Exide Moving Canvas Paints India's Roads in Folk Art

The Strategic Insight Behind Exide's Folk Art Campaign in India

Exide's campaign strategy rests on a single, powerful consumer insight: in a country as vast and diverse as India, a brand that powers millions of vehicles possesses a form of cultural presence that no competitor can easily replicate through conventional product advertising. Rather than emphasising technical specifications or battery performance metrics, Wunderman Thompson South Asia chose to anchor the brand in national identity — a move that repositions Exide from a commodity product to a symbol of collective movement.

In the Indian automotive battery market, Exide competes directly with Amara Raja Batteries, whose brands include Amaron and PowerZone, as well as with global entrants expanding their footprint in the country. The Indian battery market is part of a broader global automotive battery landscape that, according to Grand View Research, was valued at tens of billions of dollars in 2023, with lead-acid batteries representing a substantial majority of segment volume. The Indian automotive sector itself provides the strategic backdrop: India is one of the world's largest automobile markets, and vehicle ownership continues to expand across both urban and semi-urban geographies, deepening the relevance of a brand that claims presence across every category of road transport.

The strategic decision to use indigenous folk art was not merely aesthetic. It served a dual purpose: differentiating The Moving Canvas from the globally-influenced visual language common in automotive advertising, and demonstrating that Exide's national footprint is culturally legible across regions, not just commercially measurable. Per reporting by LBB Online, the campaign was developed through extensive research into folk traditions from geographically and culturally distinct parts of India, ensuring that the film's visual vocabulary would resonate with audiences from multiple regional backgrounds. This approach gave the campaign a cultural credibility that a single, unified visual style could not have achieved, and it transformed the brand's claim of national presence into something audiences could see and feel rather than simply read.

Craft and Creative Direction Inside Exide's Moving Canvas Film

Arjun Mukherjee, Vice President and Senior Executive Creative Director at Wunderman Thompson Kolkata, directed The Moving Canvas. His approach to the production was deliberately iterative and anti-formulaic. As reported by LBB Online, Mukherjee stated that the team created a storyboard at the outset but then discarded it entirely, allowing each completed frame to generate a new idea for the edit and transitions, with the film evolving each morning into something previously unimagined. That working method is itself a reflection of the film's subject matter: a journey without a fixed map, guided by what emerges along the way.

Illustration and animation for the campaign were executed by Sourish Mitra, whose task was to render more than thirteen distinct indigenous art styles — each with its own regional iconography, line quality, and palette — in a manner that allowed them to flow into one another without losing their individual integrity. The challenge was not simply stylistic but editorial: each transition between art forms had to feel motivated by the journey itself rather than by the mechanics of digital compositing. The resulting film moves through Gond, Kalamkari, Thangka, Pithora, Patachitra, Ganjifa, Kalighat, Madhubani, Bastar, Bhil, Pichwai, Chittara, Warli, and Kurmli Sohrai as though the landscape itself is shifting beneath the vehicles on screen.

The sonic dimension of the film was composed by Subhajit Mukherjee, who served as musical director. His score is an ethno-fusion composition drawing on instruments intrinsic to India's diverse musical traditions, including the Ravanhatta, Carnatic Mandolin, Dotara, Rabab, Tumbi Tanpura, Kanjeera, Tasha, Dhol, Dholak, and Tabla. Each instrument carries its own regional identity, mirroring the visual strategy of the film and ensuring that the sonic experience of The Moving Canvas is as geographically expansive as its imagery. The integration of visual and musical craft gives the film a coherence that justifies its ambition as a single, unified artistic statement rather than an anthology of stylistic exercises.

Exide Moving Canvas Awards and Campaign Effectiveness

The Moving Canvas earned significant recognition within the Indian and Asia-Pacific advertising industries following its March 2023 release in India. Wunderman Thompson South Asia won Gold at The Abbys at Goafest 2023 for the campaign in the Film category, as reported by Campaign India. The film, submitted under the full title India Moves on Exide – The Moving Canvas, also won Silver at the ONE Asia Creative Awards 2023 in the Moving Image Craft and Production category for Original Music, as documented by the ONE Club for Creativity on its awards platform.

No third-party verified audience reach, view count, or sales-impact data for The Moving Canvas is publicly available at the time of publication. The campaign's structural effectiveness can, however, be assessed on several dimensions. First, the decision to build the campaign around a single, high-craft film asset concentrates the brand's creative investment in a format that rewards repeated viewing and earns organic distribution through cultural interest rather than paid amplification alone. Second, the folk art framework generates a category of earned media — coverage in arts and culture publications alongside advertising trade press — that conventional automotive battery advertising does not typically attract. Third, the award recognition at both a national level, through The Abbys, and a regional level, through the ONE Asia Creative Awards, confirms that the campaign achieved creative distinction within a competitive submission pool. Together, these factors suggest that The Moving Canvas succeeded in repositioning Exide's brand equity beyond the functional register of product reliability into the more durable territory of cultural relevance.