Is creativity losing the battle to paid media?

New Delhi: The ad world looks very different today. Creative storytelling is increasingly taking a backseat to formula-driven celebrity endorsements and heavy media spending. Even the most creative ideas struggle to gain visibility without significant financial backing. 

Skippable ads, fragmented attention spans, and algorithms that prioritise paid placements have changed the way audiences engage with content. These shifts raise important questions about whether creativity alone can still make an impact in the current advertising landscape.

Once, advertisements such as Fevicol’s iconic campaigns or Mentos’ witty storytelling entered consumer memory through the sheer strength of their ideas. Today, however, visibility is largely dictated by how much money brands spend on amplification. 

As a result, even average campaigns can be made to look larger than life, while genuinely strong ideas often go unnoticed due to limited budgets.

Manish Bhatt, Founder and Director of Scarecrow M&C Saatchi, said the way people consume content has changed dramatically. “Our memory, the public memory, is accumulated by the old plus new every day, adding information,” he noted. With audiences constantly flooded, freshness has become scarce. “Creativity is directly proportional to newness and freshness… your surprise quotient has gone down because you don’t get surprised or impressed as easily,” he explained.

This fatigue has fuelled the rise of celebrity endorsements and influencer-driven ads. Bhatt argued this reliance isn’t only about creativity but also about system-level factors, with digital algorithms pushing paid content over organic discovery. “Paid content is always becoming a hurdle and creating clutter… organically, finding good content has reduced,” he said.

As a result, audiences now trust endorsements more than pure creativity. “People want things faster, so they go for a formula; one of the tried and tested is riding on someone else’s popularity,” Bhatt observed. Even the definition of success has shifted. “The blockbuster today and the popularity of yesterday is not equitable… now it’s about how many streams you launch in a week, whereas earlier it was measured by longevity, like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge.”

Azazul Haque, Group Chief Creative Officer at Creativeland Asia, highlighted how short-termism has become a dominant force in advertising. “We are living in a world of quick fame. Every brand wants or desires immediate cut-through and not lasting impact. They want a quick recall,” he said. 

According to him, flooding an ad with multiple celebrities is seen as a way to grab attention, but this often lacks staying power. “Without great ideas, the ads won't have any recall after a few days.”

He added that many brands have lost distinctiveness. “Flipkart looks like Dream11. Cred looks like WinZo. They all look the same because they all use the same idea.” For Haque, campaigns that are carefully thought through can still succeed. 

“If the campaigns are extremely thought through and are unique yet engaging and break the immense content clutter, they don't need heavy spending. It need not get viral, but for sure great ideas are always shareable.”

For Piali Dasgupta Surendran, Vice-President, Marketing with a leading real estate company, the industry itself is responsible for this decline. “As an industry, we have done this to ourselves. So, we have no one to blame. Unfortunately, we have slowly but steadily gone idea bankrupt and taken the easy and lazy way out of riding on a celebrity’s halo effect and star power, with zero storytelling,” she said.

She linked this reliance on celebrities directly to the economics of social platforms. “Most social media platforms offer less than 1% organic reach today. So, there’s simply no option but to put big dollars behind your digital campaigns for them to gain maximum reach and eyeballs.”

Dasgupta also pointed out that advertisements today rarely leave a lasting impression. “The shelf life of advertisements today is much, much shorter. And that’s because the sheer volume of content that is being thrown at the average customer today is overwhelming.” This leads to fatigue, shrinking attention spans, and, in some cases, even disdain. “That has made India the second-largest ad-blocking country in the world,” she added.

Yet, she argued, there are still ways to gain organic visibility through earned media and user-generated content, citing Zepto’s billboard campaign that trended on LinkedIn. “Finally, nothing succeeds like good storytelling, because the human brain is wired to receive stories well. Let the narrative be the celebrity, and views will follow.”

Reflecting similar concerns, Vineet Chugh, Marketing Head at QueueBuster, noted that while celebrities and budgets can ensure visibility, they cannot replace strong creative thinking. “Celebrities and large media spends are not substitutes for strong creative ideas. The most successful campaigns are those where both come together seamlessly,” he said, pointing to Nike’s iconic Jordan campaign as an example of balance.

For him, the challenge lies in today’s fragmented media environment. “In the past, audiences were concentrated across limited media like print, TV, and radio. Today, they are scattered across multiple platforms.” Without sufficient investment in amplification, even the best campaigns risk being overlooked. “Creativity alone can’t fight distribution,” Chugh explained. “Even the sharpest, wittiest, or most emotional idea needs visibility to land with people.”

He added that cultural relevance itself is increasingly driven by scale rather than originality. “Cultural relevance today is less about what you say and more about how many times people see it. It's a function of ubiquity… Creativity provides the spark of potential, but paid amplification and high budgets provide the oxygen for it to become a fire.”

Taken together, the perspectives of agency leaders and marketers point to a sobering reality: storytelling and creativity, once the main point of advertising, now struggle to thrive in an ecosystem dominated by algorithms, celebrities, and budgets.

As Bhatt reflected, “In today's creative agency, there will be a majority of people who would have to Google who Dinesh Pandey is. In our time, it was compulsory that people knew the popular people in our industry. That is a change.”