Consumers have redrawn advertising’s power map, forcing creativity, technology, data, and engagement to converge into a new operating model for brand influence.
Published on August 17, 2026 · 4 min read
Oh yes! They did. And they did it while we in the advertising fraternity were basking in the sunbathed pastures of the maze, referred to in the once iconic management book, Who Moved My Cheese?
In today’s advertising world of moment marketing, trending hashtags, viral content and fleeting customer contentment, some old-world marketing adages still prove to be prophetic. “The Medium is the Message”, coined by Marshall McLuhan, remains one such adage that reminds us of an age-old marketing truth. Through the phrase, McLuhan intended to convey that the message is not the sole focus of communication. The medium must also become central. Why? Because the message needs to adapt itself based on the dynamics of consumer behaviour and the way people consume that medium.
Therefore, print advertising focused more on the craft of copywriting, radio advertising on the magic of music and jingles, and television advertising on cinematic visualization of the idea. However, there were two underlying commonalities across all these media formats through the decades. One, communication with the consumer was one-sided. Only the brand spoke. Two, as a result, creativity reigned supreme because novelty in crafting the content ensured higher brand recall and retention.
So, we kept basking in the maze, shifting from station to station, read media to media, in pursuit of our piece of cheese.
The advent of social media and digital marketing initiated a change in the balance of power between brands and customers. Now, customers could speak back to the brand, instantaneously. For the very first time in the history of their relationship, since brands were born.
The occasional BTL activities in the marketing calendar were earlier the other platform where customers could interact with the brand. However, these were limited in proportion within the overall marketing budget.
But digital media made this new form of customer engagement marketing the norm.
Brand marketers were elated. They knew where the proverbial “other half” of advertising currency was going. A quick lookback. Either John Wanamaker, a leading US retailer, or Lord Leverhulme, a UK-based industrialist, is ascribed with the quote, “I know one half of my advertising spend is wasted, but the trouble is that I do not know which half”, referring to the inability to calculate the effectiveness of advertising.
Digital media scored a second high as it enabled marketers to calculate advertising effectiveness in terms of currency.
This led to more and more innovation in the same continuum of media technology, building greater customer association and engagement, resulting in immersive customer simulations in the world of AR, VR, XR, and marketing evolved to become martech.
Martech, or marketing technology as a discipline, has opened up new frontiers in the way consumers can be enticed by providing them not just engaging creative entertainment or experiential marketing, but reality-like simulated immersive marketing.
The futuristic retail scene in films like Minority Report is a technological possibility today. Customers can now experience how they would feel and live in their future homes and what they would see there, much before their homes are built, through the use of VR-based immersive simulation, haptic technology and the like. Beyond marketing too, these technologies are used to evolve training into simulated experiences and design into visual reality, thus providing clarity in decision making.
The impact of these shifts was felt across global communication behemoths. Marquee creative advertising agency brands were put to rest, restructured, absorbed or went into hibernation across communication conglomerates in the last three years, with JWT, Grey, Bates, MullenLowe, FCB and DDB being some of them.
The communication conglomerates were seen outperforming each other in presenting themselves to their clients in the new avatar of being “technology-led and digital-first” from being “creative hotshots”. Some, like WPP, even had plans to acquire traditional consulting and technology majors like Accenture.
The yesteryear advertising lore citing occasional huge consumer engagement through ideas that skyrocketed a brand’s sales for a quarter or financial year for a Coke or a Nike was not enough to retain clients.
Clients wanted consumer engagement with their brand for every unit of media currency spent.
And so, the consumer moved the cheese of the communication industry from being “creativity-led” to being “technology-led that drives consumer engagement”, a tectonic shift whose tremors have resulted in reconfigurations across global communication conglomerates and advertising agency brands.
Consumer insights mined the unsaid consumer needs, and technology delivered the answers.