Mktg - Make My Trip's Viral spoof - Ghajini

Kapil Ohri

Bollywood, especially the film, Sholay remains a constant inspiration for viral ad filmmakers in India. But this time, Aamir Khan and his latest movie, Ghajini have become their targets.

A viral ad called “Gajodhar – The wait is over”, which spoofs Ghajini, is out in the Internet space. The film has been released by Makemytrip.com, an online travel agency (OTA), to promote its online travel community site, OkTataByeBye.com. The film has been developed by Delhi-based interactive agency, Webchutney.

Gajodhar, the film’s protagonist, is a passionate traveler. His appearance has been modeled closely on Aamir Khan’s in Ghajini. The film starts at a point when Gajodhar reaches a hotel and decides to stay there for a few days. On arrival, the hotel offers him lemon juice as a welcome drink. Later, he checks into the allotted room and has dinner in the hotel, which he doesn’t enjoy.


Gajodhar is shown to use a weird way to remember his experiences at the hotel. After every new experience, he rushes to a tattoo shop located near the hotel, and asks the tattoo artist to write experiences such as ‘hotel offers lemon juice’, ‘room is good’, and so on, on various parts of his body. At one point, no space is left to write on Gajodhar’s body, and he decides to get his experiences written over his bump. When he reaches home, he starts reading the information written in his tattoos and writes the same on OkTataByeBye.com.

Speaking to afaqs!, Prabhat Bhatnagar, creative director, Webchutney says, “Gajodhar is actually depicted as a genuine traveler, who notices small things that happen during his stay in a hotel and wants to talk about the same.”

On the use of tattoo art, Bhatnagar says, “We have exaggerated the idea that Gajodhar is passionate to talk about his experiences. He works hard to note them down and get them written over his body as tattoos, so that he will not lose the correct information related to his experiences with the hotel. The exaggeration is done to convey that genuine travelers write hotel reviews on OkTataByeBye.com.”


Sachin Bhatia, co-founder, Makemytrip.com tells afaqs!, “OkTataByeBye.com is a niche website and not many consumers are aware about it. We do not advertise the travel community site and there is no advertising budget allocated to it. We only carry out search engine optimisation (SEO), so that whenever a consumer searches for hotel reviews on the internet, the site will be available on the search-results page. We want consumers to come on the site on their own and stick to it.”

He adds, “Since we do not have the advertising budget allocated for OkTataByeBye.com, we thought a viral advertising campaign would be a good and cheaper option to reach out and inform consumers about the site and expand its user base as well. We have started spreading the viral ad among Makemytrip.com and OkTataByeBye.com members by sending them e-mailers and providing them the URL of the viral ad to view it. The idea is to spread the viral ad through our own members.”

Makemytrip.com has more than a million users while OkTataByeBye.com has 30,000 subscribers.

Bhatia says, “Many travel community sites exists in the market and we briefed Webchutney to create a viral ad on something which is topical and will help us cut the clutter, make people curious about the site and let them know that the site stands for hotel reviews.”

The company has intentionally released the viral ad at a time when the travel season is picking up among travelers in India. Later, the viral ad will be uploaded on YouTube and Facebook as well.

Bhatia indicated that the company may carry out more promotional activities for OkTataByeBye.com in the social media space.