The intention gap: What separates honest minimalism from a lazy brief?

There is a certain kind of ad often running across Indian screens that seems almost embarrassed to be an ad. It skips the swelling background score, the rehearsed monologue about life-changing benefits, or the three-act emotional arc that television spots have relied on for decades. Instead: a set, a line, a beat, and it is over.

Walk into any creative floor in Mumbai, Bengaluru or Gurugram this season and you will hear the same word used to describe the shift: ‘Minimalism’. Whether that word is doing justice to what is actually happening on screen, or providing convenient cover for what is not, has become the argument currently splitting the country's creative community down the middle.

The irony is that this aesthetic of less is unfolding against a backdrop of considerably more. Per the Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2026, India's total advertising expenditure, under an expanded ADEX definition, touched ₹1,55,105 crore in 2025 and is projected to climb to ₹1,74,605 crore in 2026, a rise of 12 to 13%, with digital's share of that pie expected to move from 60% to 64% over the same period. Money, in other words, is not the constraint it was during the pandemic years. What has changed is where that money goes, and what agencies believe it should be spent on. Budgets for individual executions are being trimmed even as overall spends grow, a redistribution that has quietly reshaped the grammar of the ad itself.

The trend has genuine roots, and they predate any spreadsheet. After years of over-produced, claim-heavy advertising, consumers, particularly younger, digital-native audiences, grew visibly fatigued with spectacle. The instinctive response from brands and agencies was to strip things back, be real, and let the product speak for itself, but what followed was a quiet but significant shift in the grammar of Indian advertising. That shift has now touched everything from fintech launches to FMCG campaigns to the increasingly crowded battlefield of IPL season commercials.

The un-ad and its discontents

Few campaigns captured this moment as precisely as CRED's celebrity films, which dismantled the endorsement format altogether, replaced familiar sincerity with absurdist wit, and made the strangeness itself the craft. The category took note immediately. What followed, however, was a wave of imitation that missed the point entirely, mistaking the surface texture of CRED's ads for the thinking that produced them.

Abhijat Bharadwaj, Chief Creative Officer at Dentsu Creative Isobar, puts the misreading down to a basic confusion between format and formula. “The ‘un-ad’ isn’t new. Agencies have been trying to make ads that don’t look like an ad for years. CRED genuinely cracked it. The absurdity was the craft. They stripped the celebrity endorsement format bare and replaced it with something sharper and stranger,” he says. “The problem is, CRED’s success gave everyone permission to try the same thing, and most took the wrong lesson. They saw ‘celebrity being casual on set’ and thought that was the formula. It wasn’t. The formula was the thinking.”

That confusion is visible across dozens of campaigns airing right now. The format survives intact, a recognisable celebrity, an undressed set, a candid register, but the animating intelligence behind it has frequently gone missing.

Strip away the hard sell without replacing it with anything sharper, and what remains is not an un-ad. It is simply an unfinished one.

When the product does the talking

Nowhere has the distinction between earned simplicity and borrowed aesthetic been tested more publicly this year than in super.money's IPL campaign featuring Salman Khan. Conceptualised by Tilt Brand Solutions and directed by Ayappa KM, the 'No Drama, Only Cashback' series places Khan on a bare set, has him deliver a single line, and shrugs off any further theatre with a now-familiar sign-off: "Lo bol diya."

A later film in the series pushes the device further, with Khan fumbling the brand name into "Superman" and waving the slip away, a meta-wink at the very conventions the campaign is rejecting. As per TAM Sports' IPL 19 Advertising Report, television ad volumes during the tournament actually rose 2% over the same period last season, which means super.money's restraint is not a retreat from the arena. It is a deliberate bet that quieter creative can still cut through a louder field.

The campaign works, industry watchers argue, because its simplicity is earned rather than borrowed. super.money's proposition, real cashback with no hidden conditions, is itself uncomplicated, and the creative mirrors that honestly. Form and content are in alignment, and that alignment is precisely what separates intentional minimalism from the kind that merely apes its look.

Reminder ad or real idea?

The same question, dressed differently, runs through the industry's other big minimalism debate: whether doing more with less produces sharper ideas or merely thinner ones. The Heinz Ketchup 'Look Familiar?' campaign is frequently cited as evidence for the former. The ad showed French fry boxes around the world echoing the shape of the Heinz logo, with no celebrity, no elaborate set, nothing beyond a shape and a wink. It was clever. Whether cleverness alone qualifies as creative ambition is a separate question.

Sumanto Chattopadhyay, former Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy South Asia, is not entirely convinced. “The Heinz ad reinforces branding to some extent and tells us that the product is consumed everywhere. I don’t think it went beyond that,” he says. “We refer to hoardings as a reminder medium. This was akin to that, a reminder ad. It’s functional, but does it create brand love? Does it have appetite appeal? I’m not too sure about that.” His larger worry is about what gets lost when efficiency becomes the only creative virtue. “It’s a great idea to do more with less, especially in the era of ‘always on’ social media. But unless you also create memorable hero pieces from time to time that transcend the mundane, your brand will lose its sheen.”

Chattopadhyay's distinction matters because it separates two things the industry keeps conflating: minimalism as an aesthetic and minimalism as an excuse. Amul's decades-long print run is instructive here, minimal design, hand-illustrated topical humour, zero production fuss, and arguably the sharpest wordplay in Indian advertising, and yet it remains one of the most culturally embedded campaigns the country has produced.

Fevicol's long-running print and film series works on a similar principle: a single visual joke, a tight tagline, craft so invisible it looks effortless. In both cases the restraint is not the absence of thinking. It is the result of it.

A budget decision dressed as philosophy

The risk the industry keeps circling back to is that "minimal" has quietly become a hiding place. A brief says keep it simple, the execution turns out thin, and nobody questions it because the trend already has a name attached. Simplicity is ironically one of the hardest registers to get right. A well-made minimal film behaves like a well-made short story, where every beat is doing work. A poorly made one behaves like an unfinished email, abandoned halfway through.

Aman Gupta, Head of Marketing at Farmley, the D2C healthy snacking brand, frames the test in terms of intention rather than output. “A deliberately minimal ad still has a point of view. It knows what it’s leaving out and why,” he says. “The silence in it is deliberate, like a pause mid-sentence that makes the next word hit harder. You feel the restraint. You sense that someone made a decision, not a compromise. A half-baked ad, on the other hand, has absence without purpose. The silence isn’t dramatic, it’s just empty.”

Gupta’s internal filter at Farmley is blunt by design: can the team articulate what the creative is choosing not to say, and why. “If the answer is a confident ‘we chose to strip this back because the product speaks for itself,’ that’s a creative decision,” he says. “If the answer is a shrug, that’s a budget decision dressed up as philosophy.”

Constraint as creative accelerant, not a cut

Layered on top of this creative debate is a structural one. Shrinking per-execution budgets and the arrival of AI tools into ideation, scripting and pre-visualisation have changed the rhythm at which agencies work, and not always in the direction feared two years ago. The early anxiety, that automation would hollow out craft, is giving way to a more specific argument: that speed, used well, buys creative teams more time to interrogate the idea rather than less.

Priyank Dattani, Associate Creative Director at White Rivers Media, a Mumbai-headquartered independent digital creative agency, has watched that shift from inside the production process. “Doing more with less can sharpen ideas because constraints force you to focus on the emotional core of a story rather than decorative flourishes,” he says. “We’ve seen campaigns where a single, simple insight, executed honestly, outperforms a high-gloss spot that tries to do everything.” On AI specifically, his read is equally unsentimental, as he says that “AI is not about replacing intuition, it’s about accelerating iteration so human judgment gets to the interesting questions faster. That often leads to cleaner, more purposeful executions because we can test tone and format quickly and stop the stuff that doesn’t land.”

Dattani is careful to draw a line, though, one that echoes almost exactly what Gupta and Bharadwaj describe from the client and agency side respectively. “There’s a real risk if cost-cutting becomes the brief,” he says. “You lose craft, you shortcut testing, and the work starts to feel recycled. The sweet spot is disciplined constraint: protect the idea and the craft that lifts it, cut what’s showy, not what’s essential.”

Three sources, three vantage points, converging on the same fault line: constraint sharpens work only when it is chosen, and dulls it the moment it is merely imposed.

That fault line is likely to define the next few seasons of Indian advertising more than any single campaign will. The market itself is not shrinking, PMAR's numbers make that clear, and neither is the appetite for attention during tentpoles like IPL, where ad volumes are still climbing even as the tone of the advertising softens. What is shrinking is patience for spectacle without substance, and tolerance for restraint used as an alibi rather than an argument.

The ad that opens this piece, the one that refuses to look like an ad, is not inherently better or worse than the ad it replaced. It simply asks a harder question of the people who made it: are you saying less because you have said everything that matters, or are you saying less because you ran out of things to say? Increasingly, in a market flush with spend but thin on patience, audiences are working out the difference on their own.