The campaign
Brand: Thums Up. The specific film is usually credited as ‘Main Hoon Toofani’, part of the larger ‘Aaj Kuch Toofani Karte Hain’ push. It ran in India in the early 2010s. Agency credits are not consistently recorded in public archives, so treat the attribution with caution. By then Thums Up was already a strange and valuable asset: a homegrown cola born in 1977 that Coca-Cola chose to keep after re-entering India in the 1990s.
What the film said and how
The argument was not subtle. Thums Up was not a drink for a polite afternoon. It was fuel for doing something audacious. Akshay Kumar played the embodiment of that claim, and the film leaned on movement, heat, machinery and risk rather than refreshment visuals.
The line ‘Aaj Kuch Toofani Karte Hain’ did the heavy lifting. It translates roughly as ‘let’s do something stormy today’, and it worked as a call to action and a personality. The ad never tried to explain a new ingredient or a better taste. It sold a disposition: the brand was for people who would rather act than wait.
The response it got
The phrase escaped the ad almost immediately. People used it for spontaneous plans, dares, captions and jokes. For a cola brand, that is rare. The action-movie grammar and a major star gave it strong recall among young consumers, the category’s most important audience. Precise sales figures tied to this single film are not reliably public, but the campaign is widely remembered as reinforcing Thums Up’s position as the ‘stronger’ Indian cola.
What it changed in the category
Thums Up reminded Indian marketers that a local brand could take on global cola giants by being more culturally specific, not less. The campaign doubled down on action, daredevilry and colloquial Hindi while rival cola advertising often borrowed international gloss.
- It made a local idiom carry a national brand.
- It tied carbonation’s ‘thunder’ to a personality, not just a taste note.
- It turned a tagline into everyday speech, a rare achievement for a soft drink.
Where the brand and the idea are now
Thums Up still uses storm and thunder imagery, and the idea of being toofani remains part of its marketing vocabulary. Under Coca-Cola India, the brand has moved into sports, action cinema and broader purpose work, but the core promise of bold movement hasn’t disappeared. Later campaigns have revisited the word and the daredevil energy, which shows how durable the platform is.
For marketers, the lesson is not that every brand needs stunts. It is that a brand line can become a behaviour. Thums Up gave its drink a quality people could claim: to be toofani. That is harder for a competitor to copy than any taste claim.
Watch the original: Thums Up on YouTube
