Dentsu Creative Isobar has taken Battlegrounds Mobile India’s Collection Level feature out of the usual gaming frame and placed it inside the melodrama of 1980s Hindi cinema. The new campaign for KRAFTON India’s BGMI introduces players to the Collection Level system through two short films built on small-town settings and old-school slapstick.
The campaign’s organising line, “Jo BGMI par collection level badhaye, woh Collector ban jaaye,” borrows the real-world authority and family pride attached to the title of Collector. In the films, that prestige is redirected at the gaming community, where rare items and distinctive inventories act as markers of dedication.
What the films do
The first film, Akkad Bakkad Collector, follows the commotion in a small-town office as everyone prepares for an important dignitary. The second, Nikamme Ki Amma, leans on the familiar Bollywood theme of a mother who dreams of seeing her son reach a prestigious position. Both narratives swerve towards BGMI, turning the Collection Level into the punchline rather than the setup.
The move is a deliberate departure from conventional gaming communication. Instead of listing mechanics, the campaign makes collection progress culturally recognisable: the status of a Collector, reimagined as a title players earn inside the game.
Why the prestige play works
For BGMI players, rare items and time spent in the game are already visible signals of commitment. The Collection Level feature gives those signals a formal home. By connecting it to a familiar social aspiration, the campaign lowers the explanation burden and gives players a shorthand for bragging rights.
Srinjoy Das, Director, Marketing and BGMI Product Management, called Collection Levels “an incredible vanity metric that players in BGMI swear by,” adding that the return of this campaign was received with heavy engagement on social media.
- Status is the real product: the feature is framed as recognition, not utility.
- Culture does the explaining: 80s Bollywood tropes make a game mechanic instantly readable.
- Humour softens the sell: viewers smile before they realise they are watching a product story.
What marketers can borrow
The campaign is a useful example of mapping a functional feature to a status symbol the audience already understands. For gaming and app marketers, that can mean identifying the vanity metric users care about and dressing it in a cultural reference that makes achievement feel public and prestigious.
Abhijat Bharadwaj, CCO at Dentsu Creative Isobar, said the team leaned into “the melodrama, the chaos and the wonderfully over-the-top storytelling of old Hindi cinema” and let BGMI deliver the punchline. That discipline—playing the cultural setting straight, then letting the product complete the joke—keeps the campaign from feeling like another feature explainer.
The brief is a reminder that game progression features sell better as identity and status than as menus and mechanics. Marketers planning updates, season passes or progression tools can ask: what title, role or social cue already carries this meaning in our audience’s world?
Source: MediaNews4U
