Virality took over brand building in 2025 but 2026 may demand a return to meaning
From fleeting Reels and flash discounts to enduring meaning: why the obsession with short-term metrics is reshaping Indian advertising and why the pendulum might swing back in the year ahead.
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In 2025, India’s advertising landscape increasingly favoured virality over value, metrics over meaning, and short-form performance over emotional storytelling. Across categories- from festive campaigns to influencer-led content and hold-co consolidation, the industry showed how much the drive for reach, rapid attention and speed-to-market had overtaken traditional brand building.
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The consequence: brands are winning eyeballs but increasingly struggling to earn memory and long-term affinity.
1. The Rise of Virality: Attention at Any Cost
In 2025, brands raced not just to be seen, but felt instantly, often at the expense of deeper emotional resonance.
Influencers & the Reels Economy
Marketers leaned heavily into influencer campaigns and short-form social content, chasing likes, shares and reach rather than legacy. Legacy campaigns, jingles and iconic taglines that once entered cultural memory, are fading. As one industry veteran observed, today’s environment “is built for quick traction” where “likes and reach are optimised, not meaning.”
Unilever’s doubling down on influencer and social media spend, allocating up to 50% of global ad budgets to creators, is emblematic of this shift: an investment in speed and impact over traditionally crafted narratives.
But critics note this comes with trade-offs. “We’re renting attention, not owning meaning,” said a CMO, underlining how creator-driven work may spike visibility but not necessarily brand love or recall.
2. Festive Ads: Instant Gratification Over Warmth
The transformation was stark in seasonal marketing too. Diwali campaigns in 2025 looked less like emotional films and more like speed-centric performance pushes.
Speed, Discounts and Meme-Worthy Moments
Swiggy Instamart and Zepto turned Diwali into a race- not for warmth, but for convenience and shareability. Swiggy’s creative celebrated 10-minute delivery of everything from sweets to gold coins, while Zepto’s “Mithai Wars 2025” gamified festive choice, merging politics and confectionery into a memeable punchline.
Even traditional categories- jewellery and comfort footwear foregrounded discounts, speed, and utility over human sentiment. While such work may drive transactions and short-lived buzz, experts had then told Storyboard18 that it reduces festivals to services and savings, sidelining narratives that sit in hearts and cultural memory.
Some defenders argue this is simply evolved storytelling for a faster lives generation, where convenience and emotional connection are not mutually exclusive but the balance is fragile.
3. Media Math & the Creative Squeeze
2025 wasn’t just about short ads; it was also about a broader industry shift where media efficiency and performance metrics became the dominant currency.
Holdco Consolidation and The Data-Driven Pivot
Mega-mergers like Omnicom–IPG accelerated the move toward integrated media and performance stacks at the expense of pure creative agencies. Within holding groups, financial performance, ROI and dashboard metrics began to overshadow creative leadership and storytelling craft.
Industry veterans lamented that advertising had become “efficient but soulless- optimising dashboards, not culture, belief or long-term brand equity.”
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At its worst, this meant creatives felt like “IVR scripts”: perfectly calibrated to hit targets but lacking resonance that makes brands believable, recommendable and memorable.
4. The Cost of Chasing Now
Across these dynamics- influencer focus, speed campaigns, media first strategies, a pattern emerges:
- Short-term gains in attention often came with diminished emotional depth.
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- Performance metrics crowded out long-term branding.
- Cultural narrative gave way to transient formats.
Brands can measure clicks, views and conversions almost instantly. But what’s far harder and slower is measuring brand love, affinity, and recall across years and generations.
5. What 2026 Might Demand: Meaning Meets Metrics
While 2025 was a definitive year for virality and performance optimisation, the industry is beginning to press pause, and ask whether velocity can ever replace meaning.
Experts suggest 2026 will require a more nuanced brand strategy, one that:
- Treats creators as co-architects of meaning, not just distribution channels.
- Balances attention-grabbing content with long-term cultural anchors.
- Uses data to inform creativity, not replace it.
- As one advertising leader put it: dashboards alone don’t build belief, belief later shows up on dashboards.
In an era of algorithmic sameness, creativity, emotionally rooted and culturally memorable may again distinguish brands that matter from those that merely trend.
How ad holdcos consolidation pulling advertising away from creativity and towards media math
That’s the paradox 2026 might embrace: virality and value, performance and purpose, speed and story can coexist but only if balance replaces singular obsession.
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