Are brands designing ads for algorithms more than humans?

Open Instagram, scroll for thirty seconds, and count how many ads begin with a jarring sound cue, a fast cut, or a talking head who opens with the phrase, "You won't believe this." The hook is no longer a creative choice; it has become a platform requirement. In an era where the average viewer decides within the first two seconds whether to keep watching, the pressure on brands to engineer attention has never been more acute. The question is whether, in that race to stop the scroll, the industry has quietly stopped telling stories altogether.

This is not a hypothetical concern. According to a 2023 WARC report on the state of digital effectiveness, over 60% of brand advertising on social media fails to generate meaningful recall. Not because it is poorly made, but because it is designed to perform within a content feed, not to live in memory. Formats change by quarter, hooks age in weeks, and trends that feel urgent on a Tuesday are embarrassing by Friday. The shelf life of algorithmically optimized content is shrinking even as the investment behind it grows.


The creative-media divorce

At the heart of this conversation is a structural fault line that has widened over the past decade: the separation of creative and media functions within the agency ecosystem. When media buying was consolidated away from full-service agencies into specialized shops, the people writing the briefs lost their proximity to the people reading the data. The creative team no longer sat next to the media planner. And as platform algorithms became increasingly complex, that distance began to show in the work.

Dr. Sandeep Goyal, Managing Director of Rediffusion Brand Solutions, puts the problem plainly. "Most brands genuinely struggle to design ads for algorithms. Creative agencies have been divorced from media agencies for so long that the proximity simply isn't there anymore. Creative agencies have no real idea how to master the algorithm," he says.

The implication is direct: the conversation about algorithm-first creativity may be premature because the craft infrastructure to pursue it systematically does not yet exist on the creative side. "The ads are not designed for algorithms. The media plans may be designed for the algorithms," Goyal adds.

This matters because it shifts the axis of accountability. If media agencies are the ones interpreting and responding to platform signals, then the creative product being served is not algorithm-driven so much as algorithm-distributed. The ad gets placed where the data says it should go, but it is not necessarily built around how a platform rewards content. That gap between distribution logic and creative logic is where the industry's identity crisis currently lives.


Earning attention, not just stopping thumbs

For practitioners who work closer to the platform coalface, the challenge is less about algorithms and more about a fundamental rethink of what value advertising is expected to deliver.

Suraj Nedungadi, Associate Vice President - Strategy at YAAP, a content-first creative and technology company, frames the shift in terms of a new contract between brand and audience. "Attention on social media is no longer captured; it is earned," he says. "The first rule is that you need to deliver value. Audiences will only invest time if they receive something in return, whether that is laughter, insight, nostalgia or inspiration." Nedungadi describes the old playbook as one built on interruption and the new one as built on entertainment. It’s a distinction that sounds simple but requires a wholesale rethink of the brief. He goes further to argue that the brands with the longest staying power are not those that repeat a message, but those that build a world. "World-building over message-building. Brands that repeat the same product promise fade quickly, while brands that build a point of view stay relevant."

This worldbuilding idea is increasingly visible in how some Indian brands are approaching their digital presence: building recurring characters, episodic content, and community-led narratives that reward continued engagement rather than demanding passive reception. It is a more expensive and more patient approach, and it runs against the quarterly cadence of most marketing plans. But the brands that have committed to it (whether through branded entertainment or consistent creative IPs) tend to accumulate the kind of cultural equity that no single viral moment can manufacture.


You cannot spreadsheet your way into a 19-year-old's heart

Perhaps no market better illustrates the limits of algorithmic prediction than India. The country's cultural geography is vast, fragmented, and deeply local. A single state can contain multitudes of language, aspiration, and humour that resist flattening into a behavioural signal.

Jeel Gandhi, CEO of Under25, a youth media and culture platform, is unconvinced that data alone can crack the code of Indian youth culture. "Everyone is obsessed with finding a magic algorithm to predict the next big thing. But catching cultural virality in India isn't like solving a math equation. It is more like trying to catch lightning in a bottle," she says. "You just cannot spreadsheet your way into the heart of a 19-year-old in Indore."

Jeel's argument is not anti-data. It is a case for the irreducible value of on-ground intuition. "The future has to be a hybrid of data and on-ground intuition. In India, virality is not a formula. It is a feeling. And honestly, feelings are still running laps around the algorithms. So, in a world of predictive math, the most viral thing you can be is human."

This intuition gap is particularly significant in a country where meme cycles, regional humour, cricket moments, and Bollywood references combine in ways that no algorithm trained on global consumption data can reliably anticipate. The brands that have broken through in India's youth market in recent years have typically done so not through precision targeting but through cultural fluency: an ability to read the room that is built through relationships, not dashboards.


Familiarity as a feature, not a failure

There is a more nuanced view emerging among practitioners who work at the intersection of brand strategy and platform content. One that resists both the reflexive embrace of algorithm-first thinking and the nostalgic rejection of it. The more honest assessment is that platform logic and creative originality are not mutually exclusive, but they require a more sophisticated relationship than the industry currently has with either.

Ambika Sharma, Founder and Chief Strategist of Pulp Strategy, a performance-led creative agency known for its work across digital brand building and content marketing, describes how algorithms actually function as curators, not arbiters of taste. "Platforms today largely reward recognizable behavioural patterns because algorithms are trained on consumption signals, not artistic merit. Familiar hooks, visual structures, pacing, and edits get distributed faster because audiences already understand how to consume them," she says. But Sharma is careful not to treat this as a creative death sentence. "Originality still matters. The difference is that originality now has to arrive within recognizable formats. Completely unfamiliar storytelling struggles to scale unless there is exceptional emotional or cultural resonance. The brands winning today are not blindly copying internet culture. They are interpreting it through a distinct brand voice."

Yasin Hamidani, Director at Media Care Brand Solutions, a full-service media and brand communication agency, echoes this with a precision that is worth sitting with. "Platforms reward familiarity first because recognizable formats reduce friction for audiences scrolling quickly. Trends, edits, hooks, and recurring styles help algorithms identify behaviour patterns faster. But originality still matters — it's just expressed differently now," he says. "The content that truly breaks through usually takes a familiar format and adds an unexpected emotional, cultural, or storytelling layer. Pure imitation gets views temporarily; distinctiveness is what builds memory over time."


The brief has changed, but the fundamentals haven't

What emerges from this conversation is not a clean answer but a productive tension. The algorithm is real, it is consequential, and ignoring platform behaviour is commercially irresponsible. But the deeper truth is that the algorithm rewards what human beings respond to. And human beings, ultimately, respond to meaning.

The most sophisticated advertisers are not choosing between the algorithm and the human. They are treating platform logic as a constraint, the way an earlier generation treated the thirty-second TVC format as a constraint, and finding the creativity within it. A hook that works in two seconds can still lead somewhere worth going. A recognizable format can still carry an original idea. The brief has changed, but the brief has always changed. What has not changed is the expectation that, somewhere inside the content, there is something a person will actually remember.