From watching to participating: The new creative playbook

For decades, the biggest creative swing an agency could take was a campaign film. The brief was familiar: distill the brand truth into 30 seconds, cast it well, shoot it beautifully, and let media buying do the rest. That template is now being rewritten on the ground, quite literally, as concerts, festivals, pop-ups, and creator collaborations pull a growing share of marketing budgets away from the edit suite and into live, physical spaces where consumers don't just watch a brand story; they walk through it.

India's live-entertainment economy has given this shift real scale. The country's live events market is valued at approximately ₹17,000 crore in 2025, and experiential formats are increasingly treated as a full-funnel growth lever rather than a top-of-funnel afterthought. A joint EY-Parthenon and BookMyShow CMO survey found that 56% of surveyed brands executed an experiential marketing activation in the past year, and among those who did, 88% plan to continue investing in a structured, planned format. More tellingly, 56% of active brands expect their experiential budgets to grow by more than 30% in the coming cycle, with incremental spend often being pulled directly from traditional ATL and digital media pools.

The intent signal from consumers is just as sharp: 78% of Indian consumers say they would rather spend on experiences than products, and post-event surveys conducted across shows including Ed Sheeran, Guns N' Roses, and Travis Scott's India tour recorded 59% brand recall and a 55% uplift in purchase intent among attendees who interacted with a brand on-ground. When Travis Scott played Delhi, close to 100,000 tickets sold out within minutes, a scale of intent that campaign films rarely generate on their own.

This is the backdrop against which India's creative leadership is now recalibrating what "good work" even means.

Culture first, not campaign first

Sandipan Bhattacharyya, Chief Creative Officer at Monks India, a global marketing, technology and data-led agency, frames the shift as a change in creative posture rather than just format. "Creatively, branded entertainment needs to be 'culture-first' while still ensuring the brand message is integrated seamlessly. That requires sharp creative strategy followed by loads of craft in storytelling," he says. Bhattacharyya is careful to draw a line between how such work should be evaluated and how it should be conceived. "Of course, clients are better suited to deliberate on ROI, but you can't approach branded entertainment with the mindset of a performance campaign! It's usually driven by the ambition to make something epic that strengthens brand preference and love."

That distinction matters because it reframes the creative brief itself. A performance campaign is engineered backward from a metric; branded entertainment, in Bhattacharyya's telling, has to be engineered forward from cultural relevance, with commercial return following rather than leading the idea. The EY-Parthenon findings back this instinct up with hard numbers: brands cite "shifts in consumer behaviour towards experiences" as the single biggest driver of increased experiential investment, cited by 78% of respondents, ahead of internal positioning shifts and even ROI comparisons with traditional marketing. In other words, the market is already telling agencies that culture, not conversion, is the entry point.

Where Bhattacharyya locates the shift in ambition, Sundeep Sehgal, Senior Vice President and Executive Creative Director at VML India, locates it in the mechanics of the brief itself. "Honestly, nothing has changed, except everything," he says. "The canvas has shifted, but the instinct remains the same. Earlier, we were squeezing big feelings into 30 seconds. Now we're stretching them across a football field, a three-day festival, or a five-minute creator handshake moment." For Sehgal, the practical consequence is that the opening question in any creative process has to change. "When budgets move from films to experiences, the idea can't begin with 'What's the script?' It must begin with 'What's the participation?'"

The craft has migrated, not disappeared
There is a reasonable worry, voiced quietly across agency floors, that this move towards live and participatory formats comes at the cost of craft, that spectacle is replacing storytelling. Sehgal rejects that framing outright. "This shift doesn't kill craft. If anything, it raises the bar," he says. "Craft in this era is not disappearing; it's migrating. From the edit bay to the experience floor, from dialogue writing to designing emotional choreography, from storytelling to story-structuring, from art direction to world-building. A film is craft on a screen, and an experience is craft in 360 degrees. Different tools, same soul."

This is where the EY-Parthenon report's "experiential impact pyramid" becomes a useful lens for what agencies are actually building now. The framework moves brands from audience insight and narrative clarity, through participation and phygital integration, to long-term cultural ownership, essentially formalising what Sehgal describes as craft migrating downstream from script to structure. It also explains why the report's brand case studies read less like campaign credits and more like systems design.

RuPay, for instance, identified that in high-intensity festival environments, comfort itself becomes a form of privilege, and built "Lolla Comfort by RuPay" at Lollapalooza India as an access-led relief zone rather than a branded stage; the intervention delivered a 61% uplift in likelihood to purchase among activated consumers. H&M, similarly, treated its Lollapalooza presence not as sponsorship signage but as "The Sound of Style," an immersive fashion runway and backstage viewing deck, which drove 91% brand recall and a 58% lift in purchase likelihood among engaged attendees. Neither example has a script in the conventional sense. Both have unmistakable creative architecture.

Sehgal's larger point is that live formats strip away the safety nets that filmmaking offers. "In a strange way, the return of 'live' has made creativity more honest because you know immediately whether the idea works or falls flat. There's no edit button, no background score to rescue you. A moment is not the enemy of a script. A moment is a script, just written in real time." He adds that brands are chasing this precisely because moments outrun films in cultural velocity: "They travel faster than films. They feel truer. And they can't be skipped with a thumb."

The agency pitch is being rewritten
Suraj Nedungadi, Associate Vice President, Strategy at YAAP, a digital-first marketing agency working across categories including fintech, gaming and consumer brands, situates the same shift within a broader argument about the brand-consumer relationship. "The core principle driving this is simple yet profound: communication is not a transaction; it's a relationship," he says. "Modern consumers have an acutely strong 'BS detector' and are saturated with transactional advertising. They know when they're being advertised to, and their attention has become the most valuable, and scarce, resource."

Nedungadi's framing dovetails with a structural insight from the EY report itself, that Indian brands must build recurring, ownable cultural properties rather than one-off activations, citing examples such as Bacardi's long-running association with NH7 Weekender and Diageo's McDowell's Soda Yaari Jam, which scaled from engaging 50,000 consumers across five cities in its first edition to a projected 15-city, 100,000-plus consumer footprint.

For agencies, Nedungadi argues, this is forcing a pivot away from pitching standalone thirty-second scripts towards pitching durable ecosystems. "Instead of focusing on a single 30-second script, the new agency pitch centres on creating long-term, scalable IPs, like a recurring festival or a content series, that can sustain a 365-day conversation," he says, adding that such platforms generate "invaluable first-party data and an organic owned content pipeline." He is also unambiguous about what this does to the creative director's job description. "The 'Creative Director' evolves from a master storyteller of fiction to a master orchestrator of reality. The core craft skills now revolve around spatial design, physical UX, community management, and event technology integration."

What emerges from all three vantage points (cultural ambition from Bhattacharyya, migrated craft from Sehgal, and relationship-first strategy from Nedungadi) is not a rejection of storytelling but its redistribution. The campaign film is not dead; it is one tool among several, sitting alongside festival platforms, creator collaborations and phygital activations that Indian audiences increasingly rate as more memorable, more shareable and more trustworthy than a polished thirty-second edit. As Nedungadi puts it, brands are "prioritising memorable moments over memorable scripts," and the agencies that win the next cycle of pitches will likely be the ones that have already stopped thinking in rectangular frames.