Why brands are learning that not every cultural moment needs a response

Open a brand's social media calendar today, and it reads like a live scoreboard of the internet: a trending audio here, a meme format there, a festival tie-in, a slice of Gen Z slang turned into a caption within the hour. For years, the ad industry rewarded that reflex almost perfectly. The brand that jumped on a cultural moment fastest was celebrated as ‘culturally fluent’. But as the volume of content competing for a single scroll has multiplied several times over, agencies in India are quietly rewriting that instinct. The question clients are being asked today is no longer simply how quickly can we get in. It is whether the brand has any real business being there at all.

The scale of that noise explains why the recalibration is happening now. Creator economy’s ad spend globally is projected to grow 26% year on year to touch ₹37.1 billion in 2025, nearly 4x faster than the broader advertising market, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Creator Economy report. Within that spend, forecasting firm eMarketer expects micro and nano influencers to command 45.5% share of influencer budgets in 2026, up from a market that was once dominated by a handful of mega creators. For brands, that means cultural relevance is no longer about winning one big trending moment. It is about navigating an increasingly fragmented map of niche conversations, and knowing which ones are actually worth a brand's voice.

The cost of chasing every trend

Bharat Subramaniam, Founder and Managing Director of BigTrunk Communications, an independent creative and communications agency, believes the industry has been starting from the wrong question altogether. “The first question should not be how quickly can we react, but why should this brand be in this conversation at all,” he said. “That distinction is becoming increasingly important because the internet rewards speed, while brands are ultimately judged on consistency. A cultural moment is worth entering when there is a genuine intersection between what people are talking about and what the brand has earned the right to talk about.”

He pointed out that a food brand responding to a major food trend makes sense, and a technology brand finding a clever way into a conversation about how people are using technology can work too. “But forcing a brand into a viral internet moment simply because it is trending rarely creates anything beyond temporary visibility,” he said.

That gap between visibility and trust is showing up in how audiences respond to content that feels manufactured for the moment. A 2026 consumer trends study by Klaviyo found that the vast majority of consumers globally are neutral or outright negative when they can tell a brand has used generative AI to produce marketing content quickly, a signal that the very tools making real-time participation easier are also making audiences more sceptical of it.

Bharat framed the bigger risk in similar terms, noting that the pressure to stay visible has created a tendency within the industry to mistake participation for relevance. “When a topic starts dominating social feeds, the instinct can become finding a brand angle first and asking whether the brand belongs much later,” he said. “That is particularly risky around sensitive issues, celebrity controversies or conversations driven primarily by outrage, where a brand can end up looking like it is borrowing attention rather than adding value.”

Relevance over reflex
For Viren Vesuwala, Lead of PR, Communications and Strategic Partnerships at White Rivers Media, a communications and public relations agency, the decision to enter a cultural conversation always comes back to one filter. “It comes down to relevance, not simply reacting to what is trending,” he said. “The first filter is whether a cultural moment has a natural connection with the brand, its audience and what the brand stands for. The question isn't just whether a moment is generating attention, but whether the brand has a credible role to play in it.” In a market as layered as India, he added, that filter needs an additional dimension built in.

India rarely offers one culture to plug into. A trend that lands perfectly in a metro youth feed can mean nothing, or worse, mean something entirely different, to an audience two states away, which is why the agencies doing this well treat cultural fluency as a regional exercise rather than a national one. “In India, that also requires sensitivity to cultural and regional context. Not every moment has the same meaning across audiences, and speed should never come at the cost of understanding the context,” Viren said.

He was equally clear that the temptation to jump in when a conversation is generating attention needs to be resisted more often than the industry admits. “There is certainly a temptation to participate when a conversation is generating significant attention, but relevance shouldn't mean responding to everything,” he said. “If a brand doesn't have a natural connection to the moment or doesn't understand the context, entering the conversation can feel forced and potentially dilute its voice.”

Building for the cohort, not the crowd
Part of what is pushing brands away from chasing every trend is a shift in how younger audiences actually make decisions, and how much brands are having to invest to understand that shift. A 2025 State of Brand Cultural Fluency report by Collage Group, which tracked cultural intelligence across roughly 1,200 brands, found average cultural fluency scores rose 4.5% in the first half of the year compared with the second half of 2024, evidence that more brands globally are treating cultural understanding as a measurable discipline rather than a gut call.

Lakshay Katyal, India Marketing Lead for Premium and Flagship Phones at Motorola, sees that shift playing out closely with Gen Z consumers in India. “Gen Z consumers are smart. They have their own choices,” he said. “Earlier, we used to market products assuming they might pick this or that. But now, they are much more research-based in their decisions. There is so much big data available, especially in AI mode and across platforms, that you can get a lot of information instantly. You don't need to wait for an ad to discover something anymore.”

That research-first behaviour is exactly why chasing every cultural moment has become counterproductive for a brand trying to build a durable relationship with a specific segment. “With Gen Z, you need to be consistent with one clear thought or one message. Everybody will always have choices. You cannot touch the entire world or the entire universe at once,” Lakshay said, explaining why brands increasingly launch tightly differentiated sub-series of products rather than one message for everyone. “Once you get Gen Z insights and understand that this is the segment you need to slightly tweak for another segment, you realise that you have to be specific for different audiences.”

He also flagged a shift in how brands need to earn visibility in the first place, moving from optimising for search engines to optimising for the AI engines Gen Z is increasingly relying on for recommendations. “The question is, how do you come up in the best advice or recommendations. Attention spans are diminishing. Consumers are not waiting for long videos. They simply want the best phone under, say, thirty thousand rupees,” he said. “If you are consistent in your positioning, you start appearing in the top choices.”

That same cohort first thinking is shaping how agencies design for young audiences from the outset, rather than retrofitting a message after the fact. Rahul Arora, who heads Rusk Ads, the brand solutions arm of Rusk Media, a digital news and content platform, argues that talking to Gen Z has to start with the product, not the campaign. “There are certain cohorts that we specifically want to talk to, like Gen Z, and the brands targeting them need to be relevant to that cohort as well. It's not simply about saying, hey, I want to talk to Gen Z. You need to create products that are actually designed for Gen Z,” he said.

He used a familiar category to make the point sharper. “It's like Gillette, right? You want to put a Gillette razor in the hands of a sixteen-year-old so that, by the time he's eighteen and starts shaving, Gillette is already the brand he thinks of. If you own that customer at sixteen or seventeen, you potentially have that lifetime value.” The same logic, he said, is why fintech players now gamify investing for young users before ever asking them to put in real money, building familiarity long before they build a customer base.

Knowing when to stay silent
What ties all of this together is a quieter shift in how agencies define good judgment. It used to be measured by how fast a brand could respond. Increasingly, it is measured by how often a brand knows to hold back. Bharat returned to this point when asked what the harder call actually looks like in a briefing room. “The more useful role for an agency is sometimes to say no, even when there is a seemingly easy engagement opportunity sitting in front of you,” he said. “Silence is not necessarily a missed opportunity. In some cases, it is evidence of judgment. The brands that sustain cultural credibility are not the ones commenting on everything. They are the ones audiences can predictably trust to have something worth saying when they do speak.”

That scoreboard of trending audios, memes and festival moments is not going to slow down, and the pressure on brands to show up somewhere on it will not either. But the agencies steering that decision-making are increasingly comfortable telling clients that showing up everywhere is not the same as mattering anywhere.

The brands earning genuine cultural credibility in India right now are not the loudest ones in every feed. They are the ones that have figured out, moment by moment, exactly where they belong, and just as importantly, where they don't.