Gold at The Economic Times India DigiPlus Awards 2026

Hoopla and Syngenta India have won Gold at The Economic Times India DigiPlus Awards 2026, presented by ET BrandEquity on 25 September in Gurugram. The DigiPlus Awards are The Economic Times' national honours for digital marketing, now in their eighth edition and decided by a jury of senior industry leaders. Our Gold came in Excellence in Use of Mobile to Drive Sales, for Scan, Reward, Repeat: The ₹172-Crore Grower Loyalty Story, the loyalty programme on Syngenta's Cropwise Grower app. This is how it works.

The customer pays cash. Then they disappear.

In Indian agriculture, the brand loses its customer at the dealer counter. The customer pays cash, carries the bottle home and vanishes. No receipt. No record. No relationship. The brand spends a season earning their trust, then loses them the moment they buy, and every year it starts again from zero.

Loyalty programmes were built for people with credit cards and email addresses. Not for a customer buying a fungicide at a village dealer. We were not missing data. We were missing the customer.

Every bottle became a bank

We did not ask customers to do something new. We put the reward inside the one thing they already do, buying the product, and inside the one device they already own.

• The bottle is the entry point. A code on the pack they have already paid for.
• The phone is the infrastructure. Loyalty card, wallet, proof of purchase and prize stage, all in one hand.
• The reward is immediate. Not points expiring in a catalogue. Real money, in seconds.

We did not run a campaign about buying. We rebuilt what buying is.

See it. Buy it. Scan it. Get paid.

1. See. The ad finds the customer in their own language, on the phone already in their hand.
2. Buy. They buy the product, or buy it again, because the reward lives on the pack.
3. Scan. They scan the code on the bottle inside the Cropwise Grower app.
4. Claim. Cashback reaches their own UPI account in seconds. Not points. Money.
5. Win. Every scan is also a ticket to a lucky draw held every month.

The advertising does not ask them to click. It asks them to buy.

The product was the ticket. The prize was the ad.

Every execution repeated the same three verbs, download, scan, win, until they became reflex, and every frame carried the bottle and the code, so the ad was always one scan away from the reward. The prizes were things a customer could picture in their own yard: motorcycles, televisions, smartphones and gold coins.

The line was Chutki mein cashback kamao, cashback in a snap. It had to be understood in one glance by someone standing in a shop doorway, so we made speed itself the visual: a camera that prints money instead of pictures, a struck match with the cashback already there, a switch that turns the rupees on like a light.

Behind it sat a film system, not a single ad: reels, teasers, explainers and customer films shot in working dealer shops, transcreated into ten languages. Not one national burst but many local ones, each timed to its own crop calendar, always on since 2022. The people in the films are not actors. They are real customers, on their own phones, in the middle of an ordinary buying day.

Why customers believed it

This audience has been burned by schemes before. So trust was built into the mechanics, not the messaging.

• The code proves the product. Only a genuine pack carries a valid code, and the scan verifies authenticity before it pays anything.
• The app blocks a second bite. Scan a pack twice and it says so. No duplicates, no farming the scheme.
• The money actually arrives. Straight to the customer's own account, by UPI, in seconds.
• The books are reconciled weekly, with transaction-level detail, and draw winners are announced publicly every month.

Trust is not claimed. It is audited.

Most mobile campaigns talk about buying. This one is the buying.

That is why it won in Excellence in Use of Mobile to Drive Sales (see the official India DigiPlus Awards 2026 winners list on The Economic Times). The ad causes the purchase, because customers buy, or buy again, to qualify. The phone is the infrastructure. There is no modelled attribution, because a scan is a purchase that actually happened. It is repeat, not redemption, and it paid out at scale, across ten languages and nineteen states.

The cashback does not reward the bottle they just bought. It buys the next one.

It is the same belief behind the one lakh personalized films we made for Syngenta India: in agriculture, reach is the hard problem, and the answer is a system, not a single ad. It is also brand and performance working as one machine.

Thank you

To the Syngenta India team, who trusted a sales programme to a phone. To The Economic Times, ET BrandEquity and the DigiPlus jury, and congratulations to every team on the winners list. To every customer who scanned. And to everyone at Hoopla who built, filmed, translated and ran it, season after season. The Gold follows three wins at Flame Awards Asia 2026 and the month Hoopla became an OpenAI Select Partner. If you want mobile to move sales rather than metrics, start a conversation.