PhonePe marks 10 years with an anthem for its 70 crore users

MUMBAI: Seventy crore names is quite a roll call, but PhonePe has decided to make a song and story out of it. As the digital payments platform marks 10 years, its latest anthem film turns its enormous user base into the centrepiece of a data-led thank you rather than another milestone-heavy anniversary campaign.

The film, conceptualised in partnership with Ogilvy, uses the sheer scale of PhonePe’s registered user base to illustrate how large the brand’s decade-long journey has become. The campaign celebrates more than 70 crore registered users across India while attempting to put a human face to a number that is otherwise difficult to visualise.

At the heart of the film is Shahu Supreme, who holds the Indian record for speaking 494 words per minute. PhonePe gives him a challenge that is considerably more ambitious than a conventional speed-speaking performance: calling out its users by name at his maximum pace.

The numbers quickly turn the exercise from a stunt into a lesson in scale. Even at 494 words per minute, naming all 70 crore PhonePe users would take Shahu 980 consecutive days, making the task an almost three-year roll call if he kept going without interruption.

That calculation forms the creative hook for the anniversary film. Instead of simply saying that PhonePe has grown to more than 70 crore users in 10 years, the campaign asks audiences to imagine what that figure actually looks like when every individual behind the number is counted.

The approach also shifts the anniversary narrative away from the usual corporate milestone reel. PhonePe positions the decade as a collection of everyday moments involving millions of consumers, from making a first contactless transaction to using digital payments while running and growing a small business.

The underlying idea is that India’s digital transformation is not just a story of technology and transaction volumes. It is also a story of small, repeated actions by consumers and businesses that have gradually made digital payments part of everyday life.

Amit Doshi, group chief marketing officer, PhonePe, said the company’s journey over the past decade has been closely linked to the everyday progress of millions of Indians. He said the objective of the film was not only to mark the 10-year milestone but also to express gratitude to customers who have been part of that journey.

The creative team then gave that gratitude a numerical twist. Rather than attempting to represent 70 crore people through a montage of faces or a conventional voiceover, the campaign uses a real-world test of speed to demonstrate just how enormous the PhonePe community has become.

Akshay Seth, senior executive creative director, Ogilvy Mumbai, said the 70 crore figure told only one side of the story. The creative approach, he explained, was to focus on the people behind the number, using the data itself as the starting point for the campaign idea.

The choice of Shahu Supreme adds another layer to the execution. His 494-words-per-minute record provides a tangible benchmark against which the scale of PhonePe’s user base can be measured, turning an otherwise abstract statistic into something audiences can calculate and picture.

The film’s central proposition is therefore less about counting users and more about recognising them. Each name represents an individual who has contributed to the platform’s 10-year journey, whether through a small everyday payment, a contactless transaction or the use of digital payments in a growing business.

The campaign also reflects how anniversary advertising is increasingly using data as a creative device rather than treating statistics as supporting information. Here, the 70 crore figure is not tucked into a superscript or presented as a headline number; it becomes the central character of the film.

For PhonePe, the 10-year milestone thus becomes a story about scale, but with the emphasis firmly on the people who created that scale. And with 70 crore names to thank, even India’s fastest speaker has his work cut out for him.