ashwindravid
ashwindravid
Marketing Musings
6 posts
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ashwindravid · 4 months ago
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My Journey Through India's Content Marketing Evolution.
I've been contemplating lately how India's content marketing scene has transformed right before my eyes. It's weird—I started my career when newspaper ads were still dominant, and now I'm watching my teenagers create content that reaches thousands on platforms I barely understand.
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The early 2000s feel like another lifetime now. Celebrities smiling at us from billboards promise everything from whiter teeth to happier families. Then, the smartphone tsunami hit us; honestly, I wasn't ready. None of us were.
The change wasn't gradual—it was like someone flipped a switch. Suddenly, digital became the default. The revolution wasn't just changing how we consumed content and rewiring our decision-making.
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I've observed three generations respond to this shift in real-time. My millennial friends (yes, I'm one too, although I dislike the label) are often caught between worlds—yearning for simpler times yet entirely reliant on digital convenience. We're the awkward middle children of this transformation.
My Gen Z cousins, though? They're something else entirely. They can spot inauthentic marketing from a mile away. I once showed my 19-year-old cousin a campaign I was proud of, and she just gave me that look—you know, the one—and said, "This feels like you're trying too hard." Ouch. But he was right.
And now there's my friend's daughter's generation—these kids who've never known a world without touchscreens. Sometimes, I watch them interact with content and feel a mixture of fascination and fear. The line between entertainment and advertising doesn't exist for him. Is that progress? I honestly don't know.
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I've sat in too many meetings where executives talk about algorithms and engagement metrics without once mentioning the humans on the other end.
Yet the campaigns that still move me—that make me pause mid-scroll—are the ones that somehow reach through the screen and touch something real.
Maybe that's where we're headed—toward a future where technology amplifies human connection rather than replacing it. Where we use all these incredible tools not just to target more precisely but to understand more deeply.
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I'm still figuring it out, like everyone else. Some days, I feel hopelessly behind the curve; other days, I see possibilities that make me excited to be part of this messy, beautiful evolution.
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ashwindravid · 4 months ago
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Campaigns That Redefined Possible.
Many brand campaigns have broken the typical mould and cliches we associate with our industry. The recent Marie Gold biscuit campaign, honouring India’s first female athlete to win gold at the Paris Games 2024 and Tokyo Games 2020, is just one of many few out there. And yes, sadly, there aren't many examples in our market of mediocrity.
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Here are a few more.
Red Bull Stratos Space Jump: Gravity is Just a Suggestion
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Red Bull didn't just push the boundaries of marketing—they took those boundaries, strapped them to a human being, and launched them into the actual stratosphere. Felix Baumgartner's space jump wasn't a marketing stunt. It was a declaration of war against boring corporate thinking.
Complacency is the silent killer of creativity. Most brands are busy calculating CAC and ROAS; Red Bull was busy calculating how high a human could fall without becoming a very expensive splat on the ground.
Ola's Chennai Flood Rescue. When Plan B Becomes the Entire Playbook
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The 2015 Chennai Flood was one of the deadliest floods in India. It affected more than four million people in and around the city and caused an economic loss of around 3 billion USD. While brands were figuring out what to do, Ola said, "We are in the business of mobility, not just a cab service."
Innovation often looks batshit crazy before it looks brilliant, doesn't it?
This wasn't corporate social responsibility. This was a middle finger to the idea that a company's purpose stops at its bottom line. They didn't just respond to a crisis—they rewrote the definition of a mobility company.
Liquid Death: When Marketing Meets Performance Art
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In a world of sanitized corporate messaging, Liquid Death arrives like a punk rock band that crashed a board meeting. Their 'Safe For Work' Super Bowl commercial isn't an advertisement—it's a cultural hand grenade wrapped in aluminium.
Liquid Death understands that true cultural impact comes from being so intentionally bizarre that people can't look away. They transformed water packaging from a mundane necessity to a statement that screams, "We give exactly zero f*cks about your expectations."
My thoughts.
Here's the thing. Breakthrough thinking doesn't live in comfortable conference rooms. It emerges in those wild moments when someone asks, "What if we completely ignored every rule?"
Don't let comfort become our collective creative prison. These aren't just marketing campaigns. They are thoughts written in the language of audacity.
The future belongs to those who understand that the most interesting stories happen when you completely ignore the goddamn rulebook.
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ashwindravid · 5 months ago
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Indian Advertising Agencies Treat Talent Like Stormtroopers
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In the galaxy far, far away between Gurugram and Lower Parel, Indian advertising agencies are running their creative empires with the same tactical brilliance that made the Death Star include an exploitable thermal exhaust port.
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Too many agencies manage talent like the Empire manages Stormtroopers. Mass-produced, interchangeable, and expendable. They've built billion-rupee businesses on the brilliance of people they treat as decorative assets on quarterly presentations
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The average creative professional shifts allegiance faster than C-3PO in a hostage situation, not out of disloyalty, but survival. When your Jedi-level art director gets poached, the typical response isn't "How do we create an environment where talent wants to stay?" but "Let's find another body before the client notices."
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This isn't just bad business; it's Jar Jar Binks-level strategic thinking. Post-pandemic, creative talent has awakened to a revolutionary idea: Perhaps they don't need to suffer endless revisions and emotional lightsaber battles just to produce another forgettable social media post.
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Like Luke discovering his Force sensitivity, advertising professionals now see options beyond the Empire.
The Freelance Rebellion. Working from Goa while charging Mumbai rates.
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Joining the Dark Side. Jumping to in-house teams with shocking concepts like "work-life balance”.
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The Hyperspace Jump. Building boutique studios that treat creativity as more than a commodity.
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Didn’t you notice how Obi-Wan invested in developing Luke's potential and got his father killed in return? :)
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When was the last time an ECD spent 15 minutes reviewing a junior copywriter's work without simultaneously scrolling Instagram? The agencies that will thrive aren't those with the biggest client rosters but those who, like the Rebellion, build loyalty through purpose rather than fear. They'll create personal Jedi councils of mentorship, establish clone-free cultures that celebrate uniqueness, and protect talent from energy-draining client demands that arrive at 11 PM marked "urgent."
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Don't be the Empire, building bigger Death Stars while ignoring fundamental flaws. Be the Rebellion. Be driven by the radical idea that the creative force grows stronger when we nurture each person's unique potential. May the force be with you.
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ashwindravid · 5 months ago
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Beyond the Abyss
Generative AI and the Future of Marketing
People keep missing the point about AI in marketing. It's not coming for your job—it's coming for the marketing equivalent of fast food: those mindless campaigns nobody sees, other than the unlucky few on LinkedIn, that generic "download our whitepaper" button nobody clicks, and those quarterly reports everyone pretends to read.
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Let's be honest—we've all sat through those marketing meetings where someone presents a graph going up and to the right based on what is essentially educated guesswork dressed up in corporate jargon. AI is tearing down that comfortable façade and asking us point-blank: "So... what exactly are you bringing to the table that I can't automate in 30 seconds?"
And that's where things get interesting.
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While the marketing dinosaurs are busy updating their LinkedIn profiles with panic-sweats, the smart ones are treating AI like the intern who's freakishly good at grunt work. They're handing over the spreadsheets and keyword research so they can focus on the stuff that matters—the weird, messy, gloriously human art of connection.
Real personalisation isn't mail-merging someone's name into your template. It's about creating moments that make people feel like you're reading their diary—in a good way, not a restraining order way. It's about seeing the human behind the data point.
We're creatures of habit, desperately clinging to marketing playbooks that worked in 2017. The marketers who'll own the next decade aren't mindlessly prompt-engineering their way through campaigns. They're the ones asking: "How can this tech help me understand human weirdness better?"
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That's the twist everyone misses while doom-scrolling through "AI will end marketing" think pieces. Better AI should enhance our humanity, not replace it.
So next time you see your competitor churning out AI-generated fluff that reads like it was written by a committee of algorithms pretending to be people, ask yourself: What if we used these tools to actually listen? To spot the patterns buried in the noise? To uncover the needs people don't even know they have?
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This isn't some future revolution coming to save or destroy us. It's already here, hiding behind that "AI-powered" feature you've been ignoring. The only real question is whether you're going to surf this wave or pretend the tide isn't rising.
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ashwindravid · 5 months ago
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Uncharted Waters
Hey there. It feels like we're sitting across from each other, mugs of coffee growing cold, about to have one of those conversations that peel back the layers of what we've been experiencing. I've been thinking about vulnerability lately - not the Instagram-filtered version, but the raw, unvarnished reality of what it means to truly open ourselves up.
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This past year has been... well, complicated. There's no neat way to package it, no tidy narrative that captures all the messy, beautiful complexity. I've learned that growth isn't linear. It's more like those tangled tree roots that push through concrete - unpredictable, persistent, breaking through barriers we didn't even know existed.
There's something profound about admitting we don't have all the answers. It's not weakness - it's incredible strength. Vulnerability isn't about being broken; it's about being brave enough to show the cracks, to acknowledge that those very fractures are where the light gets in.
My closest friendships have transformed this year—not through grand gestures but through moments of genuine connection, conversations where we drop the performative masks and just exist.
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It's a continuous, messy, beautiful process. Some days, healing looks like journaling. Some days, it's saying no to things that drain me. Some days, it's simply getting out of bed and facing the world.
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The most unexpected gift of this year? Learning to be gentle with myself. To recognize that my worth isn't determined by productivity, by perfect relationships, by meeting some external standard of success. My worth is inherent, messy, and complex - just like me.
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To anyone reading this who might be navigating their uncharted waters, I see you. Your journey is valid, your struggles are real, and your capacity for resilience is breathtaking. Celebrate it.
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ashwindravid · 9 years ago
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Oh Goa, you are such a beauty 💙#nofilter (at Mangeshi Temple, Goa)
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