Every year, sometime around late April, I get the same quiet panic. Not about what to gift my mother, she has never, in my entire life, asked for anything, but about whether I should be doing more than I am. Growing up, I never bought her anything on Mother’s Day. Not once. Instead, I would sit at the dining table for two full hours, cutting and folding paper, writing things in my worst cursive, , using colours here and there as I wished, and producing what I genuinely believed was a masterpiece of a greeting card. My mother never complained, she was, as mothers tend to be, perfectly happy with the thing that cost nothing but my afternoon.
This year, while researching this story, I called her and asked if she wanted anything. She went quiet for a second, then said, acting very non chalant, “No, nothing.” I pushed, she thought about it and said she wanted the greeting cards I used to make her as a child. I told her she could ask for literally anything now, that I was earning real adult money, that she could finally be a little materialistic about it.
She laughed me off, and she pulled out a box from her closet on video call. It was a proper box and inside it had some coloured papers. They were the cards I had given her back then, every single one. Folded carefully, stored like documents, preserved the way you preserve something you actually consider a treasure.
That, right there, is what Mother’s Day advertising has always known about and leaned into heavily. Mothers do not need the grand gesture and just want to feel seen.
And for decades, most brands built entire campaigns around exactly this version of her, the woman who gives endlessly, who sacrifices quietly, who finds joy in what others overlook. It worked and still works. But something is shifting in how some brands are choosing to tell their story this year, and it is worth paying attention to. Here’s a look at a few Mother’s Day campaigns from the year:
Bournvita
Bournvita’s #OGInfluencer campaign this year does not try to subvert anything; it simply watches a mother do what mothers do. They wait by cricket nets, cheer through one more lap at the pool, sit with a child after a bad exam. The insight the campaign is built on, that long before social media, mothers were already quietly shaping who their children would become, and the film carries it with enough warmth that it does not feel like a retread.
Canara HSBC Life Insurance
Canara HSBC’s Mother’s Day film works similarly, though its emotional architecture is more specific. The film follows a mother who has cancelled a long-planned trip with friends, and the daughter who discovers this and gently pushes her to go anyway. The film frames around financial planning, the idea that securing a woman’s independence is its own form of love.
Pokonut India; District by Zomato
Pokonut’s #TheMissingU campaign, built around the identity loss many mothers quietly experience after childbirth, and Zomato District’s campaign around giving mothers new ‘firsts,’ also share DNA with this emotional lineage. Both are rooted in the acknowledgement that motherhood can slowly consume the woman inside it, a truth that is not new, but that tends to hit differently when told plainly, without too much artifice around it.
AJIO
This year’s AJIO campaign is set inside what seems to be a chappal-throwing academy, a refuge for mothers who have spent years receiving thoughtless gifts from their children. Actor Shefali Shah anchors it, and the whole thing plays in deadpan, with zero interest in making you cry. The cultural shorthand the film borrows is the mother and her chappal as a kind of domestic language.
What the brand did here is not just being funny; it acknowledged that mothers have expectations. That they notice when the effort is missing and are not infinitely patient recipients of whatever you hand them, with a hug. This is a version of Mother’s Day advertising that does not ask her to be gracious about low standards.
Swiggy Instamart
Instamart’s ‘Mummaby’ campaign goes even further in tone, building an entire film around the idea that the classic performance of love, the grand gesture, the emotional tribute, might be missing the point entirely. The film, featuring Farah Khan as a judge at an audition where contestants try to sing mothers to sleep, is loud and deliberately absurd. The mothers on the judging panel are exhausted in an entirely different way than the kind that a lullaby fixes. The film’s pivot focuses on what would actually help: doing something useful, taking over a chore, ordering what she needs.
Timezone
Timezone’s campaign, titled ‘Let Your Mom Beat You at Timezone,’ arrives from a different angle but belongs in the same conversation. The mockumentary-style film opens with a child earnestly describing how his mother ‘beats’ him, before revealing the competition is across arcade games and bowling lanes. What it is quietly arguing is that the best gift is not something you give her but something you do together, on her terms, in a space where she gets to win for once.
Hyundai India
On similar lines, Hyundai India’s campaign highlights the parallels of the woman who held you and helped you to take your first step; now is the time to let her take her first step again, and this time her children will be her support and teach her.
Slurrp Farm and Google India
The Slurrp Farm and Google India film, A Mother Is Always Searching, tells its story entirely through a mother’s Google search history across a single day. The searches range from how to strengthen a child’s bones to which cereal has no added sugar. The film closes on a cup of chai she made in the morning, still sitting in the microwave, which her older child eventually reheats and brings to her. That detail does the work that ten minutes of slow-motion footage might not.
R for Rabbit
R for Rabbit’s three-film series, made with independent creators, focuses on something that does not often get its own campaign: the moment a mother refuses to give in to a tantrum, and the people around her choose to support rather than judge her for it. There is no crying in a kitchen, no sacrifice montage, just a woman holding a boundary, calmly, and the film treating that as an act of genuine strength.
Taken together, what these campaigns reflect is not a clean break from the past so much as an honest expansion of it. The emotional truth that the classic Mother’s Day ad has always traded in, that she gives more than she gets, that she is seen less than she deserves, is still there. It has just started producing different responses in different brands.
For some, the response is to honour that truth more tenderly. To make a film that makes you call your mother immediately after watching it.
For others, the response is to turn that truth sideways and ask what it would look like if we actually did something about it, not a tear-jerker but a structural change, even a small one.
Both approaches are doing the same thing underneath: trying to make her feel like a person, not just a role.
As for my mother and her box of old greeting cards, I am not sure any campaign has ever said it better than she did, without saying anything at all.
