N I N E T Y

E I G H T

01The Thesis

Most agencies sell talent management — calendar holds, brand briefs, NDA paperwork, an inbox between athlete and sponsor.

We sold the operating system underneath. A personal brand designed for revenue, with deal flow, manufactured likability, and equity participation built into the model.

Ishant was the proof of concept. 105 Tests, 311 wickets — already a name. What we added was the mechanism to monetise that name without diluting it.

Talent is the train. Personal brand is the timetable. We ran the timetable.

02The Signing

Won exclusive representation in 2022 — sole agency-of-record for brand deals, social media, and personal communications.

The shift in posture: from a talented bowler taking sponsor calls to an ownable property with a managed brand surface. From "what's the brief" to "what does the brand sound like, what is it worth, what kind of partner do we want."

03The Numbers

Year-over-year, on the same audience. 2022 → 2023:

Better posts, not more posts. Publishing volume was nearly flat — 58 posts in '22, 61 in '23. The lift came from format choices, collab structure and timing, not from working the channel harder.

04RuPay × IPL 2022

NPCI's first-ever IPL campaign — RuPay. Be On-The-Go — went live in April 2022 with Ishant as the lead face.

Five films across TV, OTT, digital and social. The Howzzaaaatt! gag positioning RuPay's payment speed against Ishant's bowling. Harsha Bhogle and Virender Sehwag amplified on Twitter; DDB Mudra handled the creative; we ran the talent.

National scale. The most-watched cricket window of the year. Our talent at the centre.

05Spinny — selling the socials

The thesis in action. Instead of selling sponsorship slots one-off, we rented the channel.

Spinny ran a multi-week placement programme through Ishant's social handles, anchored on archival cricket reels — the same archival format the metrics team flagged as the highest-performing content type that year. The lift from that single format alone is most of the +14M reels-views jump shown above.

Outcome for Spinny: a sustained share-of-voice in cricket-fan circles that no single-window IPL slot could buy.

5bMainstreet × CRED — sneakers as content

A streetwear-shopping spree at Mainstreet Marketplace, sponsored by CRED — turned into a content piece. Ishant walked the floor, picked a haul, talked sneaker stories on camera. The reel was a swipe-able behind-the-scenes of a brand placement that didn't read as a brand placement.

The angle: streetwear is a Gen-Z signal a 35-year-old Test bowler doesn't usually own. We engineered the room where he could own it credibly — and let CRED ride alongside as the sponsor of the visit, not the subject of the post.

Brands extending the playbook in this window: CRED, RuPay, WinZO, Spinny — each with a different content envelope, all routed through the same operating system.

06Ranveer × Ishant

Cross-talent collaborations between cinema's biggest livewire and cricket's quiet veteran — engineered, not coincidental. Joint content windows, cross-posted reels, brand-aligned moments.

The 2023 social-media report named these collaborations as the primary driver of the year's engagement lift. Two cultural circles, one bridge — that's the deal-making muscle.

Beyond Beer Biceps, the bridge work extended to Sanyam Sharma and Rajesh Yadav — separate creator audiences, separate cultural rooms, the same engineered cross-over: a podcast appearance, a co-shot reel, an aligned brand moment. The thesis is the bridge, not the host.

07RD Accessories

A homegrown D2C accessories brand — the kind of partner that needs structure, not stardom. We built the deal architecture: rights, licensing, content windows, reporting cadence. Then we shipped — campaign creative, talent integration, social rollout.

The case for "business partner, not vendor." RD didn't buy a celebrity stamp; they got an operating partner.

08Asian Business School

The partnership that didn't run on a quarter. Multi-year campus engagements, brand-talent integration, content for ABS that reads as content for Ishant — not as paid placement.

Long horizons over high spreads. The deal you keep coming back to.

09The Daughter Announcement

We were the ones to break the news. Not because we wanted the engagement — because we'd earned the trust to.

Personal milestones are where most agency relationships break. Too transactional to be invited in; too performative when they are. We treated the moment as Ishant's, not ours. The post went out on his timeline, in his voice, with no brand handle in the caption.

The metric we tracked here was trust. The numbers came anyway.

10The Documentary

Featured during our window — a long-form film on cricket, identity and the modern Indian player. We coordinated the appearance, the rights and the social rollout.

Coverage your competitor can't sponsor their way into.

11Equity, not retainer

The natural extension. Once we'd proven the operating system on Ishant — a person — we tested the same playbook on a brand: Arista Vault, a luggage-tech founder we partnered with on equity terms instead of fees.

The case is its own page. The point here: when we believed, we owned the upside. Same operating system, different asset class.

01The Snapshot

Borges — a heritage Spanish olive-oil and pantry brand — partnered with 98 Entertainment to build an emotionally-led creator campaign for its India social footprint. Each creator dedicates a recipe cooked with Borges products to someone they love, and invites their audience to do the same under #CookForYourLovedOnes.

98 ran the programme end-to-end: strategy, creator sourcing and negotiation, recipe development, product-ship logistics, draft approvals, brand-safe editing, posting schedule, paid amplification.

02The Challenge

Borges is a century-old European pantry staple — globally credible, but in India it competes in a category where the emotional equity sits with regional oils (mustard, groundnut, ghee) and incumbents with deep home-kitchen nostalgia. An imported olive-oil and almond-milk house cannot out-spend that nostalgia; it has to earn a seat at the same table.

• Borrow the emotional permission Indian home cooking already carries, and route it through a Spanish brand's jars and cartons.
• Don't let the campaign read as an ad. Creator audiences punish paid-looking content; they reward confession, memory, family.
• Build a participation layer so the hashtag keeps living after the hero films go down.

03The Strategic Move

Don't sell the oil. Sell the person the cook is cooking for.

We reframed each reel around a dedication mechanic: the creator names a loved one at the top of the film, the recipe becomes a letter to that person, and Borges products are the instrument — not the subject. The brand gets the full 30-second stage, but the emotional grammar is the creator's own.

04Hero Film · Karan Tripathi

@karanfoodfanatic · Delhi · Food Creator · 63K followers

"Dedicating the dish to my dadi. She would make it when I'd visit my hometown during summer vacations. Though she isn't around anymore, I'd want to dedicate it to her — my twist would be to make it healthier using Borges products." — creator brief, in his own words

The editorial turn — a grandmother's kulfi remade vegan and lactose-free with Borges' almond drink — lets a nut-based pantry product earn a seat inside a classically Indian dessert memory. The product isn't a substitute; it's the vehicle that lets the memory keep living.

05Hero Film · Himanshi Mittal

@aromatic_flavourss · Delhi · Home Cook · 231K followers (12K at launch)

A weeknight-cook's ode to the family member who always eats her experiments first — a quick, plated open toast that feels like a recipe passed across a kitchen counter, not a demo. The role of this film in the line-up is accessibility: a recipe a viewer can attempt the next morning, with Borges' extra-virgin olive oil drizzled in exactly when the reel asks them to. Low-barrier participation is how the hashtag spreads.

06Hero Film · Renee Chopra

@reneechopra · Delhi · Cook & Recipe Developer · 53.5K followers

A classic Italian comfort plate, built around tomatoes and Borges pasta — a deliberate, uncomplicated film that lets the catalogue speak cleanly. Brought in on a prior 98 collaboration, Renee's slot was the product-forward anchor — the reel the brand would paid-boost to extend reach beyond organic. Cleared usage rights and cover/end-slide compliance let the brand deploy the asset across its own targeting pools.

07How It Was Run

The work behind each reel is what separates a creator activation that fires from one that spirals. 98 held the client on one side and the creator roster, their managers and logistics on the other.

Creative strategy. Brief interpretation, dedication mechanic, hashtag architecture, CTA framing. Turned a generic "cooking reel" ask into a campaign with a participation layer.

Creator sourcing. Shortlisting, profile vetting, home-chef filter, regional coverage, commercial benchmarking. Filtered out review-bloggers; locked in creators whose audiences reward earnest cooking content.

Commercials & contracts. Creator-by-creator negotiation, partial-barter structures, usage-rights add-ons, MoUs. Brought creator-package economics inside the brand's envelope without compromising on roster quality.

Recipe & product logistics. Recipe approval loops, SKU selection, doorstep shipment, reshipments where product arrived dented. A dented almond-milk pack would have been visible in the final shot. 98 spotted it, flagged the brand and pushed a re-ship before shoot day.

Creative approvals. First drafts, brand review cycles, revision management, lock. Multiple iteration rounds were absorbed by 98, not passed to the brand.

Brand-safe editing. Cover-template compliance, end-slide insertion, scrubbing of competing brands, hashtag placement. Every reel ships visually "on brand" — assets the brand can run across its own channels and ads.

Paid amplification. Usage-rights clauses, Meta boost planning, collab-reel vs. standard-reel decisions. Paid media was applied surgically rather than sprayed, conserving budget and keeping organic reels organic.

08What the Work Delivered

Read on three axes: creative quality, reach & engagement, and what the assets keep doing after the window closes.

Creative quality. Three films, three distinct emotional devices — tribute, sibling intimacy, weeknight comfort. Reads as a collection, not a series of reshoots. Products embedded inside recipes a viewer could plausibly cook — not unboxing frames. Brand-compliance landed without visible handprints: cover, end-slide and hashtag chain live inside each reel without compromising creator voice.

Reach & engagement. Combined creator reach in the 50K–230K band, deliberately skewed toward high-intent food audiences. Recipe-first reels on these accounts over-index on saves and comments — viewers treat the reel as a bookmarked recipe. One hero reel carried full paid amplification, extending reach beyond organic into the brand's own targeting pools.

UGC & audience participation. The dedication mechanic worked beyond the hero films. Viewers wrote in with their own happy-moment recipes; the brand ran a contest layer on the same hashtag and announced 10 user-submitted winners at the close of the window. The brand's grid carried multi-week of contestant reposts in a "Cook for your loved ones — [Name]'s happy moments" frame.

Asset longevity. Three creator reels with cleared usage rights still in rotation. The campaign creative format (cover + end-slide) was reused on subsequent UGC reposts. A ready-to-run regional creator roster, scoped during the campaign, became a starting point for any phase-two activation. A hashtag that can anchor UGC prompts, store campaigns or seasonal (Rakhi, Diwali, Mother's Day) activations.

09What This Proves

A specific capability stack — one that transfers cleanly to any pantry, FMCG or D2C brand building cultural traction in Indian kitchens.

Emotional-first creative frame. An olive-oil brand isn't a spec sheet; a cooking-oil brand isn't either. We lead with the person on the other side of the plate and let the product stand where it's needed.

Home-chef network, not food bloggers. Recipe-first creators whose followers screenshot recipes and cook from them. That audience converts cleaner for a consumable pantry SKU than a review-led influencer pool.

Full-stack campaign operations. Creator sourcing, negotiation, MoUs, product logistics, approvals, brand-safe edits, paid-media handover — one desk, not six vendors.

Rights-cleared assets with a second life. Every reel we ship is built to be boosted, clipped, and re-aired across the brand's own properties — the CPM isn't burnt on a single organic window.

01The Snapshot

Slay Coffee — a Delhi-NCR coffee D2C with its own delivery app — partnered with 98 to build a creator-led launch of new SKUs and a marketplace expansion. Each reel pairs the brand's signature black-and-red cup with a recipe twist, a partner co-pack, or an app-route push.

02The Strategic Move

Don't sell coffee. Sell the moment in the cup.

Slay's competitive set is crowded: Starbucks, Blue Tokai, Third Wave, the rising QSR coffee belt. Out-spending isn't an option; out-noticing is. We picked creators whose audience already screenshots cooking content — meaning the SKU featured in the reel converts cleanly into an app order. The brand handle @drinkslaycoffee stays in every frame; the BIT.LY checkout link in the sticker; the iconic black cup as the silent brand ID.

03Hero Creators & The Hooks

@itsaboutdeevee_ · the cup-as-portrait shot — a cinematic hand holding the SLAY COFFEE cup against a moody purple backdrop, app-link CTA over the frame.

@taanyahooda · the new-SKU hook. "This Hazelnut iced latte Bomb 🤤" — and a co-pack moment showing Slay × Causeways wraps. Caption: "Love the packaging, and it tastes yummm."

@nanditamiglani · the marketplace push. A reel built around Slay's "Food Court in an App" — reframing Slay from coffee brand to multi-brand delivery layer. "You can't miss on this one 😆 @drinkslaycoffee."

04What This Proved

The cup is the brand. Slay's black-and-red cup carries the brand without a logo cut-in — proven by every hero reel reaching for it as the centerpiece object.

Creator-led app installs. The reels fed traffic into Slay's own delivery flow, not just a generic awareness window — the BIT.LY link inside the story converts the moment to a measurable handoff.

Co-packs as content. The Slay × Causeways frame — partnering brands inside a single creator's reel — is replicable architecture for any pantry/QSR D2C looking to extend reach across friend-brands without renting a campaign window twice.

01The Snapshot

Rooh is a fine-dining house at Ambawatta One, Mehrauli — Delhi's premium hospitality address. 98 ran the brand's social arc through three flagship occasions: a sufi night with a national-tier performing artist, a chef-curated cross-pop-up, and a Mother's Day brunch — each anchored on creators whose audience already pays for premium dining.

02The Strategic Move

For premium dining, the room is the menu. Sell the room.

Rooh's premium positioning isn't an oil-and-onion story — it's an evening. The brand wins when a creator walks in for a sufi night, stays for a 7-course pop-up, and posts the courtyard, the lighting, the chef's plate, in that order. We built the calendar around occasions, not promotions — and let the creators carry the room into their feeds without a scripted brief.

03Occasion 01 · Mausiqi · Sufi Night

Live performance by @shariqrmustafa at the Ambawatta One Courtyard — co-presented with GULDAVARI and Nitin Kohli Home. The creative angle: a culture-led evening with reservation-only seating; the social arc: invite card → on-the-night reels → next-day plated-dish recap.

Hero creator: @mallaica — 4-photo reel pairing the courtyard performance, the Rooh signage at night, a plated savoury, and a portrait of the creator in evening wear. The format the audience reads as an editorial review, not a sponsored post.

Brand-share: @tanejakashish reposted the invite to her audience as a "going-tonight" share — the highest-trust creator format because it carries no edit.

04Occasion 02 · ROOH × ARCH 7-Course Pop-Up

A cross-chef pop-up curated by @chefnehalakhani and @chefashaydhopatkar — a 7-course European-Indian tasting menu running across one weekend.

Hero creator: @drdiptidhillon — multi-slide story arc: chef-collab menu card under low light, four plated dishes (amuse, a savoury, a chocolate-sphere dessert, scallop-style course), a group photo of "happy faces after a 7-course European-Indian meal." Caption: "Pop up is on until this weekend!" — direct conversion-to-reservation moment.

05Occasion 03 · Mother's Day Brunch

Hero creators: @sanagrover with her mother + @vineyskapur. Caption: "@roohnewdelhi setting the perfect vibe for Mother's Day brunch 🤍." Plated tartare-style starter, beautifully styled bar arch, two-shot of the family — every frame reads premium, but the dedication is human.

Note: @sanagrover also appears in our YYC roster — a cross-brand creator inside the 98 book, the trust travelling with her across two premium tiers.

06What This Proved

Occasion-led calendars beat product-led calendars at premium tiers. Sufi night, chef pop-up, Mother's Day — each a reservation-driver with its own creative grammar.

Cross-creator-pool economics. Sana Grover at Rooh is the same Sana Grover who posted at TBSP — one creator, two premium clients, shared cost basis.

The room as the menu. Rooh's brand is the courtyard, the bar, the lighting, the plate — not a slogan. Every reel we shipped showed those four, in that order.

01The Snapshot

Limitless operates across multiple Delhi addresses — Ansal Plaza and Vasant Kunj surfaced through our roster. The brief: build the brand the same way regulars find a bar — one credible creator at a time, one neighbourhood at a time.

02The Strategic Move

A multi-outlet lounge brand sells the room, not the chain.

Lounge audiences don't react well to "we have three locations." They react to the photo of a friend at this specific bar tonight. We split the activation by outlet — the Ansal Plaza creator pool and the Vasant Kunj creator pool stayed largely separate so each room read as a singular destination, not a franchise stop.

03The Roster (from disk)

Five creators across two outlets, captured during the activation window. Each visit produced a story-set; some converted into reels and grid posts. Disk-sourced — handles below approximate from creator-folder names; correct any that read off.

Handles drawn from disk folder names. Send corrections, we'll fix in the next pass.

04What This Proves

Multi-outlet hospitality needs separate stories per address. Treating the chain as one brand is correct on paper and wrong on Instagram. Each outlet earns its own creator visit cadence.

Photographer bias matters. The lounge audience scrolls for the look of the room, the lighting, the corner table. We optimised the creator pool for who'd shoot the room well, not who had the biggest follower count.

Repeat visits are the moat. A creator who's been to Limitless three times posts content with a kind of casual familiarity that paid placements can't buy.

01The Bet

Arista Vault is a luggage-tech brand built around smart hardware. The founder came to 98 with a small budget and a big appointment in his calendar: he was Shark-Tank-bound, and the brand needed to look ready before the cameras rolled.

We knew two things: (a) the product was good, (b) the moment was real. Standard agency arithmetic — bill hours, ship deliverables, walk away — would have undersold what the work was actually worth. So we proposed a different shape.

02The Deal

Equity, not retainer. When we believe, we own the upside.

Instead of a flat fee, we negotiated an equity-based partnership. The founder kept cash; 98 took a stake. If the brand went up, we went up with it. If it didn't, we'd have spent our time anyway. Same operating system. Different asset class.

This isn't how most agencies price. Most agencies price as if every brief has the same expected value. The Arista bet was a lesson — for some deals, the right model is alignment, not invoicing.

03The Work

Pre-Shark-Tank, the work was about getting the brand camera-ready. Sharper visual identity. A storyline the founder could tell in 90 seconds. Social cadence dialled up so the audience that arrived after the TV moment wouldn't land on a dead grid.

Post-show, the work shifted to capacity — turning attention into orders, orders into reorders, reorders into a real brand conversation. The TV moment is the door. The brand has to be the room.

04What This Proves

Pricing as alignment. An equity-based agency engagement only works when both sides actually believe in the brand. We didn't propose this to every client. We propose it to the ones we'd put our own money behind.

Pre-show prep matters more than the show. Founders prepare the pitch. Brands prepare the surface. The brand surface — the grid, the website, the founder's social — is what the audience inspects after the cameras stop.

Cross-pollination, again. Like the Ishant talent contract opens doors for brand clients, the Arista equity deal teaches the agency a different muscle: how to make brand decisions when fee structure isn't the constraint.

01The Group

Yum Yum Cha isn't a restaurant. It's a restaurant group — three distinct brands under one operator, each a different cuisine, each with its own room and audience.

The marketing problem when you run three brands: you can't speak in one voice. Each has its own audience, its own dish hero, its own night-out occasion. We treated them as three independent brand assignments under a single retainer — share the calendar, share the creator pool, but never share the voice.

02The Awards Year

2023 was the year the group's positioning paid off in industry validation.

Two prestigious panels — Times Food Awards and UNLIMIT (zeezest) — recognised the group across two cuisines. Casual Italian and Casual Asian, both Delhi. Plus a national-best for Pan-Asian. Awards aren't earned overnight; they're earned in the year of small consistent moves before the panel meets. We were running social, PR and the deal-flow in the lead-up.

03The Talent Activation

Awards do half the work. Talent activation does the other half. We engineered a moment where Ishant Sharma gave the YYC brands a shoutout on a Delhi Capitals podcast — earned media inside cricket-fan attention, the highest-trust channel for the audience the group's premium positioning was after.

This is the cross-pollination thesis behind 98: an exclusive talent contract isn't a single-property campaign asset. It's a relationship that opens doors for every other client on the book. Ishant didn't get a brief; he got a recommendation he was happy to make.

A restaurant doesn't need to advertise. It needs to be the place people who already have an audience naturally talk about.

04The Playbook

If you operate a multi-brand restaurant group, here's how we ran YYC — replicable for any operator with three or more sister brands.

One retainer, three voices. Don't merge the social pages. Each brand keeps its own handle, its own grid aesthetic, its own dish vocabulary. The retainer is shared; the voice is not.

Share the creator pool. A food blogger who liked TBSP's burrata is a warm lead for Pot Pot's bao and Wheaty's sourdough. We logged every creator visit centrally so the next round was 30% cheaper to coordinate. @shabostoc, for example, posted across all three brands inside a single quarter — the trust travelled with them.

Stack the calendar. Run launches and seasonal pushes across brands so press conversations stay current — but never compete with each other in the same week.

Position for awards from day one. Industry recognition is a cumulative argument. Document everything; the panel will read its way back through 12 months of work when nominations open.

Cross-pollinate talent. A talent contract held by the agency is leverage for every brand client on the book — don't wall it off to the brand that's paying the talent fee.

05The Roster

The shared creator pool, in practice. Each name below posted to their own audience, in their own voice, tagged to the brand's own handle — no scripted captions, no paid disclosures.

"The jumbo prawns are a great option for sea food lovers. Juicy, full of flavours and baked to perfection." — @jhalli_bypriasethi · TBSP

"Pot pot makes me happy happy." — @ishitaaroraaa · Pot Pot

"What's better than a Lotus Biscoff Croissant from @wheaty.in on Croissant Day." — @raneechopra · Wheaty

06The Receipts

The 2023 awards are still in the group's marketing copy. The recommendation engine — creators who first visited TBSP and now bring their friends to Pot Pot, talent shoutouts that opened doors with reviewers — is still compounding. The retainer ended; the awareness didn't.

01The Launch

Andrea's Eatery in Saket was reopening with a revamped concept — elevated dining, Asian-leaning menu, a new interior with the kind of warm wood and clock-wall that stays on Instagram.

The standard launch playbook is press release plus paid social. We argued for something different: let Delhi's food creators discover the restaurant on their own time, in their own voice, and build the launch arc out of their stories. Authority over reach. Trust over impressions.

A new restaurant doesn't need followers. It needs a few of the right people seen there in the first month.

02The Curation

Built a hit-list of creators across food, lifestyle and luxury categories — not just the biggest accounts, but the ones whose audience overlapped with Andrea's actual target diner: 25–40, eating-out-as-experience, Delhi NCR.

Coordinated visits across two-week windows. Spaced them out — never two big creators on the same weekend. Hosted on arrival; comped the meal; suggested the dishes worth shooting (Korean Bao as the hero, dim-sum spread as the proof of range). No scripted captions. No paid disclosures.

03The Content

Six creators visited within the launch window. Each posted to their own stories tagged @andreasdining. We captured every story, curated, and reposted to 98's grid as a single highlight reel — turning UGC into an owned brand asset.

04The Playbook

If you're launching a restaurant, here's the system underneath the Andrea's case — replicable for any hospitality brand.

Hit-list (Week −2) · Identify 8–12 creators whose audience overlaps your target diner. Aim for 6 confirmed visits. Optimise for fit, not follower count.

Brief (Week −1) · One page. Restaurant story (the why), location, top 5 dishes to try, suggested visit window. No scripted captions. No paid disclosures.

Logistics (Launch week) · Spread visits across 14 days; never two creators on the same weekend. Host on arrival; comp the meal; offer a guided tour of the new space.

Capture (Live) · 98 attends 2–3 of the visits to capture B-roll for the agency repost. Creators handle their own posts in their own voice.

Repost (Week +1) · Stories repost same-week to the brand's grid; curated 1–2 weeks later into a permanent story highlight reel. UGC becomes an owned asset.

Track (Week +4) · Tag mentions, story reach, location-tag traffic, reservation lift. Most of the value isn't measurable in a single dashboard — it's in the *room being seen*.

05The Receipts

The Andrea's launch highlight reel still sits on 98's Instagram three years later — a compounding asset rather than a one-time campaign. The dishes that ranked across creator posts (Korean Bao, dim-sum spread, the Asian-food range) are the ones that became signature on the menu.

01The Snapshot

One8 Commune is the F&B brand attached to Virat Kohli's "One8" line — a celebrity-magnet hospitality property that didn't need awareness, only the right faces in the right rooms. 98 ran an ongoing creator activation playbook, with deliberately repeat creator visits to anchor the room as a destination across the social calendar.

02The Strategic Move

A celebrity venue gets the first wave for free. The job is the second wave.

Anybody can book a table at One8. The harder job is making the right people post about it more than once. We engineered a roster of food and lifestyle creators who became regulars — the kind of creators whose audience doesn't react to "I went to Virat's restaurant" but does react to "this is my third time, here's why."

03The Roster (from disk)

Creators captured across multiple visits — the mark of a venue that becomes a habit, not a one-time post. The repeat-visit pattern is the case-study payload.

Handles drawn from disk folder names. If any handle is wrong, flag it and we'll correct.

3bThe Menu-Launch Brunch

One8 Commune unveiled an exquisite new menu — and we ran the launch as a brunch event with the regulars roster on the guest list. Not a soft-soft press preview; a real meal with the creators who'd already turned the venue into a habit. Each plate became a story told by someone who'd eaten it firsthand.

The format mattered: brunch, not dinner. Daytime light photographs cleaner; the audience reads daytime content as personal, evening content as PR.

3cThe High-Tea Shoot

For the High-Tea menu launch, 98 took charge of the production end-to-end — model casting, concept direction, scene-by-scene shoot direction. The output: a brand-asset library One8 could deploy across the launch window without a separate agency call.

Same thesis as the creator roster — the venue is the brand; the work is making the venue look like itself, in every frame.

04What This Proves

Repeat-visit cadence beats reach. A creator on her third visit is producing more genuine content than a creator on her first. We optimised the roster for who'd come back, not who'd be loudest the first time.

Celebrity-anchor needs an anti-celebrity layer. The Kohli name brings the door. The food creators bring the recommendation engine.

Cross-roster discoverability. Several One8 creators (Saanya Khatter, Shruti Malik, Unnati Malik) appear in other 98 cases — proving the cross-brand pool economics.

01The Snapshot

Daryaganj built its brand around the strongest origin claim on an Indian restaurant menu: this is where butter chicken comes from. Our job was to keep that story alive on social — without ever leaning on it so hard the brand felt like a museum piece.

02The Strategic Move

Origin claims are credibility on credit. They earn the first read; not the second post.

We built creator content that spent the credibility on adjacency — modern dishes around the heritage anchor, drinks photography that didn't lean on the kebab platter, two creators with audiences in different rooms. The brand walks in as the inventor; the post walks in as a meal.

03Activation 01 · The Walkthrough

Hero creator: @kavyaakapur — Toronto/Delhi digital creator, lifestyle & food. Four-frame restaurant takeover: warm wood-paneled interior with hanging spotlights → two-glass refresh shot ("Refresh") → seekh-kebab + tikki platter ("FOOD COMA") → the hero plate of butter chicken, dal makhani and naan ("yummy ❤️"). The chronology reads as an editorial walkthrough, not a sponsored grid.

04Activation 02 · The Tandoor + Drinks Pass

Hero creator: @shrutimalikk — author, TED speaker, social activist. Two-frame focused drop: top-down tandoori platter ("Got a thing for tikkas 😋") and a three-glass cocktail-and-mocktail shot ("Drinks over food anyday!"). Different aesthetic, different audience tier — cleanly complementary to the first activation.

05What This Proved

An origin claim is a brand asset, not a brand strategy. Daryaganj already has the butter-chicken story. The campaign job is what to do with the credit line — not how to repeat it.

Two creators in different rooms beat five in the same room. A lifestyle creator and a public-speaker can sell the same dish to two non-overlapping audiences. The cost of the second creator is the same as another five frames from the first — but the reach is genuinely additive.

The plate is enough. No event, no influencer trip, no chef tasting. Two creators, two visits, six frames — and the heritage stays alive on the feed.

01The Snapshot

Tickled Pink is a destination-dining room in Saket, Delhi — a venue built for pictures. White-and-gold carousel unicorns. Polka-dot mushroom sculptures. Peach walls with ornate ceilings. Pink umbrellas on the terrace at golden hour. The product isn't dinner; it's the feed.

02The Strategic Move

When the room is the menu, dress the visitor the way the room dresses itself.

The brief wasn't "review the food." The brief was: "show up dressed for the room, and let your audience watch you walk it." Three creators, three takeovers spread across a season — not a single push. Each pass added a fresh outfit, a fresh frame, a fresh reason to revisit a venue that already photographs itself.

03Activation 01 · The Establishing Shot

Hero creator: @samikshamalikk ✓ — verified · 56.4K · travel/safari niche, works with @bharatsafaris. Three frames: exterior at night with the neon "TICKLED PINK" sign ("today's dinner at @tickledpink.saket") → carousel-unicorn interior with red-velvet mirror → modern Indian fusion plates on a pink table.

04Activation 02 · The Food-Forward Pass

Hero creator: @anushkamehra7 · 210K · fashion / lifestyle, Delhi. Three frames: Wonderland interior with red-and-white polka-dot mushroom sculptures and pop-art framed walls ("dinner") → 4-image food collage with a now-meme-tier line ("gajar ka halwa on caramelised toast was sooo gooooddd") → a second food collage with rave caption ("EVERY DISH HAD SUCH AMAZING FLAVOURS"). The food review without the food-review template.

05Activation 03 · The Lifestyle Layer

Hero creator: @aavya.duggal · lifestyle / fashion. Three frames: peach-walled dining room with marble checkered floor → daylit table view with a pink umbrella visible outside the window → 4-image fashion collage of her at the venue (white halter, blue dress, mirror selfies, terrace shots).

Note: @aavya.duggal's handle is no longer reachable as of 2026. Credited here as the historical handle she used during the campaign.

06What This Proved

If the room is photogenic, the room is the strategy. Tickled Pink is engineered to photograph. The campaign task is to multiply visit-frames in different lights, different outfits, different days. The dishes are the pretext.

Three takeovers across a season beat one influencer night. A season-long arc keeps the venue in the algorithm — without ever asking one audience to see the same room twice.

Three different niches, one venue. Travel-safari, fashion-lifestyle, lifestyle-editorial. Same room, three audience tiers — the brand reads as ambient, not promoted.

01The Snapshot

Ophelia is a refined-European brunch venue in Delhi — peach walls, ornate ceilings, blue tufted velvet booths, marble checkered floors. The kind of room that's already 80% of the campaign before you order. We ran a single-creator deep dive: one trusted lifestyle voice, five frames, full-meal chronology — arrival cocktails through to the signature drink and the social atmosphere.

02The Strategic Move

For brunch rooms that look like editorial spreads, hire a creator who already shoots editorially.

Ophelia's product is a meal that reads like a magazine page — a marigold-topped pasta, a violet cocktail, a Mediterranean kebab platter on slate. We chose a single creator whose feed already lives in that aesthetic and asked her to chronicle one full meal — not produce a "review."

03The Activation

Hero creator: @anushkamehra7 · 210K · "things i do, fits i wear, pics i take" · Delhi.

Five-frame story chronology: arrival cocktails on marble (champagne flute and a violet flower-topped coupe — "Sunday brunchin'") → fine-plated pasta with edible marigolds and a charred pesto bread → Mediterranean kebab platter with avocado-feta-flower bruschetta → close-up signature cocktail ("BLUEBERRY SOMETHING — literally the best cocktail ever had") → the social atmosphere with a male subject and the brunch-table tableau ("how many are too many").

04What This Proved

Aesthetic match beats follower-count. A creator whose feed already looks like the venue makes the post invisible-as-an-ad. That's the point.

Single-thread storytelling at boutique tiers. Not every brand needs a multi-creator wave. A boutique room with one editorial pass converts the same audience as a five-creator activation — at a fraction of the production cost.

The chronology is the campaign. Drink one, plate two, plate three, hero drink, social — the sequence of frames is the brief. Not the dish.

01The Snapshot

Khubani is a multi-level Delhi venue with ornate chandeliers, a glass-bottle wall, a glass roof, and an unusual product: spa lunch. Get a manicure while you eat. Sister concept Habibi by Khubani opens at night for sheesha + Levantine plates. We ran the biggest campaign of any brand in our book — five creators across five different audience tiers in a single season.

02The Strategic Move

"Gossip & Glam-Up. Everyday 1:00 PM to 6:00 PM." Sell the afternoon — that's the only product nobody else is selling.

Lunch is the loneliest slot on a Delhi F&B calendar. Khubani's product wasn't dinner; it was the afternoon. We anchored the creative around the spa-lunch hook — "Who knows better to pamper and party if not Khubani?" — and put creators inside it. Manicures, mocktails, group photos, salt-cellars-of-mezze. The audience learned a new occasion: brunch's quieter, glossier sibling.

For the record: the spa-lunch programme at Khubani was introduced by 98 in collaboration with the venue. The hashtag set (#SpaLunch, #GossipAndGlamUp) and the 1:00–6:00 PM occasion-frame were both authored as part of the activation.

03The Wave

@priakhanna ✓ · 129K · fashion / lifestyle. The opener — glowing "khubani" sign, banquette + plants ("Finally here! Let's see what's all the hype is about").

@missnidss ✓ · 254K · fitness, State Bench Press champion. Three frames — multi-level interior with chandeliers + glass ceiling, banquette portrait ("Who knows better to pamper and party if not Khubani?").

@anchalbhardwajj ✓ · 191K · beauty / lifestyle / mom life · L'Oréal partner. Nine frames — the full spa-lunch reveal: glass-bottle-wall entrance, the manicure-and-mezze ("an extraordinary spa lunch"), Aperol clinks, signature plates, the Hindi-script captions and the ornate-mirror selfies.

@harteerathsingh ✓ · 297K · social entrepreneur · Hemkunt Foundation founder · HarperCollins author. Two frames — fine-dining sushi-and-pizza spread, glazed pork-rib hero plate. The credibility-tier creator on the roster.

@lekshasethi · 17.2K · lifestyle micro. Two frames — and the only creator who took on the sister concept Habibi by Khubani: candlelit "habibi" neon, Levantine sheesha-and-kebab platter.

04The Sister-Concept Layer · Habibi by Khubani

Habibi is Khubani's night side — sheesha bar, Levantine menu, candlelit. Same address, different daypart, different audience. We wrapped Habibi into the same campaign window with the youngest creator on the roster — letting the discovery feel like an "after-hours" extension of the spa-lunch story.

05What This Proved

Daypart is product. Most F&B brands sell dinner. The wins are in the slots nobody else is selling — afternoon, late-night, brunch's middle hour.

Audience-tier diversification beats audience-size. Five creators in five different rooms (fashion, fitness, beauty, social-impact, lifestyle-micro) reach more distinct followers than five creators in the same room reach total. We picked for non-overlap, not headcount.

Sister concepts ride the parent's wave for free. Habibi got campaign equity by piggy-backing on the Khubani window. One brief, two openings.

01The Snapshot

Hard Rock Cafe New Delhi is a global brand with a specific local product: a Delhi night out. Live band on stage, the iconic Hard Rock signage lit behind, memorabilia walls (Jacksons, Bobby Brown), fishbowl cocktails, loaded nachos. Our brief was the night-out — not the brand book.

02The Strategic Move

For a global brand with local franchise, the campaign is the night — not the menu.

Hard Rock's brand book is fixed. The thing that's not fixed is what a Friday night at this specific venue feels like. We cast for energy, not aesthetic — band-shot, crowd-shot, fishbowl-shot, memorabilia-shot — the four moves that turn a global brand into a local destination.

03The Night

@urnishaswargari ✓ · 57.3K · brand strategist + creative director (@saffronstays). Live-band concert shot from the floor; later a fashion-style portrait at the Hard Rock backdrop with a fishbowl cocktail ("You can find me here anytime ;)").

@tanejakashish · 39.2K · fashion · Delhi. Stage shot with drum kit; editorial portrait drinking from a goblet — fashion frame inside the music venue.

@howwyouudoinnnn · the memorabilia-wall pass: Jacksons + Bobby Brown displays, then a crowd shot in front of the Hard Rock signage. Captures the museum-meets-club character of the room.

@harteerathsingh ✓ · 297K · social entrepreneur, Hemkunt Foundation, HarperCollins author. The food frame: loaded nachos with Heinz on the table — "@hardrockcafenewdelhi has seriously rocked my world 🤩".

* @howwyouudoinnnn's handle is no longer reachable as of 2026. Credited here as the historical handle used during the campaign.

3bThe CP Relaunch Night

Beyond the on-going night-out activations, we ran the brand's full Connaught Place relaunch — a single-night event that put the iconic CP venue back on the Delhi nightlife map. The guest list was deliberately mixed: creator roster on one side, high-net-worth-individual room on the other. Both audiences were photographed at the same bar, the same stage, the same drink.

The point of putting them in the same room: a relaunch party that's only creators looks promotional; a relaunch party that's only HNIs looks closed. One frame with both, and the venue reads as arrived.

04What This Proved

For franchises, the activation is the venue, not the brand. The brand book sells itself. The local night doesn't.

Cover the four moves: band, crowd, drink, food. Not three. Not five. Four — and let four creators each take one.

Energy beats aesthetic at music-led venues. A blurry stage shot with the right caption outperforms a styled portrait. Hard Rock's audience expects the night to look messy; sanitised content reads as PR.

01The Snapshot

iSKATE is the indoor ice rink at a Roseate Hotels property — an unusual product, a luxury-hotel amenity that doubles as a destination. Our brief was to turn the rink into a content occasion three creators would compete to post about. The campaign hashtags were a ready-made: #roastedbyroseate, #iskatebyroseate, #coolnotcold.

02The Strategic Move

An ice rink in Delhi summer is a luxury moment. Cast it that way.

The rink is the product. The rink at a luxury hotel is the angle. We cast two million-plus-follower public figures — Forbes-listed luxury influencer Ammy Arora and lifestyle-hospitality creator Sneha Arora — alongside a mid-tier fashion creator who could shoot the candid layer. The audience doesn't see "ice rink"; they see "luxury hotel amenity."

03The Roster

@amy_chhabra ✓ · 1M followers · Forbes-listed Luxury Influencer of the Year 2025 · #SephoraSquad APAC · brand partnerships include YSL, Prada, Dyson, Michael Kors, Armani Beauty and Vogue × Accor. The opener — wide ice-rink shot with the campaign hashtag set.

@shreyxa · 480K · Mumbai-based fashion / beauty / lifestyle / travel. The candid arc — solo skating, "Stages of me" 4-image collage, post-skating dinner spread ("The khaana": paella + kebabs + naan), a sweet candid of her companion @aaronkoul at the cafe. Five frames covering the full visit.

@snehaarora197 ✓ · 1.1M followers · public figure · lifestyle / beauty / travel / hospitality · #Creator #Guestlister #Influencer · Delhi+Chandigarh+Punjab. The hospitality-credibility close — Reel: "Must visit @iskateindia for an amazing ice skating experience ✨" + the host hotel's lounge interior.

04What This Proved

Unusual product, M+ creators. When the venue itself is unfamiliar (an ice rink in Delhi), the audience needs a credible voice to underwrite it. Two million-plus public figures were the trust layer — the candid mid-tier creator was the texture.

Amenity venues are a brand category nobody campaigns for. Most hotel amenity content lives in the hotel's own grid. Treating iSKATE as a standalone destination — with its own hashtag set, its own roster, its own arc — pulled it out of "amenity" and into "occasion."

Hashtags as creative grammar. #roastedbyroseate, #coolnotcold — the hashtags were the brief. Every frame in the highlight uses them. The set is the campaign's signature.

01The Snapshot

Fast & Up reached its sixth milestone, and the brief was unambiguous: amplify the achievement, build social-media buzz, and re-anchor the brand in the health-and-wellness conversation. We curated a single dynamic event that braided Fast & Up's brand essence with twenty individual creator styles into one stage.

02The Strategic Move

An anniversary is a calendar item. We turned it into a content calendar.

Most brand anniversaries pass as a single post. We built one event that gave twenty creators a personal frame to use, then let each one route the brand through their own audience tier — fitness, wellness, fashion, lifestyle. The brand anniversary became twenty different anniversary posts, each carrying Fast & Up's brand essence inside the creator's existing voice.

03The Roster

Twenty-plus creators across health, wellness, fashion and lifestyle audiences. Hero creators on the night included Nitibha Kaul and Kritika Khurana — each routed Fast & Up's milestone into a distinct audience pocket on the same night.

Full roster captured on disk. The cross-niche mix was deliberate — health-and-wellness brands win when the brand shows up outside the wellness niche.

04What This Proved

An anniversary is creative collateral, not a press release. Treat the milestone as a brief twenty creators can each interpret — get twenty assets, twenty audiences, one story.

Cross-niche distribution beats sector concentration. Fast & Up wins by leaving the wellness room. Boho-fashion audiences and lifestyle audiences buy supplements too — and their feed reads cleaner without a "supplement-influencer" pitch.

Event + amplification is one product, not two. The night and the social rollout shared a brief. Every creator left with assets the brand could re-use for weeks after the cake was cut.

01The Snapshot

Unacademy's reach is its product. Our brief was to extend it by harnessing educators already thriving on YouTube — and routing them onto Unacademy as live-session hosts. The play: bring the audience that already trusts a teacher onto the platform that wants to formalise the learning.

02The Strategic Move

If a teacher's audience already exists, the platform's job is to host the class — not the casting call.

Edu-tech competes on access. The fastest way to give a learner access to a teacher they already trust is to bring that teacher inside your live-session product. We sourced YouTube educators with proven audience signal, brokered the platform-side terms, and produced the first live windows — the teacher's audience followed them in.

03The Activation

Identification → outreach → onboarding → first live class. We picked educators whose YouTube audiences were the cleanest match for Unacademy's verticals, set up the live cadence, and sat in the production loop until the format was repeatable for the platform team.

The play wasn't "hire YouTubers." The play was "let the teacher's existing class find them on a platform that can scale them." Different unit economics, different roster filter.

04What This Proved

Cross-platform talent migration is a product, not a campaign. The work isn't a sponsored post; it's a structured pathway from one audience graph (YouTube) to another (Unacademy live).

Audience-first sourcing beats fame-first sourcing. Big-name educators are expensive and noisy; the right-sized educator with a bonded audience converts to a live class better.

Education brands win on familiarity. A learner clicking into a live class with a face they already know completes more sessions than the same class fronted by a stranger. Familiarity is the platform's growth lever.

01The Snapshot

98 spearheaded the Meta Creator Enablement Programme — a six-month engagement with thirty-plus creators already thriving on YouTube, designed to enrich Facebook's video library with native, original content. The work was strategic: we ran the creator side of a platform's growth engine.

02The Strategic Move

A platform's library only grows as fast as the creators it hosts. We hosted the creators.

Meta knows what its library needs. The harder question is the production capacity to make it happen at scale. We took on the creator-side operations — sourcing, briefing, output cadence, quality control, payment ops — for thirty-plus YouTubers across six months. The deliverable: a video library Facebook could grow without standing up its own creator-ops desk.

03The Programme Mechanics

YouTube as a casting filter — the platform already does the audience-validation work. From there: roster shortlisting, monthly content cadences, FB-native format guidance (vertical reels, longer-form watch-windows, captioning), and the back-office work of running thirty-plus creator contracts in parallel.

The work is invisible when it's working. Meta sees a steady library; the creators see consistent monthly output without the back-and-forth.

04What This Proved

Platform clients are operations clients. Meta isn't buying creative; it's buying creator-ops at scale. Different sales motion, different pricing, different KPI.

Cross-platform creator routing is the unlock. The same creator on YouTube and Facebook costs the platform less than two unique creators. Library growth is cheaper through migration than through fresh casting.

30+ creators × 6 months is one ops product. The right number isn't ten or a hundred; it's the number an ops desk can run without dropping a contract — that's why this programme worked.

01The Snapshot

Happydent's brief was clear: enhance brand awareness, engage a wider audience, and reposition the gum as the go-to choice for a refreshing, confidence-boosting chew. We built a six-week influencer-driven campaign anchored around video content and a single audience-participation hashtag.

02The Strategic Move

Don't pitch the product. Pitch the moment the product produces.

Chewing gum is a small unit of consumption with a small unit of attention. We anchored the campaign on the moment after the chew — the smile, the breath, the closer-than-usual photograph. Influencers integrated Happydent into their daily lives and dedicated the screen-time to the smile, not the wrapper.

03The Activation

The hero films. Influencers crafted authentic, creative videos integrating Happydent into their routine — gym, work, after-coffee, before-the-photo — each one demonstrating freshness and the post-chew smile.

The participation layer. The #SparklingSmileChallenge hashtag invited audiences to share their own Happydent moments. Influencers actively engaged in the comments and reposts, creating a community ripple.

The PR tail. The campaign caught the attention of marketing publications and was featured in Marketing Minds — earned coverage, not paid PR. That validation lasted longer than the original window.

04What This Proved

For low-attention products, lead with the moment after. Gum, mints, lozenges — the consumer doesn't think about the product; they think about the breath and the smile. Sell that moment, not the foil.

A hashtag that's a question, not an instruction. #SparklingSmileChallenge worked because the prompt was a personal moment, not a brand statement.

Earned coverage extends the budget. When the campaign earns a Marketing Minds feature, the next quarter's pitch deck writes itself.

01The Snapshot

TGISF — The Great Indian Sneaker Fest — is the country's biggest sneakers-and-streetwear festival. We ran the influencer engine: forty-plus creators across streetwear, sport, hip-hop, fashion and pop-culture, all routed through a single weekend on one stage.

02The Strategic Move

A festival's product is the room. Forty creators IN the room is the campaign.

TGISF doesn't sell sneakers — it sells the day you spent inside the room with the people who made the sneakers matter. We cast for the room, not the post: forty-plus creators whose presence MADE the festival the festival. The reach was a side effect of the right people being there.

03The Roster

Forty-plus creators across streetwear, sport, hip-hop, fashion and lifestyle audiences. Each creator brought a distinct cultural pocket onto the stage — the festival was the cross-pollination, not the product.

Full roster captured on disk. The casting principle was breadth across cultural niches — a sneaker fest where only sneaker creators show up reads as a trade show, not a festival.

04What This Proved

Festivals are a casting exercise, not a marketing exercise. The work happens in the months before the gates open — picking the people who'd MAKE the day legible to forty different audiences.

Streetwear is a connective tissue. Sneakers cross hip-hop, fashion, sport and lifestyle. The cross-niche cast turned a category fest into a culture fest.

One weekend, multi-year asset library. Forty creators × one event = hundreds of original assets. The fest's social grid, the brand's PR pull-quotes, the next year's lineup proof — all written on the same weekend.

01The Brief

Punjab Grill is the established premium-Indian play — banqueting-credible, multi-outlet, the kind of name diners remember from every important family dinner. The creator brief: stop the brand from reading "older" by anchoring it in occasion-led content rather than category-led content.

02The Strategic Move

Don't sell "north Indian food." Sell the room your family last booked for an occasion. We worked the brand into a creator's life-event content — date night, family dinner, anniversary, post-engagement bite — letting the brand become the implicit answer when the audience asks where.

03The Roster (from disk)

Disk content captured a hosted visit by Prakriti Agarwal. Additional creator activations and the hosted-visit cadence will populate as we expand the roster.

This is a draft case modal. Real material is one creator deep — we'd ordinarily mine more before publishing.