What happens when Shah Rukh Khan, Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt sit in a writers’ room to brainstorm a commercial for TMT bars? It turns into Bollywood banter, with references to Khan’s Don, Ranbir’s Rockstar and Alia’s Jigra making their way into a pitch for Rungta Steel TMT Bars.
The ad, created by The Script Room, revolves around the creative rivalry between the three stars. Each tries to weave references from their films into a catchy jingle for Rungta Steel TMT bars. Listening to their filmi squabbling is the company’s “brand manager”, played by actor Brijendra Kala. His own proposal is to ask the stars to do a silly dance to a repurposed “Tera Pyaar Pyaar Pyaar, Rungta Baar Baar.” The actors, however, laugh off his suggestion and push their own “creative” ideas.
Khan starts by going back to Don, pitching a scene where the hero takes refuge in a house surrounded by the police of 12 nations. But the cops cannot break into it because it is made of TMT bars. Ranbir then jumps in with Don’s famous “Mushkil hi nahi, naamumkin hai” line — Not just difficult, impossible. He pitches his own idea: a Rockstar-style performance so powerful that the world shakes, but the stage made with TMT bars does not.
Alia cuts him off with a line from Rockstar, singing “O nadaan parinde, parinde baith ja” (Oh foolish bird, sit down). She offers a Jigra-inspired sequence of her own, where a sister tries to break into a prison made from TMT bars to save her brother.
The commercial turns their cinematic references and on-screen personas into a playful battle of ideas, all in the service of selling TMT bars—and without a flexed muscle in sight.
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Getting subtle about strength
This is not the first time Rungta Steel has created an ad with these three Bollywood stars. In an earlier commercial, Alia appears as Gangubai from Gangubai Kathiawadi, Ranbir as Jordan from Rockstar and Khan in his Raees avatar. Khan crashes Gangubai and Jordan’s housewarming party by breaking through the roof, then jokes that had they used Rungta Steel TMT bars, he would have had to come in through the door.
In another ad, the brand recreated a scene from Jawan, with a bald Khan kidnapping Alia and Ranbir from Barfi! before telling them their new home should be built with Rungta TMT bars.
But the latest ad tweaks the formula. Instead of dropping the actors into recreated movie scenes, it turns the making of the ad itself into the punchline. Here, they are shown ‘behind the scenes’, vying to choose what avatar they want to wear next for the commercial.
Most commercials for infrastructure companies, especially TMT bars, connect the strength of the bar with hypermasculinity and extreme endurance. GK TMT’s ad with Hrithik Roshan, for instance, frames the actor’s physical strength, martial arts moves and flexibility as a metaphor for the traits of the bar.
The traditional playbook is simply to take a big star from any field and have them promote the product—like SRMB Steel featuring MS Dhoni and Kapil Dev, or Icon Steel featuring Amitabh Bachchan. In the Rungta TMT ad, however, the jokes are self-deprecating, as Khan, Alia and Ranbir spoof their own films.
The ending of the commercial also has a twist. After the pitching session is done, the stars, holding each other’s hands with high hopes, ask the brand manager, “Toh kaun si banani hai (So, which one are we making)?” The ad then cuts to the three dancing to “Tera Pyaar Pyaar Pyaar, Rungta Baar Baar… Rungta TMT baar, ekdam solid”— the brand manager’s original suggestion. The actors then admit that the dancing commercial is the best of all the pitches. The subtext perhaps is that the Rungta TMT idea is the strongest.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)