From campaigns to content: The quiet shift in brand building

The Indian advertising industry used to run on a fairly reliable rhythm back in the day. A brand would build up to a campaign with months of strategy, a big creative idea, a burst of media spend, and then silence. The campaign would run, the awareness metrics would tick, and the brand would retreat to wait for the next season: Diwali, IPL, summer, back-to-school. The calendar ruled everything.

That rhythm is breaking down. Not dramatically, not all at once, but quietly and structurally, brands are shifting from campaign thinking to content thinking. The question is no longer just what to say, but how to keep on saying it, and whether the discipline of always-on storytelling can carry the same weight as a big, singular idea.

The numbers support the trend. According to the Dentsu Global Ad Spend Forecast 2024, digital advertising (where content-led strategies live) now accounts for over 60% of total ad spend globally. In India, the e4m-GroupM report pegged digital's share of total advertising at 38% in 2023, with social and content formats growing fastest. The infrastructure is in place. The question is whether brands are building the right editorial muscle to use it.

The attention economy has rewritten the rules

Suraj Nedungadi, Associate Vice President - Strategy at YAAP, says, "Attention on social media is no longer captured, it is earned. Standalone posts are designed to win a moment, episodic formats are designed to build memory."

The distinction matters. Winning a moment is what a campaign does. Building memory is what a content franchise does. Nedungadi argues that the logic of always-on content rests on three rules: delivering value, creating return behaviour, and building a world rather than just a message. "Brands that repeat the same product promise fade quickly, while brands that build a point of view stay relevant," he says. "Episodic storytelling allows brands to move from what they sell to what they stand for."

The shift is not simply a technological one. It reflects a fundamental change in how attention works. Social media platforms do not reward intermittent presence. Their algorithms favour consistency, return behaviour, and narrative depth. A brand that shows up once a quarter with a polished film is not playing the same game as a brand that shows up every week with something interesting to watch.

Consistency is the hardest part of the brief

If campaigns are sprints, content is a marathon. And most brands are trained as sprinters. Shifting to an always-on model demands not just a different kind of content, but a different kind of organisation.

Nedungadi is candid about the internal tensions this creates: "The hardest part of episodic storytelling is not the idea, it is the commitment. A series demands consistency, rhythm and patience, and the moment a brand breaks that contract with the audience, attention drops off fast." There is also a boardroom problem. When the product is not the hero in every episode, it can feel uncomfortable for leadership. "That restraint is exactly what makes the content work," Nedungadi notes. "The tension between building long-term brand meaning and short-term brand reassurance is where many episodic ambitions quietly die."

Ambika Sharma, Founder and Chief Strategist at Pulp Strategy, a full-service digital agency with deep expertise in performance and content marketing, sees the same pattern play out with IP. "Indian brands are beginning to experiment with long-term IP, but most are still wired to think in campaign cycles," she says. "What has changed is the awareness that bursts of visibility do not compound. However, true IP building requires patience, editorial consistency, and budget commitment across quarters, not just seasons."

The distinction she draws is an important one: the brands that are serious about IP treat it as an owned growth asset, not a content series attached to a launch. "We are seeing early signs of structural shift, but it is uneven. A few category leaders are building properties. Many others are still renaming campaigns as IP."

The Gen Z variable

Layered on top of the content-versus-campaign debate is a more fundamental shift in how audiences (particularly Gen Z) consume and evaluate brands. This cohort does not wait to be advertised to. They research actively, form opinions early, and are deeply resistant to messaging that feels performative or inconsistent.

Lakshay Katyal, India Marketing Lead for Premium and Flagship Phones at Motorola, works in a category where this shift is acutely felt. "Gen Z consumers are smart. They have their own choices. Earlier, we used to market products assuming they might pick this or that. But now, they are much more research-based in their decisions," he says. The proliferation of AI-driven search and recommendation engines has accelerated this. "You don't need to wait for an ad to discover something anymore."

For Katyal, the implication is not that brands should produce more content, but that they should be more precise and consistent in their positioning. "You need to be consistent with one clear thought or one message. You cannot touch the entire world at once. Slowly, you start identifying your right base — where you want to end up and which audience you truly want to serve."

He also raises a dimension that most content strategy discussions underweight: AI optimisation. "Earlier, we started with SEO. Now, it is about optimising for AI engines," Katyal says. "The question is: how do you come up with the best advice or recommendations? If you are consistent in your positioning, you start appearing in the top choices." Content, in this framing, is not just audience-facing; it is training data for the recommendation systems that increasingly mediate brand discovery.

The business case for long-form IP

If the creative argument for always-on content is about memory and brand-building, the business argument is about compounding returns. A campaign delivers awareness in a burst and then fades. A content franchise, if built well, accumulates. The audience grows. The cost per impact drops. The brand becomes something audiences return to voluntarily.

Yasin Hamidani, Director at Media Care Brand Solutions, a media and content consultancy, frames it in terms of asset versus expense: "Multi-season IP lowers the cost of attention over time because the format and audience loyalty already exist. It also delivers repeated touchpoints across the year instead of one burst. When linked to measurable outcomes — community growth, search lift, repeat engagement, branded queries, and lower-funnel conversion support — IP becomes an asset, not an expense."

Sharma puts the financial logic more bluntly. "The business case for multi-season branded content is simple but demanding. It lowers the cost per impact over time because recall compounds. It creates owned audience pools rather than rented impressions. It strengthens brand memory through narrative continuity." But she is careful to flag the conditions under which this logic holds. "Without a clear funnel and monetisation pathway, long-term IP becomes an expensive vanity play."

Hamidani echoes the caveat: the market is still in transition. "A few progressive brands are committing to multi-season creator partnerships, podcasts, or entertainment formats because they want ownership and continuity. But many are still treating IP like a longer campaign by funding one season, then reviewing it like a quarterly tactic. True commitment shows up when brands build formats, not just films, and stay consistent even when results aren't instant."

What this means for the big idea

None of these signals the death of the campaign. The IPL season, Diwali, and major sporting events will continue to demand big, unified, high-impact creative. But the relationship between the big idea and the content pipeline is evolving. The campaign can no longer do the work of building brand meaning on its own. It needs to be embedded in something continuous.

Sharma articulates what this demands of brands structurally: "This is the beginning of a structural shift, but only for brands willing to think like publishers and product builders, not just advertisers. The future belongs to brands that own platforms, not just placements."

That is a significant ask. It requires editorial discipline, budget patience, creative consistency, and the organisational willingness to prioritise long-term equity over short-term reassurance. It requires treating content as infrastructure, not output.

Zomato is one brand that seems to have absorbed this lesson structurally. Its ‘Quick Chats’ series, a run of bite-sized Instagram Reels framed as an office micro-drama, blending workplace banter, food conversations, and self-aware creative chaos, does not feel like advertising. It feels like something you would actually choose to watch. They do not sell the app. They build a world around the brand. This illustrates what it looks like when a brand stops interrupting culture and starts contributing to it.

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Nedungadi's final word is perhaps the most clarifying: "Episodic storytelling is not just a content trend, it is a shift from chasing attention to earning remembrance." For an industry built on the art of interruption, that is a genuinely different brief. And learning to write it, quarter after quarter, without blinking, is the real creative challenge of this decade.