The goal was straightforward, drive awareness for RazorpayX Payroll within the HR community. A relevant audience, but a notoriously difficult one to engage, given our product's finance-heavy positioning.
That changed with our recent launch: an AI feature that lets employees interact directly with their payslips and ask salary-related questions. We started seeing genuine traction among HRs, which prompted us to dig deeper.
The insight - for employees, Salary Day is the most anticipated day every month. For HRs, it's a week-long nightmare. The moment salaries hit accounts, inboxes flood with the same questions: "Why did my salary change?" "What's this deduction?", not out of carelessness, but because payslips are dense with abbreviations, tax codes, and compliance jargon that few people understand. It’s a week lost every month, just answering the same questions.
Over time, this dependency became the norm, accepted by HRs and normalized by employees. That cultural resignation became our creative brief.
We had the problem. We had the solution. We needed a dramatic way to bring it to life for a community that rarely engages with branded content.
Drawing inspiration from the iconic "sawaal pe sawaal" scene from Damini, we Bollywood-ised the entire narrative and used Gen AI to produce the ad entirely in-house.
The campaign's purpose: to challenge the normalization of HR dependency, reframe payslip confusion as a design flaw rather than a human burden, and restore clarity, transparency, and trust to how employees experience their salary, all wrapped in a story that genuinely empathizes with HRs.
HR has long been stereotyped as the department that “doesn’t have much to do.” In truth, they are the organisation’s shock absorbers, the first line of empathy and explanation.
On Salary Day, they become the frontline for confusion and calm. Every month, the same questions return.
Instead of treating repeated salary queries as an HR problem to manage, we reframed it as a payroll design flaw. If the same questions are asked every month, the system - not the people need fixing.
To dramatize this, we built an animal courtroom inspired by the Indian folklore Panchatantra, putting repetition on trial.
Creative and art direction shaped this world. Porcumar Rao became a porcupine, each recurring query landing like a spoke in his back. Chulbull Pandey, the aggressive bull, channelled the iconic “sawaal pe sawaal” energy from Damini, challenging the normalization. Hathiram Trankalp, the wise elephant judge, presided over the chaos. Employees appeared as a flock of chirping birds.
We began with character and mood explorations in Midjourney, iterating until the tone and personalities felt right. Camera rotation and framing prompts were crafted using ChatGPT and Google Gemini, then executed through Google Nano Banana to generate consistent multi-angle shots. These were refined in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Firefly to maintain continuity and texture depth. Character sheets covering angles, poses, and expressions were created through structured prompting.
For video, we worked with Kling, Runway, and Google Veo, iterating to achieve natural performances. Voice recordings were synced using Kling Lip Sync mode, and the final film was composited and edited in Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro.
Heightened through theatrical exaggeration, the film made the repetition of monthly salary queries visible. What usually lives in inboxes became spectacle. Within this narrative, RazorpayX Payroll introduced R.A.Y. - an AI assistant that reads an employee’s payslip upon query and explains any change instantly, in simple language, without HR stepping in.
We extended the idea into culture through the Wall of Laughter - an anonymous digital board where HR professionals shared the funniest salary-related queries they’d received.
The movement organically reached HR communities across India, including The Shape of Work (TSOW), People Matters, SHRM India, Being HR, HR Breakfast Club, and multiple LinkedIn HR and founder-operator groups.
Knowing HR professionals are cautious about being seen online, we enabled anonymous submissions and used humour as a safe entry point.
Instead of marketing payroll to HR, we built a campaign where HRs felt seen, and their invisible burden was acknowledged.
RazorpayX Payroll’s "Trial of the Century" achieved its core objective: shifting the payslip query narrative from "HR Failure" to "Systemic Gap.”
An Empathy Movement in the HR community
Catalysed by a few internal HR leaders, the campaign sparked an industry-wide movement! HRs and Founders started sharing the campaign and their experiences over LinkedIn/WhatsApp, tagging their fellow HRs, evident from 300+ Brand Mentions & 250+ Reposts! We went viral as a “WhatsApp forward” in multiple HR groups.
We had our Avengers Assemble moment - when the campaign rippled through India’s HR-focused startup ecosystem - and the likes of Plum, Spring Verify, ClearTax, Smartstaff, Jify, Fi, all engaged with us, a campaign that finally focused on HRs!
The Impact Was Measurable & Viral: We turned a mundane B2B feature launch into a pop-culture moment:
Audio Breakout: Our debut music single, "Inbox Avalanche," garnered 4.5 Lakh+ impressions and 50+ saves, proving B2B content can compete with entertainment.
Engagement Translated into High-Intent Revenue
Most importantly, we achieved TAM coverage: From the 6.5L online HRs, we were able to reach 3L via the campaign! This was the campaign's primary objective: to reach HRs and build brand recall for RazorpayX Payroll.
