In the age of Reels and memes, who controls creative decisions today?

New Delhi: Before debating meme culture, shrinking attention spans, or whether purpose-led storytelling still works, a more uncomfortable question sits at the heart of advertising’s current moment: who is actually taking the call today, the brand or the creative agency?

Creative decisions are no longer made in isolation. They’re shaped by platform incentives, performance dashboards, shrinking timelines, and an unrelenting demand for speed. What looks like creative fatigue is often a leadership problem or a diffusion of responsibility where brands want certainty, agencies want safety, and neither wants to be wrong in public. The result is work that feels optimised rather than authored.

The feed moves faster than the boardroom

Joel James, Co-founder and Chief of Innovation at Studio Blo, zoomed out to the cultural shift underway.

“We don’t live in a mass-media era anymore. TV and radio don’t drive culture. Instagram does. Reels did that. Now everything is louder, faster, and way more competitive. Culture today rejects perfect. Raw beats polished. Real beats prim-and-proper. People would rather watch something messy and honest than something that feels rehearsed,” James argued.

That speed, he noted, often pushes brands and agencies toward sameness because virality feels safer than depth. “Brands are genuinely trying, but the pressure is insane. They’re not just competing with other brands anymore; they’re competing with creators and influencer-led brands who speak the language of the feed natively. You have five seconds, and you’re sharing that moment with a hundred others. Virality feels safer than depth.”

That pressure, James argued, isn’t just external. It’s reinforced by how agencies are structured and how their value is increasingly misunderstood.

“Agencies are still often run by older decision-makers, so everyone ends up chasing the same formats, the same humour, the same faces. Somewhere along the way, brands also forgot what agencies actually do. Agencies aren’t just production houses. They’re psychologists and cultural scientists, disguised as creatives. That thinking gets lost when everything is about instant results.”

Creative anxiety is a systemic symptom

Against this backdrop, the industry’s anxiety around memes, humour, purpose, and AI begins to make sense. These aren’t isolated creative choices. They’re symptoms of a system under pressure.

Kalyani Srivastava, Chief Business Officer at Creativeland Asia, sees the shift as cultural before it is tactical. “The shift isn’t only about formats or algorithms; it’s about culture and trust.” She argued that purpose-led storytelling hasn’t disappeared; it has been compromised by overuse and scepticism.

“Purpose-led storytelling hasn’t disappeared, but audiences have become far more skeptical of brands pushing agendas under the guise of purpose. There is real purpose-fatigue today. Consumers aren’t rejecting meaning. They’re rejecting manufactured meaning,” she explained.

Authority, she noted, has shifted decisively. “Trust has moved away from brands and towards communities, creators and peers. People believe people.” What’s emerging instead is not louder messaging, but deeper participation. “The next wave of storytelling won’t be for proclamation, but for participation.”

Has short-form killed emotional storytelling? 

Anand Karir, Founder and Creative Mentor at Boing Brandvertising, rejected the idea that short-form platforms are the enemy of meaning. “Purpose can never go out of fashion in advertising,” he said.

Advertising, Karir argued, has always competed with entertainment for attention. What’s changed isn’t the job, but the context. “That makes advertising’s job harder, not redundant. Because ads aren’t made to entertain; they’re made to sell. The first rule still applies: if you’re interrupting, at least be interesting.”

Most importantly, he challenges the assumption that emotion can’t survive short-form constraints. “Short-form platforms haven’t killed emotional storytelling. Some deeply emotional campaigns my agency wrote and I directed for brands like PaisaBazaar didn’t chase trends; they built the brand. Their views and engagement ran into billions. In India, emotion has always worked. And it continues to work irrespective of the medium. It all depends on how you dish it out,” he pointed out.

When speed becomes the enemy of meaning

Sanjana Jain, Partner at Collective Artists Network and CEO of Collective Creative Labs, framed the issue as one of patience, not relevance. “Purpose hasn’t lost relevance; attention has lost patience,” she said.

While humour dominates feeds, its impact is fleeting. What endures, she argued, are stories rooted in lived experience, stories that touch a deeper truth even when told lightly. Campaigns like ITC Swasthya Bengal, she noted, prioritised trust and long-term value over virality.

“The real challenge isn’t emotion,” Jain said. “It’s precision.”

AI can’t replace human judgment

AI has added a new layer of tension to creative decision-making. Srivastava warned that while it can scale production, creativity itself isn’t output. “It’s empathy, judgment, originality.”

Karir was more blunt, describing the current moment as “bot vs bot.” While AI accelerates execution, he argued, it cannot locate human truth. Strategy, increasingly, lives inside the prompt.

What outlives the campaign

Despite the noise, one truth remains stubbornly intact. “Emotional, message-first work has always worked and always will. As an artist and producer myself, I see this clearly. Thousands of songs drop every day, but we still gravitate to the ones that make us feel something. It’s been decades, and we still vibe to Frank Ocean. Fast content gets views. Work that moves you builds value,” James summed up.