As CTV gains ground, is long-form advertising finding its way back?

For the better part of a decade, the Indian ad film has been on a diet. 30 seconds became 15, 15 became 6, and the vertical frame, the skippable pre-roll and the thumb-stopping hook turned into the house rules of creative departments. Agencies learnt to put the logo up front, clients learnt to count success in 3-second views, and the idea of a film that takes its time began to feel like a luxury from another era.

Now, with connected TV finding its way into more living rooms, and creators and premium content shifting to the big screen, the pendulum is swinging back towards the long-form film that the feed had all but written off. The question doing the rounds in agency corridors and client meetings is whether the hero film, once the crown jewel of a campaign, is about to get its old seat back.

The numbers explain why the conversation is happening now. The Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2025 projected CTV ad spends in India at up to ₹3,000 crore by the end of 2025, a growth of 40% over the previous year, with CTV's share of digital video ad spends rising to 18% from 12% in 2024. Industry estimates put the country's CTV households at over 50 million in 2025. WPP Media's This Year Next Year report expects CTV ad revenue to grow around 22% in 2026 to just under $1 billion, even as overall TV ad revenue slips 1.5% in 2025 to ₹47,740 crore, with linear viewership falling at a mid-single-digit pace.

Put simply, the money is following the audience, and the audience is moving to a screen that rewards craft far more than a 5-inch feed ever could.

A correction, not a comeback
Not everyone is comfortable calling it a return, because some brands never left. Niharika Joshi, CMO, Cumin Co., a cookware and kitchenware brand, prefers a more measured description. "I do think there's a renewed appetite, although I'd call it more of a correction than a comeback. For years we've been cutting stories down to fit the feed, and somewhere along the way we lost the bits that make you feel something before you even know what's being sold," she says.

For Cumin Co., the launch films for Kairi and Shyamal were built around a single film each, because the product is tied to ritual: the heat building, the tadka, the family around the table. "You can't really do that justice in a scroll," Joshi says. What CTV changes, in her view, is the setting. The film finally gets a screen that suits it. That does not mean every idea deserves more seconds, and Joshi is quick to add that the point is to match length to story rather than default to the shortest version. "A 7-minute film isn't automatically more meaningful than a 15-second one. It's about giving an idea room when it actually needs it, and letting shorter formats do what they're good at, like discovery and frequency."

Sini Magon, COO and Global Partner, Grapes Worldwide, an integrated marketing and communications agency, reads the shift as a reason to put the hero film back on the brief. "A bigger screen allows a story to breathe and makes longer-form content more engaging. But it is not about going back to the old way of doing things," she says.

The big screen raises the bar
The shift is also changing the mood in which films get made. Social-first production is an anxious craft, where every frame is planned around stopping a scroll, and that pressure shows up in the work.

Joshi says a living-room viewer changes the equation. "When you're making something for Instagram, you're constantly thinking about how to stop someone's thumb. It's a very anxious way of making things. The big screen takes a lot of that pressure off. Someone's sitting on their couch; they've chosen to watch, so you're not fighting for attention in the same way," she says. A viewer who has settled in and chosen to watch lets directors hold a shot longer, trust the sound design, and leave the voiceover out.

Magon puts it plainly, saying, "While social content has to work quickly, CTV gives you the freedom to take your time, build a narrative, and let the visuals do more of the work."

The freedom comes with a cost, since the bigger canvas shows every shortcut. "You cannot take a social-first asset and scale it up to a 55-inch screen; it exposes everything. Bad lighting or a lazy edit, all show up on a 55-inch screen," Joshi says. For a brand selling cast iron and ceramics, that scrutiny works in the product's favour, because the grain, the glaze and the steam rising off a pot get flattened on a phone but read properly on a television. It also nudges brands and their agency partners to think like filmmakers again. Joshi's rule of thumb is to start big and cut down, rather than shoot vertically and hope it stretches.

Creators and premium content change the room
There is a larger cultural shift behind the craft conversation. Creators and premium content, which built their audiences on phones, are now landing on the same television screens where brand films once lived. That matters for creative agencies, because the viewer sitting in front of a CTV is no longer watching with a leaned-back, ad-tolerant mindset inherited from appointment television, nor with the impatient thumb of a feed. They are in a third mode, choosing what to watch from a wide menu and judging an ad against the production value of the content around it. A hastily stretched social asset now sits next to a high-budget series or a polished creator episode, and the comparison is not flattering.

For creative directors, that is both a threat and an opening. It raises the floor on what counts as acceptable craft, but it also gives long-form ideas a legitimate home, one that does not depend on a festival reel or a prime-time cricket break to be seen.

The film as the spine of the campaign
The revival of the hero film is not a retreat from short-form. The more common model has the film setting the world and the narrative, with cutdowns, stills, reels and creator content flowing out of it. That answers a problem many marketers now admit to, which is a hundred small pieces of content that never add up to a brand.

Joshi says the film is where a brand works out what it is trying to say. "One properly made film isn't a single asset; it's an asset library: the film itself, the cutdowns, the stills, the sound, and more importantly the narrative spine that everything else hangs off," she says. She adds that the economics have moved too, since making thirty disposable social assets is not actually cheaper than making one film well once rework is counted, "and the fact that most of it is invisible within a week."

Magon describes the same architecture from the agency side. "Brands are looking at the hero film as the central storytelling asset, with shorter formats, social content, and creator-led pieces built around it. The approach is less about choosing long-form over short-form and more about using each format to play a distinct role in the larger campaign," she says.

Earning attention on the big screen
A larger screen does not guarantee a captive viewer, and the media side has its own warnings. Shahad Anand, Business Head, Skylight Mediakart, a media and ad-tech platform working across OTT, Connected TV, video, contextual advertising and performance marketing, says consumer behaviour on digital video is predictable, and not in the advertiser's favour. "There are three actions that happen once the ad starts on a digital medium. We wait to skip the ad, we watch the ad, or we pick up another device, and that happens mostly when we are on connected television," he says.

Anand traces the reason to what he calls the three I's: intrusion, interruption, and inevitability. "We feel intruded, we feel interrupted, and till the time I get to skip or the ad finishes, I have to watch it," he says. His answer is to win the opening seconds with personalisation, an irresistible offer, and a call to action. "One-way street never holds attention," he says. He also argues that creative and video have to work as a pair. "Once we have the attention, we move the user from consideration to belief, and that is where the creative, along with the video, works wonderfully well."

Measurement is part of the answer too. Anand points to attention mapping, which shows where a viewer's eyes actually go inside a frame, as a way to tighten the craft. "Whatever we focus on becomes the cause. By controlling the individual elements in the ad, we can ensure that the focus goes up," he says. For agencies, it is a reminder that a longer film has to justify every shot, not just its running time.

Only if there is something to say
For brand custodians, the lesson is that the hero film cannot simply be dropped onto CTV and left to do its work. It has to earn its minutes. A hero film only earns its place if the brand has something to say, and in a new category, where there is a genuine argument to make, it usually does.

Short-form, then, is not going anywhere, and it remains where most people will first meet a brand. What CTV is offering is the chance to give those shorter pieces something to come from; otherwise, it's a bit like having lots of tiny trailers and no big film.