The content trap: Are brands creating too much and saying too little?

The 73rd Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity wrapped up on the Croisette this week, and India's scorecard reads thinner than in years past. Five Lions: two Silver and three Bronze, against 24 shortlists, a sharp fall from the 14 metals and 28 shortlists the country brought home in 2025 across comparable categories.

Entries from India dropped 31.2% this year, a steeper decline than the 25.5% fall in global submissions. The country drew a complete blank in Direct, Media, PR, Social & Creator and Creative Data, the categories that increasingly define how the world judges integrated, effectiveness-led creativity. Health, audio and craft carried India's flag this year. Everything else stayed quiet.

That quiet has reopened a conversation that the advertising industry circles back to every few months, usually right after a big awards season, and almost always without a clean answer. Brands are putting out more content than ever: reels, shorts, mainline films, social-first cuts, influencer collaborations, platform-specific edits of the same campaign idea stretched six different ways.

Yet the number of campaigns being talked about a year later, the kind that become reference points in pitch decks or case studies, seems to be shrinking. The industry has a phrase for this gap between output and impact, and it is not a flattering one: the content trap.

The numbers explain part of why this is happening. India's advertising market crossed ₹1,55,105 crore in 2025 under the Pitch Madison Advertising Report's expanded AdEx definition, growing 12% over the previous year, with digital now accounting for 60% of all spending. Quick commerce advertising alone scaled from ₹1,325 crore to ₹4,000 crore in a single year, a 202% jump, and MSME digital spending crossed ₹35,814 crore.

Every one of those numbers represents more touchpoints, more platforms and, inevitably, more pieces of content required to fill them. A brand that once made a 30-second television commercial and called it a campaign now needs that same idea cut for Instagram Reels, repurposed for YouTube Shorts, adapted for quick commerce app banners and rewritten for a creator brief, often within the same week.

More platforms, not more ideas

Anadi Shah, National Creative Director, Chief Innovation Officer & Founding Partner at tgthr, frames this less as a crisis of creativity and more as an honest reflection of how fragmented media consumption has become. "Brands now have to be active across multiple platforms. There is mainline advertising, social media, and content. Viewership is distributed across these channels, which means brands need to remain relevant and present wherever their audiences are. That is why you see brands creating so much content and communication today," he said.

Shah is careful to separate volume from value, arguing that what looks like an explosion of output is, in his reading, simply brands following their audiences across a more splintered media landscape rather than diluting their ideas. "However, that does not necessarily mean brands are putting out too many advertising campaigns. The increase in output is largely a reflection of the growing number of platforms and touchpoints," he said.

On the question of whether awards season results, India's thin five-Lion haul this year included, are a fair proxy for creative health, Shah pushes back on treating Cannes as a scoreboard. "When it comes to awards, they cannot be the sole parameter for judging whether a brand is producing good work. Several factors come into play, including jury perspectives and the specific context in which campaigns are evaluated. A campaign winning or not winning from a particular region does not automatically indicate the quality of work being produced there," he said.

Where Shah does draw a hard line is on authenticity of intent. Brands chasing every cultural moment and every festive hook, he argues, end up working against themselves if the connection is not real. "What matters is that the reason behind a campaign is strong and authentic rather than force-fitted. For example, if a brand has no meaningful connection to an occasion such as Raksha Bandhan, creating a campaign around it may not make sense. There needs to be a genuine and credible connection for the communication to resonate," he said.

Brands, in his view, are simply trying to stay inside the consumer's consideration set, whether that means nudging an impulse purchase or keeping a category top of mind, and constant output is the price of staying visible in that race.

Strategy as the filter, not the brake

If Shah's view locates the content surge in media fragmentation, Megha Marwah, Vice President - Strategy at White Rivers Media, locates the real friction point elsewhere, in the gap between what wins at a festival and what survives a client review. "The disconnect comes from different priorities. Juries often reward originality and bold craft designed for global attention, while brands look for work that delivers measurable outcomes in their specific markets. That difference in the lens is where campaigns sometimes fall short commercially," she said.

This is precisely the gap that shows up in India's Cannes numbers this year. The categories where India scored, Audio & Radio, Health & Wellness, Pharma and Film Craft, reward storytelling and craft. The categories where India drew a blank, Direct, Media and Creative Data, reward measurable, effectiveness-led thinking. Marwah's agency, she said, tries to close that gap before a creative idea ever reaches a client's desk rather than defending it after the fact.

"When we present bold ideas, we always root them in the client's business objectives first. The creative is then shown as a lever to drive visibility, engagement, and ultimately sales. By linking the concept to data, insights, or past examples, we position boldness not as a risk but as a calculated way to break through clutter," she said.

Marwah is also candid about where awards sit in that hierarchy internally: useful for morale and reputation, but never a substitute for the numbers a brand actually tracks. "It's a simple filter: what matters most to the client's success. Awards are motivating and help build reputation, but they can't replace measurable impact like sales uplift or brand growth. When the team sees how commercial outcomes strengthen relationships and create long-term value, alignment becomes much easier," she said.

Selling ideas like they are already trending

Ganesh Pareek, Executive Producer, Creative Director & Partner at First December Films, a production house that won many international creative awards including India’s 3rd Film Gold Lions, takes the argument a step further, suggesting the industry's real failure is not in making too much content but in pitching big ideas the wrong way to begin with.

"Cannes Lions celebrates big cultural ideas, originality, symbolism, storytelling that feels timeless. The jury asks: does this surprise me, does it move the craft forward? Clients flip that. Their only filter is: did it sell, did revenue grow this quarter, did it cut through clutter? That's the gap. Cannes equals value creation, sparking stories that shift culture. Clients equal value capture, distribution and consumer action. One side is meaning, the other side is numbers. The reality is, unless you connect the two, it's just art on the wall, nice to look at, but not paying the bills," he said.

Pareek's solution is structural. Rather than presenting a creative idea as a finished film waiting for budget sign-off, he stages it the way it would actually appear in a consumer's feed, building the business case and the cultural hook into the same pitch. "Clients don't buy art – they buy ROI, return on investment. In plain terms: if I put in one rupee, do I get five back? I can't just pitch ideas; I have to stage them like content that already feels alive. Think less deck, more Reel drop or YouTube Shorts; the idea has to play in the room the way it would play in the feed," he said.

He breaks the pitch into layers that move from commercial proof to creative ambition. "I structure it in layers: first sales, ROI, reach, uplift, then creative, memory, trust, culture, then technology, AI tools, creator collabs, amplification engines. Package it like a business case, deliver it with the energy of a trending Reel, and the client doesn't just hear the idea; they feel its inevitability," he said.

On where that leaves awards in the larger scheme of an agency's purpose, Pareek is unsentimental, treating Cannes recognition as a welcome bonus rather than the goal itself. "It's business results, every time. Awards like Cannes Lions are cherries. But brands don't survive on cherries; they survive on cake, sales, trust, market share. I tell my team: bake the cake right, and we'll always have more chances to add cherries later," he said.

That framing, he added, is also what keeps the work from becoming repetitive churn for its own sake. "At my core, I'm a problem solver. Awards are occasional; problems are daily. And that's what I love about this business; there's always another problem to crack. Growth comes from solving problems every day, not wishing for the world to get easier," he said.

What India's five Lions actually say

Set against this debate, India's five wins at Cannes 2026 read less like a verdict on the industry's creative health and more like a snapshot of where strategic clarity and platform fit are still aligning. Leo India's Silver Lion for Sting, ‘The Unofficial Official Sound of F1’, won in the Challenger Brand sub-category of Audio & Radio Lions, a category built specifically around brands punching above their market share through sharp positioning rather than budget.

Colgate's ‘Indianis Dentris’, by The Refinery and Brand David Communications, took Silver in Health & Wellness for Brand-led Education & Awareness, a category that rewards exactly the kind of long-horizon, purpose-anchored thinking Shah and Marwah both describe as harder to force-fit than a topical post.

Ogilvy's ‘Renu vs The City’, for St. Jude India ChildCare Centres, picked up Bronze in Non-Profit Health Education, Advocacy & Fundraising, and Humour Me's ‘Sawaal Uthao’ for Tata 1mg won Bronze in Pharma's Disease Awareness category, both built around sustained behavioural change rather than a single viral moment.

TBWA\Lintas' ‘Don't Look Up’, for client Steadfast, added a Bronze in Film Craft's Script sub-category, a recognition specifically for writing, the part of the process that gets compressed first when output volume goes up and timelines go down. Every one of these five wins came from a category that rewards depth over distribution, which is precisely the territory the Content Trap debate keeps circling back to.

What India did not win is just as telling. The blanks in Direct, Media, PR, Social & Creator and Creative Data point to a structural gap rather than a one-off bad year, particularly given the scale of competition Direct alone drew over 1,300 entries globally. These are categories built around measurable, integrated, platform-native thinking, the exact discipline Marwah and Pareek argue agencies need to bake into a pitch from day one rather than bolt on after the creative is locked. It suggests the industry's strongest muscle right now is storytelling and craft, areas where India has a long-standing pedigree, while the muscle for translating ambitious ideas into measurable, channel-native execution still needs work.

Where this leaves the industry

None of the three voices in this conversation, despite approaching the question from agency strategy, production and craft respectively, argue that brands should simply make less. The consensus, if there is one, is closer to Shah's framing that volume is a function of fragmented media rather than a symptom of weak ideas, paired with Marwah and Pareek's shared insistence that the real fix lies in how strategically every piece of that volume is built, not in how much of it exists. A brand producing fifteen pieces of content a month is not necessarily in worse shape than one producing three, provided each piece can trace back to a clear business reason rather than a calendar slot that needed filling.

Cannes Lions 2026 has, in its own way, made the same argument with numbers. India's wins came concentrated in categories that reward sustained, purpose-led thinking, while the blanks came in categories that reward integrated execution at scale. The lesson the industry seems to be drawing from this festival is not that less content is the answer, but that every piece of it, however small, however platform-specific, needs to justify its own existence. The brands and agencies treating that as a discipline rather than an afterthought are the ones likely to keep finding their way onto a stage, awards season or not.