Evolution: the original Indian animated film

Read the campaign story

Mentos’ Evolution takes a familiar advertising promise about bright ideas and expands it to a ridiculous scale. An animated monkey begins in a subordinate role to a donkey. After eating a mint, it develops into an inventive human and reverses the relationship. The joke does not require viewers to believe confectionery improves intelligence. It turns the brand’s existing smart-thinking territory into an unmistakably impossible origin story.

The official Mentos India timeline places Evolution in 2008. Contemporary Exchange4media reporting in February that year credits Ogilvy & Mather, creatives Abhijit Avasthi and Jignesh Maniar, director Rajesh Krishnan of Soda Films, and animation studio Frameworks. It describes a television launch, with other media being discussed as follow-ups. Those announced plans are not treated here as proof that every extension ran. The brand history’s praise for memorability is also not an independently measured result.

The editorial lesson is about preserving a rule while changing its scale. The organising rule is that a fresh thought turns a frustrating situation around. A new setting can make that rule feel unfamiliar without abandoning the audience’s route back to the brand. Animation helps by allowing the escalation to be obviously fictional. The final reversal pays off the opening relationship, so the sequence has a destination rather than functioning as a collection of unrelated inventions and visual jokes.

For a small team, the expensive surface is less useful than that underlying structure. A simple original illustration can show an obstacle, a reframing and a changed outcome. The important planning question is what the protagonist understands differently at the end. If the answer is merely “our product is magical,” the story may have lost its strategic connection. For a practical tool or service, the reversal should arise from a real capability. For a playful consumer brand, the exaggeration should remain clearly separate from a factual performance claim.

This case is not a scientific explanation of evolution or evidence of a cognitive benefit from sweets. Nor does the available contemporary reporting verify sales lift. It shows how a campaign platform can be renewed through a different storytelling form while retaining a recognisable payoff. A responsible experiment would compare the animated exaggeration with a simpler execution, checking both which benefit people understand and whether anyone mistakes the comic premise for a health or intelligence claim. Attention alone would not settle that question.

Keep the rule, change the world

Write the existing campaign’s core relationship in one sentence. Change the setting or scale while preserving that relationship.

Make the ending answer the beginning

Storyboard the opening obstacle and final reversal first. Remove intermediate scenes that do not make the payoff easier to understand.

Check literal interpretations

Ask viewers what the product actually promises. Rewrite if comic exaggeration is mistaken for an unsupported health or performance benefit.

A small test for another brief

Create an original illustrated before-and-after story in which a real product capability changes the approach to a familiar problem.

Correct benefit recall, brand attribution and frequency of unsupported literal interpretations.

Stop if humour creates a health claim, confuses the product role or depends on humiliating a group.

• Choose one supported capability and one recognisable obstacle.
• Sketch an opening, a change of approach and a final reversal.
• Compare a playful version with a direct demonstration.