Ketan Shivadekar, Creative Director at AGENCY09, looks at how the growing volume of content and the rise of generative AI are reshaping advertising, and why creating something memorable remains the harder and more important creative challenge.
Aisa jod lagaye ki…
Hema, Rekha, Jaya aur Sushma, sabki…
Buland Bharat ki buland…
Kuch khaas hai hum sabhi mein…
Thanda matlab…
Did you complete any of those lines in your head?
Maybe you even sang one.
Now let us try the reverse.
Mentos.
Chlor-mint.
Tata Sky.
Did Dimaag ki batti jala de, Dobara mat poochhna or Isko laga dala toh life jhingalala immediately pop into your mind?
That is the power of memorable advertising.
Sometimes a line brings the brand to mind. Sometimes the brand brings back the line. At some point, the ad stopped being something you saw and became something you carried.
Some of these campaigns are decades old.
Now think about the advertising you saw last week.
How many ads did you see?
Instagram, YouTube, TV, websites, OTT, influencers, reels. Everything fighting for your thumb. Probably hundreds.
Sometimes a line brings the brand to mind. Sometimes the brand brings back the line. At some point, the ad stopped being something you saw and became something you carried.
How many do you remember?
More importantly, how many brands do you remember?
That is the strange place advertising finds itself in today.
We are making more of it than ever before.
And we remember less of it than ever.
This is not an old advertising-was-better argument.
It would be convenient to look at Fevicol, Nirma, Bajaj, Cadbury or Coca-Cola and conclude that advertising was better then.
It was also a very different media environment.
Fewer channels. Fewer brands fighting for attention. Campaigns ran longer. Ads repeated more. Families watched together. A popular commercial could become part of culture. That is harder now.
So yes, those campaigns had advantages.
But that does not explain why some still live in our heads, years after the ads stopped running.
Plenty of advertising from the same period disappeared completely.
The ones we remember left something behind.
A phrase.
A tune.
A character.
A behaviour.
A visual.
A joke.
A way of speaking.
Something belonged to the brand.
Once it entered memory, we carried it for them.
Advertising has become publishing.
Today, the demands on brands are very different.
There is always something that needs to go out.
A reel.
A topical.
A story.
An influencer collaboration.
A product post.
A performance creative.
A festival post.
A ten-second video.
Another version of the ten-second video.
The same video in three languages.
And naturally, something for tomorrow.
The content calendar never stops eating.
Over time, this changed one of the most important questions in advertising.
We used to ask:
What should the brand say?
Increasingly, we ask:
What are we posting tomorrow?
Those sound like similar questions.
They are not.
One begins with meaning.
The other begins with inventory.
Content asks what can we make today.
Brand building asks what should people remember tomorrow.
Both matter. The problem is when we treat them as the same.
Then AI arrived.
Generative AI did not create our appetite for content.
It simply removed many of the barriers that were slowing us down.
Until recently, making fifty different films required money, crews, studios, directors, editors, musicians and a considerable amount of time.
Today, one person sitting in front of a computer can generate images, write scripts, create music, animate characters, build voices and produce multiple versions of an idea before the traditional production process has finished discussing the estimate.
It is extraordinary.
For someone who works in creativity, it is difficult not to be fascinated by what these tools make possible.
But abundance brings a new problem.
When making things is easy, making more is not an achievement.
Making something worth remembering is the achievement.
And this is where things get interesting.
Infinite possibilities. Strangely familiar results.
Look at enough AI-generated advertising and a curious pattern begins to appear.
The impossible camera movement.
The object transforming into another object.
The glossy hyperreal world.
The dramatic product reveal.
The surreal transition.
The perfect face.
The cinematic lighting.
The visual is impressive.
Then you scroll.
Another impressive visual.
Then another.
Somewhere between the tenth and twentieth spectacular post, spectacle becomes ordinary.
We were given technology capable of creating almost anything imaginable.
How did we end up making so much that feels the same?
It is easy to blame AI.
That is not fair.
AI works with what already exists.
But so do we.
We feed it reference films, trending aesthetics, popular campaigns, Pinterest boards and prompts filled with descriptors like cinematic, premium, hyperreal and epic.
We ask a machine to create something new by carefully describing things we have already seen.
Perhaps AI is not creating sameness.
It may be revealing how dependent advertising had already become on references.
Beauty is now cheap.
This is one of the most significant creative shifts AI is creating.
For a long time, beautiful execution itself had value because beautiful execution was difficult.
You needed photographers.
Directors.
Production designers.
Editors.
Illustrators.
Composers.
Specialists with years of craft.
That craft still matters. But now, anyone can enter.
A reasonably skilled person with the right tools can now produce an image that would have required a substantial production budget a few years ago.
So beauty alone cannot set you apart.
Neither can spectacle.
Neither can the fact that something looks expensive.
When everyone can make extraordinary-looking things, they stop being extraordinary.
So the value moves elsewhere.
Towards the idea.
Towards judgement.
Towards cultural understanding.
Towards restraint.
Towards taste.
Towards knowing what not to make.
And, most importantly, towards distinctiveness.
The real lesson from the old ads is not nostalgia.
The lesson from Nirma is not that every brand should write a jingle again.
The lesson from Fevicol is not that every brand needs comedy.
The lesson from Cadbury is not that every campaign should become emotional.
The lesson is simpler than that.
Those brands created memory structures.
They repeatedly gave people something recognisable enough to belong to them.
You could remove the logo and still know who was speaking.
That is an extraordinarily high creative standard.
Now try the same test with a large amount of contemporary advertising.
Remove the logo.
Could it be a competitor?
Could the same reel belong to five different brands?
Could that influencer be promoting almost anything?
Could the AI-generated film end with another logo and still make perfect sense?
If the answer is yes, the advertising may be beautifully produced.
But it has not built memory for the brand.
We measure almost everything except what stays.
Modern advertising gives us extraordinary amounts of data.
Views.
Clicks.
Completion rates.
Engagement.
Shares.
Watch time.
Conversions.
Reach.
Impressions.
We know exactly how many people saw something.
But being seen is not being remembered.
A piece of content can receive millions of views and leave almost nothing behind.
Someone watched.
Someone smiled.
Someone scrolled.
The brand vanished with the swipe.
Of course, not every piece of communication needs to become part of popular culture.
Some content exists to sell today.
Some exists to explain.
Some exists to respond.
Some exists because the algorithm needs feeding.
That is fine.
But brands also need communication that builds memory for tomorrow.
The danger is when everything is content, and nothing gets enough time or consistency to become advertising people carry.
AI is not the problem. Sameness is.
I would rather not turn this into another warning about machines stealing creativity.
AI is one of the most exciting creative tools we have received in years.
It can allow smaller teams to attempt bigger ideas.
It can democratise production.
It can make experimentation cheaper.
It can help us explore things that previously died with the words, the budget will never allow it.
That should make advertising more creative.
But only if we use AI to bring distinctive ideas to life, not expect it to provide the distinctiveness.
There is a difference between using AI to make an idea, and using AI as the idea.
The first can be powerful.
The second is already becoming familiar.
Soon, nobody will care that your film used AI.
Just as nobody watches an advertisement today and marvels that it was edited digitally.
The technology will fade.
The idea will remain.
Or it will not.
Perhaps we need a different creative test.
Before releasing another film, reel, post or AI experiment, we should ask a few uncomfortable questions.
Could another brand run this?
What remains after the logo disappears?
Is there something here that only this brand can own?
If we create fifty versions, what stays consistent across all fifty?
Are we making another post, or building an asset?
Would the idea still be interesting without the production technique?
And the simplest question of all:
What will somebody remember tomorrow?
Because twenty years ago, an advertiser managed to put half a sentence into our heads.
Aisa jod lagaye ki…
They do not even need to finish it anymore.
We do it for them.
Today, we can create a hundred films before lunch.
That is progress.
But the real challenge is not making a hundred.
It is making the one that, years from now, somebody else will still know how to finish.
