ANTENNAS UP. Abhijeet Dipke-led ‘infestation’ in New Delhi | Photo Credit: ANI

For roughly two decades — ever since “viral” migrated from epidemiology into digital marketing around 2007 — I have been the most unpopular person in the room whenever the word comes up.

Clients demand it. Agency teams promise it. Award juries celebrate it with trophies that look increasingly like Toblerone chocolates.

The best campaigns prove my point quietly. Ariel’s ‘Share the Load’ went viral and moved market share — because the virality served a precise commercial and cultural goal. Zomato trends regularly — because every piece of content points toward one measurable outcome: App opens.

When virality serves a goal, it is a powerful amplifier. When virality is the goal, it is — as the Cockroach Janta Party demonstrated so elegantly — an expensive and exhausting way to go nowhere. Though, to be fair to the cockroach, it did get to CNN.

In May, a senior judicial figure allegedly compared sections of unemployed youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites of society” in open court. By the following morning, Abhijeet Dipke — a 30-year-old political communications strategist and Boston University PR graduate — had founded, named and distributed the Cockroach Janta Party across Instagram.

Twenty million followers in 72 hours. Coverage on CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera. Street protests at Jantar Mantar, complete with cockroach costumes and mock manifesto slogans.

Marketing academics will be studying this particular case for years — not entirely for the right reasons, but enthusiastically nonetheless. As a piece of communications craft, viewed purely as a marketing exercise, it was breathtaking.

Jonah Berger’s STEPPS framework — the most rigorous model of content spread available — identifies six conditions for virality: Social currency, triggers, emotion, public, practical value and stories.

The CJP hit five of these with a precision most agency creative teams spend careers chasing and award show entries try reverse-engineering.

Let’s deep-dive:

Social currency: Sharing a cockroach meme signalled political awareness, irreverence and humour simultaneously, at zero personal risk. It made the sharer look sharp without requiring commitment to anything.

Triggers: The original remarks recirculated through news cycles for days, each repetition refreshing the outrage and re-exposing new audiences to the CJP brand without a single rupee of media spend. The movement did not need to sustain its own attention — the news ecosystem did it for free. This is what the industry calls earned media.

Emotion: Anger and humour activated simultaneously in the same container — high-arousal emotions. Anger alone exhausts an audience. Humour alone trivialises a cause. Together, they are nearly unstoppable — as every successful political cartoonist from RK Laxman onwards understood.

Public: Cockroach masks/costumes at Jantar Mantar gave the movement a visual identity that cameras could shoot and audiences could decode instantly — absurd enough to be funny, specific enough to be unmistakable.

Stories: The underdog reclaiming an insult is one of the oldest narrative structures in human communication. The movement did not merely respond to being called cockroaches. It adopted the name, built a brand around it and turned the act of reclamation into the content itself.

The one missing condition was ‘practical value’ — there was nothing useful to do with CJP membership beyond feeling agreeably righteous while scrolling. No conversion path. No next step. No answer to the question every successful campaign must eventually face: And then what?

The only number that ultimately matters: 20 million Instagram followers produced a few hundred people on the street at Jantar Mantar. A conversion rate of approximately 0.001 per cent.

No electoral registration, no policy platform, no formal political standing. The founder, it bears mentioning, was leading this revolution for unemployed Indian youth from Boston, Massachusetts, which is either deeply ironic or the most honest thing about the whole enterprise, depending on your appetite for contradiction.

The cockroach, as any entomologist will confirm, survives everything. Nuclear winters. Geological epochs. Even bad marketing strategy. Whether this particular movement survives its own virality is, at this point, an open question.

Virality without a goal is not strategy. It is noise with excellent metrics, a very good costume and absolutely nowhere to go.

(The writer is a brand and communications strategist based in New Delhi)

Published on June 15, 2026