The Utility Play: How MakeMyTrip Made Its Product the Answer, Not the Ad
At Mahakumbh 2025, MakeMyTrip co-created a live content hub with Aaj Tak and Explurger, putting on-ground anchors and creators to work solving real pilgrim problems, with stays, cabs and app bookings surfaced as the practical solution inside that guidance. The commercial message vanished inside the help. This is the mechanism, captured in jugnu's Kosh.
The tension it resolves
A travel brand trying to sell bookings at a religious event risks feeling transactional and disrespectful, but framing every booking option as a solution to a real problem the pilgrim is already facing dissolves that friction entirely.
The challenge it solved for MakeMyTrip: How do we make a travel brand feel welcome and valuable at a religious mega-event without seeming commercial or intrusive?
The mechanism
Embed the brand's product as the answer inside editorially credible, situation-specific utility content produced by trusted voices already present at the event.
Aaj Tak, MakeMyTrip, and travel app Explurger co-created a Creator's Lounge on the ground at Mahakumbh 2025 in Prayagraj, a 2,000 sq ft space with podcast rooms and high-speed internet. On-ground anchors and digital creators produced real-time content covering approach roads, dos and don'ts, food, accommodation and navigation, with MakeMyTrip's stays, cabs and app bookings woven in as the practical answers rather than separate advertising.
Where this applies in India
An edtech brand could own exam season by running a real-time doubt-clearing series where its own courses appear as the next step for students who need structured help. A health insurance brand could do the same during hospital discharge moments, guiding families through claim paperwork while surfacing its own cashless network as the answer. An agri-input brand could produce crop-stress advisory content during unseasonal rain, with its soil treatment products appearing as the recommended action.
FAQ
What is the Turn Your Reporter Into a Guide: When Utility IS the Ad pattern?
Embed the brand's product as the answer inside editorially credible, situation-specific utility content produced by trusted voices already present at the event.
Which brand proved it works?
MakeMyTrip, in online travel booking (India). jugnu's Kosh tracks 304 such patterns across Indian and global brands.
How do I apply this to my brand?
Run your brand challenge through jugnu. It diagnoses the tension underneath your problem, checks whether this pattern fits it, and builds ideas on the patterns that do.
This is the story. Every Kosh card also carries a transfer layer: the consumer insight underneath, the principle that moves across categories, and the boundary conditions where it breaks. jugnu applies that layer to your brand when it builds ideas.
Wondering if this pattern fits your challenge? Run it through jugnu and find out.
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