BigTrunk Bags Velvex National Digital and Social Mandate

BigTrunk Communications has won the national digital and social media mandate for Velvex, the lubricant brand owned by Mumbai’s Nandan Petrochem, handing the agency control of the brand’s content, social channels and paid media across India. The win sets up what both sides describe as a long-term partnership, built around always-on content and Velvex’s cricket sponsorship with the Lucknow Super Giants.

On its own, an agency hiring is the kind of trade item most readers scroll past. Read against the rest of the category, it is a small marker of how India’s oil brands now chase attention: a cricket badge for reach, and a steady feed to keep the name alive between matches.

What BigTrunk Picked Up With the Velvex Account

The mandate puts BigTrunk in charge of Velvex’s digital identity nationwide, from content production to social strategy to paid amplification. The agency’s stated job is to lift the brand’s share of voice in a crowded market and turn product performance claims into a consistent narrative across the country. The brief also covers Velvex’s wider visibility work, including the cricket tie-up.

The work breaks into a few clear streams:

• Always-on content built to keep the brand present in feeds rather than only during campaign bursts.
• Platform-first storytelling, meaning creative shaped for each channel instead of one asset cut down everywhere.
• Targeted amplification aimed at both core mechanics-and-fleet buyers and newer urban audiences.
• Region-specific campaigns adapted to priority markets and the consumption clusters tied to Velvex’s distribution.

Bharat Subramaniam, founder and managing director of BigTrunk Communications, tied the assignment to the category’s trust problem rather than to reach alone.

The lubricants category is evolving, with brands needing to stay relevant across diverse audiences while building trust and familiarity over time.

That framing matters because lubricants sell on confidence as much as chemistry. Most buyers cannot judge an engine oil before they pour it in, so the brand that feels familiar at the counter tends to win.

Oil Brands Are Quietly Crowding the Feed

Velvex is following a path a lot of legacy and industrial brands in India are walking right now. Categories that once lived on shop boards, distributor relationships and the odd television spot are shifting real budget into digital, and the lubricant aisle is one of the clearest examples.

The logic is straightforward. India’s two-wheeler and car parc keeps expanding, younger buyers research before they buy, and the cost of staying top-of-mind through a daily feed is low next to mass television. BigTrunk itself has built a side business turning old-line names digital; the agency recently picked up the digital account for the antiseptic brand Soframycin on much the same pitch of dragging a heritage product into modern channels.

For a product as low-interest as engine oil, the appeal of social is reach without the price of a marquee media buy. The wider Indian lubricant business is forecast to be worth roughly several billion dollars across the automotive and industrial lubricant segments, and the brands fighting for the premium end of it are the ones spending most aggressively online. Velvex, positioned around its ‘X Factor’ performance pitch, is aiming squarely at that premium tier.

Cricket Does the Heavy Lifting

The digital mandate does not exist in a vacuum. It is wrapped around Velvex’s renewed deal as Official Partner of the Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) for the upcoming Indian Premier League (IPL) season, a continuation of the tie-up the brand struck the year before. BigTrunk’s job is to squeeze every match, every player moment and every fan touchpoint for content the brand can ride for weeks.

Vikas Gupta, chief executive of Nandan Petrochem, kept the rationale plain when the renewal was announced: “We are pleased to continue our partnership with Lucknow Super Giants. Strategically, this association is aimed at strengthening our brand visibility and improving recall among consumers.”

Velvex is in familiar company. Cricket has become the default megaphone for an industry that struggles to be interesting on its own merits, and the biggest lubricant names have all bought a seat at the IPL table.

The pattern tells you something about where the value sits. Gulf Oil’s India lubricants and automotive oils business has leaned on its Chennai Super Kings link for more than a decade, treating the team as a year-round brand asset rather than a seasonal logo. Velvex is much earlier in that arc, which is exactly why the digital layer matters: without sustained content, an IPL badge is just a sticker that goes quiet in May.

Where India’s Lubricant Market Sits Now

The market Velvex is fighting in is large, slow-growing and brutally competitive, which is the combination that forces brands to spend on visibility. Volume keeps rising, but only by low single digits a year, so share gains come at a rival’s expense rather than from a growing pie.

• 5.77 billion litres is the projected size of India’s lubricants market in 2026, per research firm Mordor Intelligence, up from 5.60 billion in 2025.
• 2.51 billion litres sat in the automotive lubricants segment in 2025, the slice Velvex competes in most directly.
• 54.15% of category revenue came from automotive end-users in 2025, the largest share of any segment.
• 41.95% of the market is engine oil, the single biggest product line and Velvex’s core.

State-owned giants such as Indian Oil’s Servo, HP Lubricants and MAK dominate volume, with Castrol and Shell holding the premium private ground. That leaves challenger brands like Velvex chasing a premium automotive lubricants segment growing faster than the overall market, where margins are better and brand perception does more of the selling.

Can You Make Engine Oil Worth a Follow?

Here is the catch the cheery agency releases tend to skip. Engine oil is about as low-interest as consumer products get. Nobody follows a lubricant brand for fun, almost nobody talks about one at dinner, and the purchase decision is often made by a mechanic, not the vehicle owner. Building genuine engagement on top of that is hard, and most attempts settle for noise instead.

That is the real test of the BigTrunk mandate. Buying reach through an IPL franchise is the easy half; converting borrowed cricket attention into recall that survives the off-season, and into preference at the counter, is the half that decides whether the spend pays off. The agency has said it will lean on regional nuance and consumer behaviour data to make the content land, which is the right instinct in a country where a fleet operator in Punjab and a two-wheeler owner in Kerala behave nothing alike.

The broader India lubricants market analysis from research house Technavio points to premiumisation and digital-first buyers as the growth engines, which gives a digital push a real target. The question is whether always-on content can move a category where the product is invisible until something goes wrong.

BigTrunk’s Legacy-Brand Track Record

BigTrunk is not a random pick for this kind of job. Founded in 2013 and run out of Mumbai with offices in Delhi, Bengaluru and overseas, the agency has built a client list spanning aviation, financial services, healthcare and industrial names, and it took the Agency of the Year title at the Adgully DIGIXX 2026 awards. Its pitch leans hard on data and on rescuing heritage brands that arrived late to digital.

Velvex fits that template cleanly: a performance product with a loyal trade following, a cricket platform already paid for, and a digital presence that has lagged its ambitions. The mandate covers every market in the country, with the core brand story held constant and campaign executions adjusted by region.

The first real read on whether any of it works comes with the IPL season itself, when the cricket spend and the new content engine finally run at the same time. Until then, the account is a plan on paper.