New Delhi: Brands do not need to become entertainment studios to stay relevant in culture. They need to become cultural storytellers.
That is the view of Manoti Jain, founding member and Chief Operations Officer at Kulfi Collective, who argued that advertising has not lost relevance, but its role has fundamentally changed.
“Brands don’t need to become entertainment studios. They need to become cultural storytellers,” Jain said. “The smartest brands know when to create original IP, when to collaborate with creators, and when to step back and let culture lead. It’s not about producing more content; it’s about participating meaningfully in the right cultural moments.”
Jain said the shift in brand building is not from advertising to content, but from promotion to cultural relevance. “Advertising hasn’t disappeared, it’s just evolved,” she said. “Brands today aren’t just advertisers anymore; they’re becoming participants in culture. They’re building IP, collaborating with creators, investing in communities and shaping stories people want to engage with, not just watch.”
In that system, she said, advertising is no longer the main act. “It’s the amplifier. Its role is to take what a brand is building culturally and make it travel. It keeps the brand present in conversations, gives moments scale and helps translate participation into memory.”
To explain that shift, Jain pointed to brands across categories. She cited Cadbury’s girl-POV cricket film as an example of a brand using advertising to scale a cultural shift rather than just push product. “Their girl-POV cricket film didn’t just sell chocolate, it flipped a long-standing cultural trope and made the country feel something,” she said. “Advertising gave that emotional shift scale and made it part of mainstream conversation.”
She also pointed to Spotify Wrapped as a case where the product experience already exists, but storytelling turns it into a recurring cultural moment. “It’s the storytelling around it, from OOH to creator collaborations and persona-led narratives, that turns it into an annual cultural moment people anticipate and share,” Jain said.
Zomato, she added, has similarly used humour rooted in everyday relatability, including around moments such as Mother’s Day, to stay embedded in internet culture and not just app behaviour.
Moving ahead in the conversation, Jain emphasised the need to re-examine how branded content should be evaluated. She argued that most branded work is still measured on the wrong signals. “Views, likes, and shares tell you how far something travelled, not whether it meant anything,” she said. “And today, scale is easy to manufacture. You can push distribution and hit numbers overnight. But branded content isn’t built just to perform in feeds, it’s built to live in culture.”
Her test, she said, comes after exposure. “The real question is what happens after people watch it. Do they talk about it? Do they reference it? Does it shape how they see the brand?”
She cited Amul’s topical advertising as an example of work whose impact cannot be read only through engagement spikes. “Their impact isn’t measured in engagement spikes; it’s in how consistently they become part of the national conversation and public memory,” Jain said. “They don’t just react to culture, they archive it in real time.”
Globally, she pointed to Nike’s Find Your Greatness and Dream Crazy as examples of campaigns that shape cultural discourse around sport, identity and ambition. “Virality can create noise, but cultural relevance creates recall,” she said. “In the long run, brands aren’t built on what people saw; they’re built on what people remember.”
That emphasis on memory also feeds into how she sees branding inside content. Jain said the problem is not subtle branding, but vague branding. “If content entertains but doesn’t build the brand, it usually means the brand’s role in the story wasn’t clear to begin with,” she said. “Subtlety only works when the brand’s voice and point of view are baked into the idea, not added later.”
For that to happen, she said, brands need far stronger internal clarity. “Accountability really sits with how clearly the brand knows itself, what it stands for, what it wants to say, and the role it wants to play in culture,” Jain said.
She added that such clarity is not built through one campaign, but through repeated, consistent cultural participation. “That clarity doesn’t come from one campaign. It comes from consistency, showing up in culture with intent, taking stands when it matters and telling stories with integrity.”
Jain also drew a distinction between growth and brand meaning. “Growth today can absolutely be driven by product, UX and creators. But growth alone doesn’t build brand meaning,” she said.
In her view, advertising’s job is to shape how that growth is understood and remembered. “Without it, you’re leaving the brand’s narrative to chance.”
Culture, she argued, shapes far more than just awareness. “It influences perception, identity and affinity,” she said. “Advertising helps brands participate meaningfully in that cultural conversation around their product.”
She used Crocs as an example, saying the brand already had functionality and creator love, but culture-first campaigns such as its K-Drama x Bollywood crossover helped frame it as a symbol of self-expression and fandom, not just comfort.
That, Jain said, is when advertising justifies its spend. “When brands become culturally relevant, it translates into real business outcomes, stronger affinity, deeper loyalty and sustained growth over time. That’s when advertising earns its budget, when it builds cultural meaning around growth, not just awareness.”
The shift, she said, also has implications for agencies. “We’re no longer just campaign builders,” Jain said. “We need to think in ecosystems, across content, communities, creators and platforms and help brands navigate culture, not just media.”
In her view, agencies that continue to operate as execution partners alone will struggle to stay ahead. “Advertising isn’t dying, it’s becoming more intentional and more embedded in culture,” she said. “And agencies that can operate as long-term cultural partners, not just execution partners, will define what comes next.”
Her conclusion was direct: “The future won’t belong to agencies that make ads, but to those that help brands make cultural dents.”