From Rock Bottom to India's Most Talked About Ad Brain: The Tanmay Bhatt Story Nobody Expected

He lost everything in 2018. His company. His reputation. His ability to get out of bed. Here's how the internet's most unlikely comeback happened right in front of our eyes.

Picture this. It's 2019. One of Indian entertainment's biggest names is sitting at home, not performing, not posting, not doing anything. The company he spent the better part of a decade building is gone. The fans who once worshipped him are now writing Twitter threads about why he deserved it. And the man himself is telling the internet, from his Instagram account, that he feels completely paralysed.

That man is Tanmay Bhatt. And that low point? Turns out it was just the beginning of the most interesting chapter of his life.

When AIB Was Everything

You cannot tell this story without first talking about what AIB meant. Not just as a comedy group, but as a feeling.

When AIB arrived on the internet, it felt like someone had finally handed a microphone to the generation that grew up on satellite TV and dial-up internet. The roast battles, the honest takes, the willingness to go after things that other entertainers would not touch with a barge pole.

Tanmay was the loudest, funniest, most recognisable voice in that world. His Snapchat filters went viral before going viral was even a thing. He was everywhere.

And then, in October 2018, everything collapsed.

The 2018 Controversy That Changed Everything

During the peak of India's MeToo movement, it emerged that Tanmay had been aware of harassment allegations against a colleague and had not acted on them. The internet, which had once celebrated him, turned with a ferocity that felt very personal. He was removed as CEO of AIB. He was pulled off Comicstaan. Brand deals evaporated. The YouTube channel that had millions of loyal subscribers went quiet. AIB, the thing he had built from nothing, was effectively over.

The Part Nobody Talks About Enough

Most public figures in damage-control mode follow the same playbook. Disappear for a bit. Return with a carefully worded post about growth and reflection. Maybe a podcast interview where they seem humble but not too humble. Tanmay did none of that.

In June 2019, he posted on Instagram and said he was mentally checked out after everything that had happened. He opened up about being diagnosed with clinical depression and admitted that nobody wants to work with a depressed comedian, calling it an oxymoron. He was not performing recovery. He was living it, loudly and publicly.

It was messy. It was uncomfortable. And because he was Tanmay Bhatt, some people did not believe it. Critics accused him of using mental health as a deflection strategy. The backlash did not soften. If anything, this disclosure made things more complicated, not less. But here is the thing about that moment that becomes clear only in hindsight: he chose not to disappear.

He stayed visible, stayed honest and stayed human about how broken things were. That choice, more than anything that came later, is what made the comeback possible.

PUBG, CarryMinati and the Quietest Restart in History

In November 2019, Tanmay started streaming PUBG Mobile on YouTube. He hit a million subscribers by May 2020, partly because he played alongside Ajey Nagar, better known as CarryMinati.

He was not pretending none of it had happened. He was not launching a grand reinvention with a PR firm behind it. He was just a guy streaming games, being funny, being real, slowly finding his footing again.

He also started a second channel where he talked about depression, money, ambition and heartbreak with the same energy he had once used to roast Bollywood celebrities. People showed up. Not in the millions at first, but enough. And the ones who showed up were genuinely there for him, not for the version of him that had come packaged in a comedy collective with merch and sponsorships.

This phase of Tanmay's career almost never gets written about. But it matters enormously. Because this is where he figured out that he still had something to say, and that people still wanted to hear it.

CRED, Rahul Dravid and the Ad That Broke the Internet

Skip forward a few years and something wild has happened. Tanmay Bhatt, the disgraced comedian who could not get out of bed in 2019, is now the most talked about creative brain in Indian advertising.

The turning point came with the CRED campaign, beginning with Rahul Dravid's now-famous reimagining.

What followed was a string of hits that reshaped how brands thought about celebrity, humour and internet-first storytelling, including Disney+ Hotstar's IPL campaigns with Shah Rukh Khan and MS Dhoni, Lenskart with Karan Johar, and Subway with Viswanathan Anand.

The Rahul Dravid CRED ad deserves a moment. Because Dravid, India's most gentlemanly cricketer, road-raging through Bangalore in an auto rickshaw was not just a funny concept. It was a masterclass in understanding what makes people stop scrolling. The joke worked because it understood exactly what the audience thought of Dravid, and flipped it with perfect timing. People who had never downloaded CRED and never intended to were sharing that ad. That is a very specific kind of magic.

Tanmay and his agency Moonshot, which he co-founded with Devaiah Bopanna, built campaigns that created a hammerblow of attention by placing celebrities in genuinely unexpected situations rather than just having them endorse products with a smile.

BoldCare, Ranveer Singh, Johnny Sins and the Campaign India Did Not See Coming

If the CRED ads proved Tanmay understood humour, the BoldCare campaign proved he understood courage.

Men's sexual health is the kind of topic that Indian advertising typically handles with hushed voiceovers and awkward metaphors. Moonshot made it look like a saas-bahu soap opera, complete with the corniest possible dialogues, slow-motion dramatic shots and Ranveer Singh playing a concerned brother-in-law. And then they cast Johnny Sins. In an Indian ad. For a men's health brand. And somehow, it worked completely.

On February 13, 2024, searches for BoldCare on Google Trends surpassed those for both Ranveer Singh and Johnny Sins. Read that sentence again. A men's wellness brand, previously unknown to most of India, was searched more than two of the most searched names on the Indian internet. That is not a marketing win. That is a cultural event.

At the Good Ads Matter Awards India 2025, Moonshot won two golds, two silvers and a bronze for Swiggy Instamart, a gold and a silver for BoldCare's teleshopping campaign, and additional awards for CRED and BoldCare's serial parody, ultimately being named Independent Agency of the Year 2025.

The Question Everyone in Advertising Is Asking

By 2024, industry conversations were drawing comparisons between Tanmay and advertising legend Piyush Pandey. Tanmay himself pushed back on this, telling media that a comparison between himself, an absolute newcomer, and a legend like Piyush was absolutely unfair, and that stalwarts like Piyush Pandey and Prasoon Joshi were the people who inspired him to get into advertising in the first place.

That humility lands differently when you know the backstory. This is someone who was written off. Who spent a year unable to participate in his own life. Who had to watch everything he built fall apart in real time, in public, with millions of people cheering the fall. The fact that he now speaks about being a student of advertising rather than its new king is not false modesty. It reads like someone who genuinely knows how quickly things can be taken away.

What This Story Is Actually About

The easy version of the Tanmay Bhatt comeback says: he got cancelled, he laid low, he reinvented himself. That version is clean and satisfying and also mostly wrong.

The real version is messier. He did not lay low. He stayed in full view, told everyone he was struggling, got more criticism for that, kept going anyway, started streaming games from his bedroom, built a new audience one honest conversation at a time, and eventually channelled a decade of understanding what makes Indian audiences laugh into one of the most impactful bodies of advertising work the country has seen in years.

He did not come back because the internet forgave him. He came back because he refused to let the worst moment of his career also be his last one.

In 2026, brands are calling Moonshot. Awards are piling up. And Tanmay Bhatt is still exactly what he always was: the funniest person in the room, just now the room is a boardroom, and the jokes are selling products to the tune of millions.

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