Cardia Life's 2019 'Live Life to the Fullest' campaign by Digitally Inspired Media repositioned a functional cooking oil brand around purpose-driven lifestyle
Cardia Life Bets on Purpose to Sell Healthy Cooking Oil in India
Cardia Life's "Live Life to the Fullest" campaign is a 2019 digital initiative created by Chennai-based agency Digitally Inspired Media that repositions a functional Markhub24.clapboard.com/archive/ocado-life-delivered-food-drink">cooking oil brand around the pursuit of purposeful living, passions, and sensory experience rather than product-led health claims, targeting consumers across India, according to Ipsos.
Published in April 2019, the campaign centres on a single digital media asset and belongs to the food industry category, as documented on Clapboard.com. The creative premise draws a deliberate contrast between routine, passive existence — cubicle work, passive cinema-going, the rhythms of the unremarkable day — and a life defined by exploration, curiosity, unusual foods, and engaged sensory discovery, according to Lexology. Cardia Life, a cooking oil brand produced by Kaleesuwari Refinery Pvt. Ltd., according to Clapboard.com, uses this contrast to anchor its identity to lifestyle aspiration rather than nutritional specification, according to Adsoftheworld.
The campaign's geographic focus is India, a market where functional food and drink brands increasingly compete on emotional resonance as much as ingredient credentials. The objective, as the creative work makes clear, is to align Cardia Life with the values of a consumer who defines a good life through experiences, learning, and deliberate choice — with food positioned as one of the most immediate and intimate arenas in which that choice is exercised. By framing the act of eating adventurously as an expression of character, the campaign attempts to elevate an everyday purchase into a statement of personal identity. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 58 out of 100, reflecting a work that demonstrates strategic intent and clear creative direction while remaining constrained by the limits of a single-asset digital execution.
Cardia Life made a deliberate strategic pivot in 2019, shifting its communication platform from functional health claims toward a lifestyle and purpose-driven narrative. This shift carries significant context. According to Clapboard.com, the Advertising Standards Council of India upheld complaints in December 2016 against earlier Cardia Life advertising that claimed the oil helped improve immunity and control cholesterol, ruling that those claims lacked robust, product-specific scientific evidence. The 2019 campaign, by contrast, makes no such direct health assertions, instead building brand equity through aspiration.
This pivot reflects a broader strategic reality in India's food and drink sector. Asia-Pacific was the largest regional functional-food market in 2019, accounting for nearly half of global revenue, according to Clapboard.com citing market research. In a competitive landscape where brands such as Fortune and Saffola have long dominated Indian cooking oil shelves with a combination of health messaging and mass-media spending, Cardia Life's decision to pursue a digital-first, lifestyle-coded campaign represents a meaningful differentiation attempt. Fortune, backed by Adani Wilmar, and Saffola, owned by Marico, compete with substantial advertising budgets and established brand recall across India. Against these entrenched players, a purpose-driven digital narrative offers Cardia Life a route to cultural relevance that a features-and-benefits approach could not credibly sustain following regulatory scrutiny.
The insight driving the campaign is that Indian consumers, particularly those engaging with digital media in 2019, increasingly define their identity through experiences and passions rather than passive consumption. By aligning Cardia Life with this sensibility — positioning the brand as a companion to a life fully lived — Digitally Inspired Media constructed a strategic platform with room to grow beyond a single execution.
Mridula Joseph served as creative director on the "Live Life to the Fullest" campaign, according to Clapboard.com, working within a team that included chief creative officer Surej Salim Kumar, VP of strategic planning Jeffin Thomas, art director Namashvi D, copywriter Babu Sivakumar, and additional credits to Manish Kishore, all at Digitally Inspired Media, Chennai.
The creative execution deploys copywriting as its primary instrument. The campaign's copy contrasts the textures of a routine life — the contained world of the office cubicle, the passivity of sitting in a cinema — against a life shaped by deliberate exploration: learning new things, seeking out unusual foods, inhabiting sensory experience fully. Food is not presented as fuel or as medicine but as one of the most immediate expressions of a person's willingness to engage with the world. This framing is rhetorically ambitious, asking the audience to see a cooking oil purchase as continuous with the broader question of how they choose to live.
The campaign exists as a single digital media asset, as documented by Clapboard.com, which places considerable pressure on the craft of that one execution. A single-asset digital campaign in 2019 India required the copy and visual language to work hard independently, without the cumulative reinforcement that a multi-format, multi-channel campaign would provide. The copy-led approach suits the digital medium, where text-forward content can carry narrative weight in ways that a television spot relying on production scale cannot. The decision by Digitally Inspired Media to anchor the campaign to lived experience and sensory detail — rather than abstracted lifestyle imagery — gives the execution a specificity that serves both memorability and brand alignment in the food and drink category.
No verified performance data for the "Live Life to the Fullest" campaign is publicly available. According to Clapboard.com, no published business results, sales lift, market-share movement, brand-tracking data, reach figures, engagement metrics, or conversion data have been documented for this campaign. Similarly, no media budget or spend range is on record, and the campaign has not been recognised across Cannes Lions, Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, Clio Awards, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, as confirmed by Clapboard, according to X.com.
Structural analysis, however, offers meaningful perspective. The campaign's single-asset digital format, while limiting in terms of reach amplification, is well-suited to a brand operating without the scale budgets of category leaders such as Saffola or Fortune. The strategic decision to abandon health-claim territory following the Advertising Standards Council of India's 2016 ruling, as documented by Clapboard.com, was not merely a compliance measure but a creative opportunity — one that this campaign attempts to convert into a coherent brand identity built around lifestyle, passions, and the idea of living fully.
The Clapboard Score of 58 out of 100 reflects a campaign that demonstrates genuine strategic clarity and a well-reasoned creative platform, but one whose impact is structurally constrained by its single-execution scope. The purpose-driven narrative is coherent and the creative team's copy-led approach is appropriate for digital media in India in 2019. What the campaign lacks is the layered, multi-touchpoint presence that would be required to shift consumer perception meaningfully in a food and drink category as competitive as cooking oil across the Indian market.
Cardia Life's "Live Life to the Fullest" is a digital campaign launched in April 2019 in India, created by Digitally Inspired Media. It repositions the cooking oil brand around purpose and lifestyle rather than health claims, contrasting passive routines with deliberate, experience-driven living and using food as an expression of personal identity.
Digitally Inspired Media, a Chennai-based agency, created the campaign. The team included chief creative officer Surej Salim Kumar, creative director Mridula Joseph, art director Namashvi D, and copywriter Babu Sivakumar, according to Clapboard.com. The campaign was published in India in April 2019 for Cardia Life, a brand of Kaleesuwari Refinery Pvt. Ltd.
Cardia Life faced regulatory pressure after the Advertising Standards Council of India upheld complaints in 2016 against health claims that lacked sufficient scientific evidence, according to Clapboard.com. The 2019 campaign responded by building brand equity through lifestyle aspiration and purpose-driven storytelling rather than direct nutritional or functional product assertions.
The campaign received a Clapboard Score of 58 out of 100, as documented on Clapboard.com. The score reflects a campaign with clear strategic intent and a coherent creative platform, while acknowledging structural limitations imposed by its single-asset digital format and the absence of a multi-touchpoint execution across the Indian market.
Saffola, owned by Marico, and Fortune, backed by Adani Wilmar, dominate India's cooking oil category with large advertising budgets and broad brand recall. Cardia Life's digital-first, purpose-driven approach represents a strategic alternative route, seeking cultural differentiation in the food and drink space rather than competing directly on media spend or functional health messaging.
No verified awards or published performance data exist for this campaign. According to Clapboard.com, the work has not been recognised at Cannes Lions, Effie Awards, D&AD, The One Show, Clio Awards, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, and no sales, reach, or engagement metrics have been documented publicly for the April 2019 India campaign.
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