out.”
Ahmed points out that different brands are pursuing different storytelling paths.
“Razorpay on the other hand has been backing India’s startup ecosystem for years now. In that case, Razorpay just had to counterintuitively share the spotlight to gain all the attention. The long-term distinctiveness will come from how consistently you can maintain both styles of storytelling narratives.”
When agencies shape a category
Another structural reason behind the convergence is the growing influence of a handful of creative agencies working closely with startup brands.
Agencies such as Talented have built a reputation for internet-savvy campaigns that resonate with young digital audiences. But when multiple companies within the same category rely on similar creative ecosystems, stylistic overlap becomes inevitable.
Different scripts. Different celebrities. Same creative DNA.
Advertising history has seen similar patterns before.
For years, if marketers wanted purpose-driven storytelling with emotional heft, they often gravitated toward Lowe Lintas.
Today’s fintech advertising has simply replaced purpose with playful irreverence.
But some in the industry argue the issue runs deeper than stylistic sameness.
“Everyone in advertising is fighting the same battle: break clutter. But somewhere on that crusade, a few fundamentals quietly get left behind,” says Adarsh Atal, chief creative officer of Tilt Brand Solutions.
“Most work doesn’t have an insight. A surprising number doesn’t even have a clear task they are looking to solve. And the fintech category is no exception.”
He argues that many campaigns fail to reflect where the brand actually sits in its lifecycle. “Agencies are often either oblivious to the stage a brand is at or simply don’t care. Is the brand building awareness? Earning trust? Driving trial? The work rarely reflects any of that thinking.”
“Breaking clutter is a means to an end. Somewhere along the way, it became the end itself. And sometimes it does cut through. But when the consumer finally stops to listen, the argument runs hollow. The clutter was broken, and the opportunity was wasted in the same breath,” Adarsh added.
The danger of creative convergence
Industry observers say there are structural reasons why fintech advertising often ends up looking similar.
“Fintech as a business is fairly regulated. The elbow room for clever claims or gimmicky ads is pretty limited,” says Dr. Sandeep Goyal, chairman of Rediffusion.
“Also, by and large financial brands by nature are risk-averse and not prone to much experimentation. That leads to much too much of a sameness.”
Others believe the category has already entered a creative monoculture.
“Fintech advertising has entered a monoculture moment,” says Ruchika Malhan Varma, CMO at Generali Central Insurance.
“The witty, self-aware digital voice that once set challenger brands apart has now become the default tone across the category. When everyone sounds the same, distinctiveness erodes.”
She warns that brands risk confusing attention with long-term equity.
“The real risk is confusing short-term attention with long-term brand equity. Sustainable differentiation comes not from clever copy but from trust, clarity of purpose and a defined philosophy about money, risk or empowerment. In crowded categories, memorability doesn’t come from being universally likeable. It comes from being unmistakably recognisable,” Varma added.
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For advertising veteran Ambi Parameswaran, the current moment echoes an older advertising playbook.
“A lot of fintech advertising aims to capture attention at any cost,” he says. “CRED did it with some pizzazz. Their ads were talked about, and they managed to get a lot of people onto their platform.”
“It looks as if super.money is also trying to do the same kind of irreverential advertising using Salman Khan. If they pour enough money, they too may get enough consumers onto their platform.”
Parameswaran compares the strategy to classic low-involvement advertising once used by snack and soda brands.
“We used to call this ‘low involvement’ advertising. Categories like candies, snacks and sodas were experts at this. Now with a lot of capital, fintech companies too are adopting this playbook, encouraged by their VCs.”
“But if you are yet another vanilla platform, I wonder how well it will work in the long term.”
The bigger creative question
India’s fintech sector is entering a more competitive phase.
The easy user acquisition era is fading. The category is crowded. And marketing budgets are climbing again as companies compete for attention.
Which makes creative distinctiveness more important than ever.
Because when every fintech ad feels like it came from the same creative kitchen, audiences may laugh at the film.
But struggle to remember which app served the meal.
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