The new creative brief: Don't just make an ad, create a moment too

The Indian advertiser's oldest anxiety, that the audience has simply stopped watching, has finally forced a rewrite of the brief itself. For years, the industry measured success in reach and recall: in how many eyeballs a 30-second film could hold before the remote moved on or the skip button got pressed.

That currency is losing value fast, according to the EY-Parthenon and BookMyShow report titled ‘Beyond Attention. Into Immersion’, 78% of Indian consumers now say they prefer experiences over products, and 88% of brands that increased experiential spending over the past year plan to continue doing so in a more structured, budgeted manner. India's live events market alone is now estimated at close to ₹13,000 crore, and the same report found that 59% of attendees recall the brands they engaged with on the ground, while 55% report higher purchase intent after interacting with a brand at an event.

The message underneath the data is blunt. With India's overall ad spend growth moderating to between 7% and 12% for 2025, per the Madison Advertising Report 2026, brands are chasing the channels that still deliver outsized attention, and increasingly that channel is a stage, a stadium, or a festival ground rather than a screen.

From impressions to immersion

Globally, the shift is already priced in. Experiential marketing spend touched a record $128.35 billion in 2024, according to PQ Media, and 84% of consumer marketers and 86% of B2B marketers worldwide say they intend to increase event spending through 2026. India's version of the story carries its own texture, shaped by cricket stadiums, music festivals, wedding season crowds and a young, mobile-first population that would rather queue for an experience than scroll past one on a feed.

Rahul Ganjoo, CEO of District by Zomato, the dining and live entertainment platform that has become one of the country's most active stagers of festival and gig partnerships, has watched this shift unfold on the ground and at scale, most recently at Rolling Loud India. His reading of it is that the brand's job on-site has changed entirely, from being seen to being used.

“Live entertainment brand partnerships have fundamentally shifted. It’s no longer about visibility or product placement on-ground; it’s about embedding brands into the experience itself, creating moments that feel native to the event rather than imposed on it. At Rolling Loud India, partnerships were designed around utility and immersion. MakeMyTrip integrated travel and hotel booking directly into the festival ticket purchase flow, solving a real friction point for attendees traveling from Delhi, Pune, and Bangalore. Commute partners like Uber, DriveU, and Navi Mumbai Metro addressed last-mile connectivity on festival day. These weren’t sponsorships in the traditional sense; they were functional enablers that improved the attendee experience,” said Ganjoo.

Beyond solving for utility, the festival turned brand real estate into destinations in their own right. Budweiser's Brew District came with an exclusive viewing deck and a live graffiti wall, Casa Bacardi ran mini parties with mixologists crafting signature cocktails, and the BudX Dankies Skatepark let both professionals and first-timers try their hand at tricks. The Sprite Basketball Court turned casual fans into players for an afternoon, the Liquid IV Pickleball Court introduced a fast-growing sport to a festival crowd, and the Thums Up X-Force Zone delivered the adrenaline hit that hip hop audiences expect. Red Bull's Energy Zone pushed further still, hosting breakdancers battling live in a Dance Your Style format, while the Spotify Rap 91 Zone celebrated local and global rap and Valorant offered its own immersive gaming corner. Harley Davidson ran an on-site Tattoo Shop, Patron built out a Hacienda experience around premium tequila tastings, and BBlunt's Loud Cutz gave attendees fresh cuts on the spot. Every activation, as Ganjoo put it, felt purpose-built for the culture rather than placed within it.

“When storytelling happens live, among fans, in real-time, the craft shifts from controlled messaging to creating spaces where audiences choose to engage. The bar is higher; activations need to feel authentic, add value, and respect the cultural context. Done right, they don’t interrupt the experience; they enhance it,” he said.

When the brief begins with participation

What Ganjoo describes from the ground is now reshaping the brief before a single line of copy gets written. Agencies that once opened a project with a script are increasingly opening it with a question about what the audience will do rather than what they will watch, and that inversion is changing where the creative energy in a building goes.

Sundeep Sehgal, Senior VP and Executive Creative Director at VML India, frames it as a change of canvas rather than a change of craft. “Honestly, nothing has changed - except everything. 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,” he said.

That stretching, in his view, has forced planners and creatives alike to stop thinking in rectangular frames. “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?’ Strangely, 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,” Sehgal said, adding, “A moment is not the enemy of a script. A moment is a script, just written in real time.”

The commercial logic behind that honesty is straightforward enough to explain the budget migration the industry is seeing. “Brands want moments. Because moments generate chatter, fandom, reels, and receipts. They travel faster than films. They feel truer. And they can’t be skipped with a thumb,” he said.

Craft is migrating, not dying

The worry in many creative departments, unspoken but present, is that a shift toward participation-led work will flatten the craft that agencies have spent decades building around film. Sehgal pushes back on that reading directly, arguing that the skill set is not disappearing so much as relocating within the building.

“This shift doesn’t kill craft. If anything, it raises the bar. 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,” he said.

That reframing matters for how agencies staff and price this work. A world-building brief for a three-day festival footprint demands a different bench: spatial designers, sound designers, choreographers of crowd flow, working alongside the copywriters and art directors who once owned the process end to end.

The case for a hub-and-spoke model

None of this is entirely new, and Rohit Mukherjee, Executive Creative Director at TBWA\India, is quick to place the current wave of branded entertainment within a longer lineage rather than treat it as a 2026 invention.

“Long-form storytelling and branded entertainment experiences that go beyond the traditional 30-second spot are not something new. It might be in vogue with increasing digital spends on connected TV than linear TV, but BMW had done it way back in 2001 with the film series ‘The Hire.’ Imagine this when YouTube only came into existence somewhere around 2005,” said Mukherjee.

His prescription for agencies navigating the current moment is structural rather than purely creative. Rather than treating brand experiences and traditional brand communication as competing budgets, he argues for a model where one feeds the other. “In my opinion, the way forward could be a hub-and-spoke model wherein agencies shape the brand narrative by establishing it through foundational brand communication, including traditional formats like the 30-second spot. Collaborations with specialized content partners to develop long-form entertaining pieces can be explored to build on that narrative,” he said.

That collaboration, in his framing, is also where agencies will have to prove their worth against a growing field of specialist content, gaming and live entertainment partners competing for the same experiential budgets. “The most successful branded entertainment experiences will emerge from agencies that can walk both worlds, presenting clients with a cohesive vision that includes a strategic brand narrative alongside compelling long-format plotlines, each justified by clear KPIs focused on tangible outcomes,” Mukherjee said.

Taken together, the view from a live entertainment platform, a global network's creative leadership and an independent agency's creative desk converge on the same point even as each arrives from a different vantage. The ad is no longer the unit of measurement it once was. Recall, participation, dwell time on ground, and the reels an activation generates after the fact are becoming the new scoreboard, and with India's live events economy still building out its measurement muscle, the agencies that learn to plan for participation as rigorously as they once planned for reach are the ones likely to own this decade's most talked-about creative work.