Adtech regulation a priority for Modi govt in third term: MoS Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Credibility of news and platforms are as important as monetisation challenges: Anurag Thakur

HUL: Meet the leaders who have emerged from "The CEO Factory"

Punit Goenka addresses Zee employees; ensures no layoffs due to failed merger

Disney's strategic sale to Viacom18 set to boost market share to 40 percent

The Leader's Edge: Storyboard18 in conversation with leaders, decision makers and disruptors

Nobody’s Perfect Retro Porsche Ad

In Conversation With Raja Rajamannar, Mastercard

Shahid Kapoor And Varun Ganjoo Speaks On PokerBaazi's Campaign

In conversation with IHCL’s Puneet Chhatwal & GroupM’s Kate Scott-Dawkins

Why are brands including e-sports in their sports marketing itinerary?

Storyboard18 x The English Nut: How to pronounce these 10 brand names

Experts' Take On Reinvention Of Ad Campaigns Through Technology

Experts Speak On Key Emerging Trends In Cannes Lions Entries

Leaders of the future have to be outstanding human beings: Nestle MD

In conversation with VMLY&R’s Hari Ramanathan

iPhone: 3 in 1 

A triumph of acumen

A triumph of judgement 

A triumph of courage


Incorrect predictions, unexpected outcomes, faulty prophesies, sheer happenstance and plain misjudgment all these have a place in the history of Big Tech. But above all innovators move markets with confidence.
 
In January 2007, Steve Jobs introduced a revolutionary ‘three in one’ product: 

First - A wide-screen iPod with touch controls. 

Second - A fabulous mobile phone.

Third - A never before Internet communications device.

He called it the iPhone. It was a touch screen, a music player, a phone, and Internet access and more. 

Steve Ballmer - Microsoft CEO - prophesied that there was no chance of it gaining any market share traction given its pricing. 

A market research report by Universal McCann on a big sample of ten thousand respondents declared that it would flop. 

In sum, the consensus was that where multiple available devices were sophisticated and affordable, people would not want one device.

When you could have a great cell phone, a great digital camera and an MP3 player why would you prefer a one size fits all product with no claims to being superior in any of the three? 

Expertise ranks above versatility, this was the view.

But we now know that the iPhone was not a flop. 

Apple’s iPhone business was, within less than a decade, worth more than Microsoft.

In the history of mankind there has never been a more commercially successful device. So much for predictions. 

Apple had spent billions of dollars and five years designing a product that people could not want.

What lessons are to be learned? 

Firstly, innovation needs creativity. 

Secondly, that creativity ought to explore new approaches. 

Finally , all new approaches have inherent risk. 

Risk tolerance is a type of courage, a willingness to confront potential failures. 

Fear and vulnerability can foster a culture of conformity, where people avoid stepping outside their comfort zones. Everyone agrees but they know they have the wrong answer. 

If your plan is simply to survive for the day, week, month or quarter and kick the can forwards you won’t make an iPhone. 

Shubhranshu Singh is CMO, Tata Motors CVBU. He writes Simply Speaking, a column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

Simply Speaking: Shorts #1 - The "flop" that became a global hit

Nvidia announced a booming revenue report a few days ago and now looks set to become the most valued enterprise on earth. 


Meanwhile, Elon Musk pulled in $ 6 billion and some change for his venture and his claim is that human-level artificial intelligence is coming next year. Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI has completed this striking fundraising achievement at an impressive $24 billion valuation. Backed by Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, xAI is poised to potentially vie with AI giant OpenAI for industry dominance.


This is not his first foray into AI since he co-founded Openai, then left after a rupture with Sam Altman. In his view, Tesla is an AI company not an automobile maker.


Big tech can't seem to mouth enough Al-powered hope statements. Everywhere confidence trumps competence. The more the hype the more the eventual harm. 


It sure seems like the ‘Al hype transcontinental flight’ has taken off the long runway whereas in fact it may be already preparing for its eventual descent. 


We need only focus on what AI can do, how well can it do these things and productivity will boost returns? AI ventures must generate returns for stakeholders over the medium term. 


Several glitchy introductions touted as improvements /innovations are revealing that the rate of improvement for Als is slowing. It naturally makes new ,hitherto unimagined, applications rarer still. Building and running AI on scale is a capital guzzler. What is more , competing Al models are coming into the market continuously whereas the earlier ones are not turning any profits. 


On the one hand base AI is getting commoditized but on the other hand staying ahead required spending. 


OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini-need more data than any steam engine burnt coal. It has to be fed every moment. 


Having trained on more or less the entire internet, there isn’t much left.


The free, open-source models, like those from Meta and Mistral, are nearly as good as the current leaders. 


If the game shifts from innovative add ons to base cost management, it will need scale of subscription to remain afloat. 

<a href="https://www.storyboard18.com/special-coverage/go-google-or-google-gone-fate-of-search-business-in-judges-hands-shubhranshu-singhs-simply-speaking-32074.htm">Read more: Go Google or Google Gone? Fate of search business in judge’s hands</a>

Al startups have already started to go belly up or selling out to the leaders of the pack. The Wall Street Journal reported on the exit of the Inflection AI’s team to Microsoft whereas the CEO of Stability AI cut away in March. 


A report in the Wall Street Journal quoted Sequoia’s estimate of $50 billion dollar having been spent on chips from Nvidia to train Al in 2023. But the revenue for all players is only $3 billion in revenues.


Google, now offering AI-generated summaries across billions of search results, will eat into its margins since redirection and programmatic advertising is its main source of revenue. 


Clay Shirley said “Revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviors”. I think it applies to this case a well. 


How many corporations have put Al at work in their mainstream functions?


How many license and pay for Al tools for their workforce at large?
 

Being intrigued by Al and bearing a cost to use it and add value are two very different things.


<a href="https://www.storyboard18.com/brand-marketing/excel-that-is-the-powerpoint-of-it-read-shubhranshu-singhs-take-on-how-excel-forever-changed-business-and-marketing-31399.htm">Read more: Excel - That is the powerpoint of it: Read Shubhranshu Singh's take on how Excel forever changed business and marketing</a>


Financial Times reported in December that OpenAI’s revenue was at least $2 billion, and would double by 2025.


But OpenAI has nearly $90 billion market valuation and at some stage the multiples will look hyper optimistic. This is the case for Anthropic having raised 8 billion dollars and being valued at 18 billion. 


Is Al a tool or master? Is it an enhancer of productivity or -in certain classes of jobs- entirely a substitute for human effort?
 

Training people and building habits /workflows remain barriers to the swift adoption of Al.


Al may well be radically disruptive . It may well transform jobs and human lives.


But at its current pace, it is likely to take more fuel and cover less distance. Hence, its viability is a question. A great tool is that which has the least variance of performance. 


I would say it’s hype over hope for now.

Shubhranshu Singh is VP and CMO, Tata Motors CVBU. He writes Simply Speaking, a special column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

Read More: <a href="https://www.storyboard18.com/brand-makers/i-am-more-hungry-for-artificial-imagination-than-for-artificial-intelligence-shubhranshu-singh-21029.htm">I am more hungry for artificial imagination, than for artificial intelligence: Shubhranshu Singh</a>

AI: Hype or Hope? Asks Shubhranshu Singh in this week's Simply Speaking

One of the most important antitrust cases in history is being considered in a federal court in the US. The Department of Justice has alleged that Google is a monopoly that abuses its power over the internet by striking anticompetitive deals for prime placement of its search engine, while Google contends its dominant market share is the result of a superior product.

It’s the biggest tech antitrust trial ever and comes as its multiplicative impact could go far beyond Google. The fate of Google’s search business is now in the hands of Judge Amit Mehta, as closing arguments concluded in the landmark trial. It will also lead to a direct impact on the app economy.

Google has grown continuously in the past 25 years from its founding. In terms of revenue, valuation and most importantly, active engagement with consumers, it has come to define big.

Google’s problems are bigger than just the antitrust case in discovering its next era as a corporate leader. Googlers have always prided themselves on solving the toughest problems in computer science. The money was more a consequence than the target.

Dominating the internet

The Google brand is its most precious asset. Its many businesses all feed back to the brand. Its culture is deeply identified with the brand.

Therefore, if the big idea would be for Google to become a data fiduciary like a bank is with our money, no amount of encryption will help if the brand is rendered weaker. It has the clout to aspire thus.

Daily, billions of people around the world query on Google Search, email with Gmail or use Google Maps to get to their destination.

The tech giant dominates the internet economy. It has consistently spent more than almost any other group or company on lobbying. Its business expansion has been fuelled also by buying hundreds of firms.

In 2023, it generated $307 billion in revenue, larger than the GDP of Finland, Qatar, and Peru. Its revenue taken as equivalent to GDP would place it on rank 45 in the list of nations.

A ruling against it would limit Google’s search empire. The modus operandi of paying billions to secure prime placement for its search bar on Apple’s iPhones or other web browsers would become a thing of the past.

Potentially, it would be forced to sell off the Chrome browser and open up competition to other search engines.

The fundamental question is whether Google stifled competition and hence harmed consumer interest by becoming the default search engine through deals with phone makers and internet browsers.

The Justice Department case has a reputational impact that Google did not keep its monopoly via great innovation and search, but through dealmaking that effectively made it difficult for any competition search engine to thrive.

Two extenuating circumstances may come to Google’s aid – one that the definition of search itself is broad: it happens on Amazon, Spotify, and TikTok. Secondly, it claims that the literal contracts with Apple, Firefox or Samsung are not actually exclusive, but still render it as a default.

If the ruling is that Google isn’t a monopoly, it will demolish the arguments of the state and many others who say Big Tech has grown too powerful. That will apply in mutant versions to all including Amazon and Apple.

In any case, there is likely to be some injunctive relief in case the ruling restricts itself to the nature of the contracts, and that, going forward, such contracts cannot be entered into.

However, when the state went after Microsoft in an anti-trust investigation, it had tried to break it up. So, potentially the government could ask Google to stop certain practices, direct it to divest businesses, or order its break up into separate entities. Google competitors have accused it of branding its power to suppress competition links to travel, maps, and reviews, among others.

Let’s understand the Google world.

Google has nine products with more than a billion users each.

1. Google search — 4.9 billion users

Google is the world’s most important search engine, and it truly dominates the space, controlling 92 percent of the market, which equates to 4.9 billion people (data from StatCounter and the International Telecommunications Union).

This is the business at the core of the government’s allegations.

Microsoft’s Bing comes in second with a paltry 3 percent. Google is the world’s No. 1 site, with more than 86 billion visits a month, according to internet data provider Similarweb.

Now Google has begun putting AI-generated answer summaries, which are trained on content scraped from the web, at the top of search results for more of its users. That could squeeze publishers who rely on traffic from Google for their survival.

2. Chrome — With 3.4 billion users

Chrome is the world’s most popular web browser. The vast majority of desktop computers and a huge portion of mobile phones have Chrome as the default browser. This is how Google gets the ability to keep its search engine front and centre, but also allows it to track people all over the internet, giving it incredible amounts of granular data on online behaviour, especially when it comes to advertising and e-commerce.

This edged out Microsoft Explorer or Mozilla’s Firefox. Microsoft’s new browser, Edge, is built off a version of Chrome.

3. Android 

More than 3 billion people use smartphones running Google’s Android operating system, the company said in 2021. That is around 70 percent of all the smartphones in the world.

Apple’s iOS is a distant second at 28.5 percent. Android has become the default operating system for most of the world’s phones, hence Google can put its other services, including Search, Maps, YouTube and its app store, in front of billions of people.

4. Google Play Store

Around 2.5 billion people use Google’s version of the app store every month, making it much bigger than Apple’s app store. The Play Store lets Google charge a commission on every app sold as well as get a cut of transactions made through those apps.

Android phones, unlike iPhones, don’t require apps to be downloaded through the official app store, and in China, numerous other app stores exist. Elsewhere, using an Android phone means going through Google to get your apps.

5. YouTube

Google’s online video service is a behemoth in its own right, with 2 billion users, according to the company. YouTube says 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. It’s an entertainment site, quasi social media platform and video archive rolled into one.

If you added the run time of all 454 feature films released in the US in 2022, at an average of two hours per film, you’d get about 900 hours of content. That is less than everything uploaded to YouTube in two minutes.

6. Google Workspace — 3 billion users

Google’s archenemy is Microsoft, and the company has for years worked to compete with Microsoft’s core products — its productivity suite, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Though Google still hasn’t dethroned those products, its own tools have grown rapidly over the years, benefiting from being bundled into other Google services such as Gmail.

At the end of 2022, Google said its Workspace apps, which include Docs, Sheets and Google Drive, had more than 3 billion users.

7. Gmail

Google was late to the email arena, where Yahoo, Hotmail and others had exhausted themselves fighting. It offered larger amounts of free storage than its competitors, it quickly began winning over customers with features and ubiquity.

Now, Gmail is the undisputed king of the email world, with 1.8 billion users. Google now makes people pay for storage leading to a huge source of revenue for the company.

Google also makes money from Gmail by placing ads in it. It is in control of the rules that dictate which emails end up in users’ primary inboxes and which are sent to the spam folder.

8. Google Photos

Google’s photo-storage app grew to a billion users just four years after launching in 2015. It benefited from being wrapped into Google Drive and as a default photo-storage tool on Android phones. But the app is hugely popular with iPhone users, too, thanks to Google’s offer of large amounts of free storage.

Now, millions of people pay Google monthly just to preserve the photos they have stored in the tool, providing a significant extra boost to revenue. Google Photos is also a major proving ground for the company’s AI tools.

9. Google Maps

Google was also late to the map game, with rivals like MapQuest already running major businesses when it first came on the scene. But the company gradually took over the space, and now it’s the tool people predominantly use to navigate the real world.

Google crossed a billion monthly users in 2012, and the company’s user base in the space has only grown since then. Even on iPhones, where Apple has tried for years to get people to use its own default maps app, many people still download Google Maps and use it exclusively.

Maps soon turned into a huge reviews site, shaking the businesses of such companies as Yelp and Tripadvisor, and putting Google into competition with a whole different set of companies. Like most of Google’s businesses, Maps is also an advertising platform.

Big Tech’s grip

Google’s parent company Alphabet is an organisation in the middle of momentous change. It is at the centre of the socio-cultural debate on Big Tech. While lawmakers and trustbusters scrutinise abuses of its market dominance in online-search-and-advertising technology, the very same businesses are maturing and not fuelling endless growth. Monopoly or not, could its base effect in revenue and profitability become its bigger headache?

Google argues that the internet is a lot bigger than it is and that companies like Amazon, Netflix, TikTok and OpenAI are all competing with it for people’s time, attention and money.

We are seeing a real focus in Europe and the US in weakening the grip of Big Tech on the economy, especially with reference to the internet.

It’s a very important judgement in the history of brands and businesses.

Watch this space.

Shubhranshu Singh is VP and CMO, Tata Motors CVBU. He writes Simply Speaking, a special column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

<a href="https://www.storyboard18.com/brand-marketing/excel-that-is-the-powerpoint-of-it-read-shubhranshu-singhs-take-on-how-excel-forever-changed-business-and-marketing-31399.htm">Read more: Excel - That is the powerpoint of it: Read Shubhranshu Singh's take on how Excel forever changed business and marketing</a>

Go Google or Google Gone? Fate of search business in judge’s hands: Shubhranshu Singh's 'Simply Speaking'

If capitalism had its version of Agitprop, its two main heroes would be PowerPoint and Excel.


They would be celebrated as tools that revolutionised and transformed business management. Without a doubt, they have had a massive impact. Whether as carriers of prior information, facilitators of analysis or creators of meta thinking, they established themselves as the ‘always on’ tools especially for those who were set to climb the ladder fast. 


This impact helped create, sustain and grow the mystique of the business mandarin. In myriad ways, they were invaluable to the ‘behind-the-curtain’ players who formed the establishment glue, the grout in the interdepartmental tiles as also to those who did customer facing razzle dazzle. In terms of packaging and distribution - PowerPoint and Excel came to hold sway.


But, are they fit for purpose and has this impact only been positive?


PowerPoint is more fundamentally flawed. It is a poor tool and has made both medium and message shrink. Intrinsically, it isn’t suited for what it is meant to accomplish in terms of clear, engaging, sharp communication. Sharp imagery, a few bullet points and a narrative often trumps thorough analysis and case supporting documentation. It is used indiscriminately for big bold ideas as well as the minutiae. It only follows a sequential, linear narrative. 


Could a general plan battle with PowerPoint inputs? Could an advocate convincingly argue with it in a court of law? Is it telescopic or microscopic in its net effect?


When done differently, it often gives rise to another issue, namely over stuffed presentations. But saying “apologies for a busy slide” is all it takes to brush away the illegible density. 


I have seen multiple slides in one or beastly innovations such as one slide with multiple links that go to other slides only to return to the nominal single slide.


The very ephemeral nature of such an arrayed display - boring or bedazzling - as it may be means that each slide appears for a few seconds before a puzzled, distracted or engaged audience. The etiquette of posing questions together at the end means the ‘peak end effect’ inevitably takes hold. Often, all you remember is the high point and the conclusion.


The celebration of PowerPoint is however a symptom and not the cause. 


Reductive, shorthand summarisation has become the preferred mode for collective discussions. There is not much bandwidth for detailing. An impactful image becomes a substitute for a cogent argument rather than a support for it. I am all for visually attractive, clutter breaking and compelling imagery but must the horse ride the man? Truly, does a picture say more than a thousand words? When the need for quantitative substantiation is felt, numbers march into the cramped space and infographics take pride of place. But it’s self-selection of data that happens most of all. People choose to see what they want to see. 


PowerPoint is a great tool for advocacy but not critical analysis. 

The recipe has become more important than the dish.


There is also the futility of the pre read. PowerPoints are often circulated prior to meetings and distributed far and wide. Hence there is an urge to be armed with additional content to drive specific agendas during meetings. 


A simple litmus test is whether a presentation is self-explanatory without the presenter. I am not disputing the critical role of the narrative, but every presenter wants attention and that leads to message mutation.


The detailing must be to a level of sufficiency. Brevity is the soul of the nitwit.


If you make PowerPoint presentation an end rather than the means, you will end up making a puréed mess of your ideas, and you have no choice in the matter.


Let me now deal with Excel. I believe Excel is the single most transforming element of what has made modern business what it is. It was like a cannon to the ramparts of feudal management. It blew old style marketing and creative industries to bits. 


It all started with the advent of the spreadsheet. This came in the early 1980s shortly after the introduction and widespread adoption of the IBM PC: VisiCalc, followed by Lotus 1-2-3, and then, of course, Microsoft Excel as a part of MS Office. 


Working a spreadsheet made business a malleable reality. It visually gave birth to the bottom line. Change the numbers up and the bottom line changed from red to green. Whereas real business was dealing with frictional ground realities, excel made every scenario a gamed outcome. If it could be on excel, what prevented it from being real on ground? 


‘Go to market’ strategy became subservient to excel. 


Old style business began to look sloppy, wasteful and plain. 


‘Excel men’ derived power from mathematical certainty whereas creative business was messy, loud and chaotic in comparison.


Power shifted towards formality and reserve. Men became cooler than the air conditioning. You counted only if you could be counted to deliver the numbers in the cells.


Financial engineering became the domain of the high-flying manager. Convening rights and allocation of resources got determined via outcomes from the spreadsheet. Excel made effects and countereffects easy to visualise and all fantasies seemed within grasp.


A patina of seriousness was acquired by the excel man. He was seen as wise and careful -someone sober, clinical, precise, and forever ready. He held the cards and didn’t need to show his hand. 


This ex parte advisory had a lugubrious air, implied authority and was blessed with Delphic certainty. It was inherently at conflict with the hopeful, familial charters of old business. 


Excel created a vehicle for defining value. It made the old corps tetchy. But they had no option but to lump it. Any large corporation is a confederacy of noncooperative parts. The excel yoke put everyone in one line. 


For all its intentionality, the ‘excel projection’ gave its controllers a certain degree of ritual deniability. After all they just ran the numbers. If the targets were not achieved, the line managers and operators were to be held accountable. 


With excel power, even the sub-rosa parts of business became a sound and light show - dynamic, dramatic and dangerous. The consumer reality became subservient to higher order lines like technology, supply and cost.
 

Marketing and management now suddenly demanded a different type of temperament. Without the excel seal of approval you were only a poet. 


By the 90s, the old order was being swept away as the millennium melted away into a sunset. Absolute novices, powered with the right to analyse and manipulate numbers—took over unassailable, solid, and essential brands. 


It was a revolution: new against old, analytical stars against storytellers, financial visionaries against business as usual. True or not, that’s how it was framed. Brand building, which used to be an institutionalised, specialized, creative, viscous activity—became everyone’s playing field. 


He who had the excel sheet controlled the dream. Financing something, anything, became the central economic activity.


Whilst the marketing culture at large was being dumbed down, the excel culture was getting smarter, more competitive, oppressive and, adamant in its pursuit of the ‘excel outcomes’.


From being the core of a business, the brand became a great abstraction. Businesses could be broken up, sold in parts, merged and dissolved.


A page of PowerPoint and a sheet of excel was all that mattered. 


Shubhranshu Singh is VP and CMO, Tata Motors CVBU. He writes Simply Speaking, a special column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.


Read More: <a href="https://www.storyboard18.com/brand-makers/i-am-more-hungry-for-artificial-imagination-than-for-artificial-intelligence-shubhranshu-singh-21029.htm">I am more hungry for artificial imagination, than for artificial intelligence: Shubhranshu Singh</a>

Excel - That is the powerpoint of it: Read Shubhranshu Singh's take on how Excel forever changed business and marketing

Everywhere you look, stock markets are ticketing away to new records. The S&P 500 hit an all-time high in January and then vaulted to above 5,000 in February when Nvidia released its solid results. Europe's STOXX 600 l, Japan's Nikkei 225 and the Indian Sensex and Nifty are all at record highs. 

This boom is very significantly based on the assumption that Al will transform the global economy. Businesses the world over are already starting to experiment with Al tools and techniques. It is going to change not merely the ways of working but also the definition for entire industries. 

When the disruption hit business over the past five years, few could have predicted it would unleash innovations as redefining as AI-generative video. We often mistake AI for automation. What does Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) mean? Well, it means different things to different people, but the most important achievement that is causing the ferment is the current generation of advanced AI large language models such as ChatGPT, Bard, LLaMA and Claude. 

These pioneering models take on novel tasks they were not trained for and perform very well. That's why AI and supervised deep learning systems have now graduated to AGI. The key property of generality has already been achieved. The early AI systems were endowed with narrow intelligence able to concentrate on a single task. Their benchmark was attaining human level. MYCIN, only diagnosed and recommended treatment for bacterial infections. SYSTRAN only did machine translation. IBM’s Deep Blue only played chess and so on... 

Later deep neural network models trained with supervised learning such as AlexNet and AlphaGo successfully took on a number of tasks in machine perception and judgment that had long eluded earlier heuristic, rule-based or knowledge-based systems. But emerging applications like OpenAI’s remarkable text-to-video generator Sora can potentially reshape marketing down to its foundations. 

Sora’s uncanny ability to transform simple text into strikingly polished 4K video unlocks new frontiers for brands and agencies to drive engagement and ROI through visually dynamic campaigns personalised at scale. The potential for localised video content across languages, demographics and sectors appears boundless. As consumer attention increasingly shifts to digital video, reducing production barriers promises democratisation for small and large businesses to better compete in an intensely visual age. 

In 2022, the projected global market revenue for online video advertising will already stand at a staggering $75 billion. As India's digital maturity and smartphone adoption continue to accelerate, Sora-like AI video solutions can no longer be ignored by forward-thinking marketers keen to engage this new generation of mobile-first consumers. 

Such flexibility could allow marketers to swiftly generate product demonstrations, concept videos, explainers, advertisements, and other visually immersive content tuned precisely to messaging goals. This includes dynamic personalisation at scale, like showing clothing on varied models or positioning products in customised lifestyle settings. No longer limited by production bottlenecks, marketers can pursue more experimentation and iteration to better the engagement. 

Indian edtech firms, for instance, can leverage Sora to develop personalised and cost-effective educational video content tailored to regional curriculum needs. E-commerce players can minimise product uncertainty by generating virtual try-on videos to engage customers better. Even specialised product categories like jewellery or textiles can showcase intricate details easily ignored in images and text. 

I am not a doomer but a boomer. I feel the river flows only in one direction. Sora does raise valid concerns around copyright, ethics and misinformation, and these need continued vigilance. However, if scaled responsibly, Sora represents a democratising force, levelling the playing field for smaller brands otherwise excluded from sophisticated video campaigns. Just as DIY website builders and email services expanded access decades ago, AI video production can drive greater creativity, diversity and healthy competition across the marketing ecosystem. 

Tapping emerging technologies has always required the courage to envisage new possibilities combined with the wisdom to navigate risks. With careful steering, Sora-like winds can take a marketer on a voyage never conceived. The time for exploration has arrived. 

But as remarkable as Sora may be, we must acknowledge it represents only the earliest glimpses of an AI-driven video frontier still very much in its infancy. While capabilities today focus predominantly on transforming text to video, rapid innovation drives systems towards more interactive, multi-modal interfaces accepting verbal commands and even hand motions as inputs. Imagine marketers developing a storyboard scene-by-scene with verbal or textual instructions only, fluidly bringing product concepts and creative visions to life without extensive production requirements. Systems like Sora hint at a not-too-distant future where video personalisation and iteration can be dictated in real-time by marketers themselves, optimised dynamically for campaign goals. 

Accessibility barriers around professional video production may fall fast. Emerging tools like RunwayML already enable those with zero coding or design experience to train AI models on custom datasets for tailored video generation applications. As synthetic video creation grows more commoditised, expect new crowdsourced marketplaces around stock video elements and datasets to minimise production costs further. 

<a href="https://www.storyboard18.com/watch-listen/media-dialogues-with-storyboard18-ai-and-digital-accelerating-tata-motors-cv-brand-and-business-21131.htm">Watch: Media Dialogues with Storyboard18: AI and digital accelerating Tata Motors CV brand and business</a>

Tactical implementation of ideation could accelerate dramatically, freeing resources towards more strategic messaging experimentation. However, such rapid iteration heightens the risks of perpetuating societal biases if governance does not keep pace. Thoughtful oversight around training, data curation, model evaluation protocols and source transparency remains critical. 

We must also examine concerns around generative video more holistically within broader technology regulation debates. Beyond Sora itself, tensions simmer around legal frameworks struggling to balance free speech, privacy, public safety and innovation in an increasingly complex digital ecosystem. Whatever legislative paths India pursues , will profoundly influence the AI landscape regionally and globally. 

It may benefit policymakers to assess generative video governance within segmented contexts rather than one-size-fits-all decrees. Blanket bans risk overreach that stifles progress and accessibility. More pragmatic guardrails tailored across consumer, commercial and research domains could nurture innovation responsibly. Policy, too, must progress iteratively, evolving dynamically alongside technological change. 

For all the risks, the promise of expanded video creativity and personalisation should not be readily dismissed, especially within a youthful, smartphone-native population like in India. Channelling energies into promoting AI literacy and ethical design principles may better serve the public than reactionary policies rooted in fear. If digital maturation has taught us anything this past decade, possibility scaffolded by commercially viable applications works wonders.

Shubhranshu Singh is the chief marketing officer of Tata Motors CVBU. Views expressed are personal.

Simply Speaking: Importance of AI literacy over reactionary policies rooted in fear

In the theatre of modern commerce, the twin forces of generative AI and Generation Z are not merely actors; they are the scriptwriters, redrawing the boundaries of consumer engagement and corporate strategy. As businesses acclimate to this new order, a geopolitical dimension unfurls, adding layers of complexity to the narrative. This is a tale of innovation, consumer consciousness, and the relentless march of nations vying for digital supremacy — a tale in which India is poised to play a pivotal role.


The ethos of GenZ — a demographic sculpted by the internet's omnipresence and the digital age's promises — is global in its essence yet nuanced in its local expressions. These young consumers, wielding substantial influence over market trends and brand trajectories, are now interwoven into the broader tapestry of international relations and corporate diplomacy. Their demands for authenticity, social responsibility, and digital fluency compel brands to navigate a world where cultural acumen is as crucial as technological expertise.


Generative AI, once the domain of science fiction, now sits at the fulcrum of a new world order. Its content creation and data analysis prowess has ushered in an era of personalised consumer experiences at a previously unimaginable scale. However, this technological leap forward is not without its geopolitical implications. The race for AI dominance has become a proxy for national power, with data sovereignty and technological innovation being central to nations' strategic interests.

India's Strategic Play

With its tech-savvy population and robust digital infrastructure, India stands at an intriguing crossroads. The nation's commitment to digital growth, exemplified by initiatives like 'Digital India', has catalysed its emergence as a crucible for AI development and application. Indian brands and businesses, therefore, find themselves at the heart of a confluence of global technological trends and a vibrant, diverse consumer base that is quintessentially GenZ.


The country's geopolitical stance is characterised by a push for self-reliance and a quest for technological autonomy. In the realm of AI, this translates into fostering indigenous innovation while navigating the complex web of international data governance and cross-border digital policies. Indian companies are increasingly conscious of the global narratives shaping consumer expectations, which now include the ethical use of AI, the protection of data privacy, and the fostering of digital ecosystems that can thrive amid international competition and cooperation.


The substance of this dialogue is critical. For instance, India's stance on data localisation — mandating that data be stored within national borders — is a stance that reflects a deeper assertion of sovereignty in the digital space. It's a move that resonates with a global trend towards data nationalism but also raises important questions about the balance between open digital markets and the protection of citizen data.


In this geopolitical shuffle, the role of brands extends beyond mere commercial interests; they become envoys of cultural exchange and technological prowess. The corporate strategies of Indian brands are not just about capturing market share but also about showcasing India's unique blend of technological ambition and cultural richness to a global audience. 


India Vs. Others 

The recent agreement on AI development reached by 28 countries at the Bletchley Park summit showcases how India is aligning itself with international efforts to manage AI risks responsibly. According to the agreement, countries including the US, Australia, China, and members of the EU have recognised the need for international cooperation to ensure AI is developed and used in safe and beneficial ways for the global community.


For India, this global dialogue is particularly timely. The country plans to propose a broad framework for the regulation of AI at the December summit, aiming to secure agreement from all signatories of the Bletchley Declaration and the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI).


In contrast, the EU has taken a more cautious approach with the proposed AI Act, focusing on risk assessment and user safety. At the same time, the US has solicited industry input to manage AI risks, and China has emphasised state control in alignment with national security objectives. 


As we look towards a future where digital frontiers are continuously redefined, the interplay between generative AI, the digitally-native GenZ, and the geopolitical ambitions of nations like India presents a rich mosaic of challenges and opportunities. For brands, this is an era of corporate statesmanship, where their actions must resonate within the marketplaces they serve and the global stage they inhabit.


Brands that will thrive in this complex interstice are those that recognise their role in a larger narrative — one that encompasses the aspirations of a young generation and the strategic imperatives of their home nations. It is a call to action for brands to become not just purveyors of products but ambassadors of innovation, ethics, and cultural empathy.


As we stand at the precipice of a new era, where the confluence of generative AI, an empowered GenZ, and a reshaping global stage beckon, the narrative is far from complete. This is not an end but a beginning — a prologue to a story where technology and humanity intertwine in unprecedented ways. 


With its vibrant tapestry of culture and technology, India is not just a participant but a potential protagonist in this unfolding saga. The question now is how brands will adapt and how they will lead in crafting a future where innovation, ethics, and global harmony coalesce. The stage is set, the actors are ready, and the world eagerly awaits the next act in this transformative play of digital evolution.

Shubhranshu Singh is the chief marketing officer, Tata Motors. He writes Simply Speaking, a weekly column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

Simply Speaking: The Algorithmic Accord - AI, youth, and the new global paradigm

Physicist Michael Goldhaber coined a term in 1997 to describe how he believed the world economic order would change in the internet age. He noted that the present world economy is often characterized as an information economy. However, economies get built on underlying scarcity, whereas information is truly more abundant than ever. 

What is scarce is people’s attention. 

Therefore, he predicted correctly that “seeking attention” would become a core activity of the digital age. He called it the “attention economy” where attention is not only a resource but a currency: users pay for a service with their attention. Goldhaber wrote that the global economy is shifting from a material-based economy to one based on the capacity of human attention.

All consumer decisions are meditated even when seemingly impulsive. Hence we must ask:

Is influence proportional to fame? 

Is media exposure as a driver of celebrity sustainable even if effective? 

Why does public attention lead to sell-ebrity ? 

Has public visibility as a means for personal branding become a free for all in the age of the all-pervasive internet?  

Is the notion of authenticity central to evaluations of content or is it more a worthy mention than an honest concern?

As brands worked to build themselves out into social media personalities, individuals on social media worked to simplify and distil their personalities into easily understandable personal brands. 

At an exhibition in Stockholm in 1968, the American pop art pioneer Andy Warhol wrote: ‘In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.’ Back then it was an inconceivable, outrageous idea but now reality has caught up. There are no socially acknowledged benchmarks for fame. Virality can propel anyone to instant fame in a blaze of glory. Then, the next dud video takes the star back to relative anonymity.

Now, a run of successful self-shot videos can propel an individual to the orbit of a celebrity creator multi-millionaire. In Warhol’s time, fame was awarded to a few by a small set of gatekeepers -editors, publishers, culture builders, public relations folks. You had to be admitted. Achievement led to admission. And admission, in turn, led to achievement. There was no way to storm the gates. Today, a single, super-fast, ever-mutating social media app with Chinese ownership with an inscrutable algorithm is the biggest fame engine. 

The science of fame building in terms of network has been very sharply summarised by Albert-László Barabási  in his book The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success.

“A few years ago, physicist César Hidalgo and his team devised a way to rank the most famous people of all time. The criterion used for the Pantheon project was the number of languages a person’s Wikipedia pages appear in. The most famous musician? Jimi Hendrix. The most famous American? Martin Luther King Jr. Perhaps inevitably, the classical Greek philosopher Aristotle heads the entire list.

Among celebrities, reality-television star Kim Kardashian comes 14th, although her fame clearly outweighs any recorded achievement “ wrote Mark Buchanan in his review in  Nature, the leading science journal

Barabási claims that such paradoxes are reflective of deep social laws that can be understood through science. Success and recognition in many realms may have only a tenuous link to effort, skill or inherent excellence. We need to test how influence and attention flows through social networks.

TikTok is not charmed by prior celebrity stature. Anyone has the potential to go viral on TikTok. Its algorithm works on what’s called a ‘content graph’, looking at what folks previously engaged with, rather than a ‘social graph’ – based on followership. That makes it possible for a video to go super-viral from very ordinary origins. 

TikTok’s rise is meteoric. Yes, it’s creating a new generation of celebrities – many of whom are younger than the YouTubers who came before them. But the rise of TikTok has wider ramifications, arising from the fact that it was made by, and is still owned by, a Chinese company.

The way we consume content is closely linked to our lifestyles. Today, we live in an on-demand economy. When we care, we share. Mobility is on demand be it Uber, Lyft or Grab. Tinder, Bumble, Raya help us date. Music on demand is a rage be it Spotify or Apple Music. We eat on demand with Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Swiggy or Zomato. We watch content on demand and YouTube is a universe of its own. But there is also Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. We rate services and value experiences. This consumer pays for exactly what he wants and when he wants it. This is consumption maximisation and not demand minimalism. The new ‘on demand’ consumer refuses to pay for anything not needed. We increasingly cut the cord from cable TV companies and use ad blockers. 

Therefore, the idea of bringing advertising closer to entertainment and pop culture was always a theoretical no brainer but never a practical choice of the mainstream players. The big spenders invested in branded content as a fad. Through till Y2K, the global mainline agencies carried the mental baggage of the golden era of print and television.

There is no denying that, following the success of campaigns such as BMW Films many similar attempts by brands and talented creatives resulted in failure. 

Meanwhile Facebook and then Instagram grew at a never before seen pace.

Then, into such a playing field walked in TikTok.

In Jan 2013, about a year after Zhang Yiming founded ByteDance , a video sharing platform Vine, that was TikTok’s spiritual forefather, came into existence. Every video on Vine had to be 6.4 seconds or less. It gave birth to many of online video’s biggest stars, and had a longer-lasting effect much beyond its actual existence. Without Vine, we wouldn’t have the stars Shawn Mendes, Jake Paul, or Lele Pons. But it was ahead of its time, when social media wasn’t the established entertainment platform. 

Traditional media snootily dismissed any stars of the small screen then with the moniker ‘e-celebrities’ or ‘social media stars.’ This was before YouTubers presented TV shows, sold out stadiums on tours, and topped the music charts. 

Vine became a fountain of creativity. Vine’s format had an essential similarity to newspaper comics. There was a set up and pay off in 3 to 4 frames, at best. If you loved it, you’d make it a daily fixture. If you didn’t like it, you hadn’t invested much time in it anyways. Short-form content had never been done, and a whole crop of people learned how to make entertaining content in 6.4 seconds.

Two interconnected things in particular matter– the length of the videos, and the algorithm used to serve up those videos. The length played off the attention spans helping in an era of multi-tasking distractions.   

Think about the amount of content it’s possible to consume in an hour on TikTok. If each video lasts 60 seconds maximum, that’s 60 videos, back-to-back, encountering 60 new faces and opening a door into their world – and an opportunity to follow them further and propel them to superstardom. Contrast that to YouTube, where the average length of videos is getting longer and longer hence harder to build a following. 

What grabs attention immediately and comes with a novel twist provides a dopamine rush that’ll carry you through to the next video and your fingertips in an endless scroll can flick by at will.

An abundance of information is correlated with exhausting our attention while our urge for newness causes us to collectively switch topics more rapidly.

In the new world of TikTok, Andy Warhol’s infamous 15 minutes of fame have, quite literally, become 15 seconds.

And we have just begun. 

Shubhranshu Singh is vice president, marketing - domestic & IB, CVBU, Tata Motors. He writes Simply Speaking, a weekly column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

Simply Speaking: The T20-fication of content; TikTok and the fame to flame story

Firstly, I sensed like there were two parts to the entire Olympics of creativity - One that spoke of the message and the other that was all about the means. The bigness and the buzz aside, I wish for Cannes to get even more revitalized as the apex festival of creativity rather than an expo of digital plumbing and ad tech.

Kraft Heinz would be a perfect Ad for Cannes itself, swinging back like a pendulum from 3G Capital’s mandated zero-based budgeting to being a big winner for creativity. Its partnership with with Gut, the agency made headlines this year. That’s acute business sense feeding into a renewed culture of creativity. Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) as Creative Marketer of the Year for a second year in a row arrived with all the effervescence and the froth it deserved.

I sensed that creativity is being seen through the lens of effectiveness and results. Brands have over purposed themselves to excuse creative license. Business needs payback. 

I was head of Jury for the APAC Effies this year, and every time I had to remind myself and the jury that results and effectiveness was above all other criteria. That great results were garnered using creatively enriching ways was a clincher or a bonus. The Cannes weightage is the other way around. The end list is equally credible. 

Tech, diversity and inclusion was pretty much at the heart of the agenda and not something auxiliary, novel or exotic. The biggest headline from Cannes was ‘The arrival of AI’. The mainstage takeaways were broadly positive qualifying it as a developing but vast area which will be a means and an end at the same time. 

There were no awards for AI-generated campaigns, yet but I saw AI and machine inspired creative expressions being generated and shared. 

It was good to see the absence of doom and gloom but no votes were cast for whether generative AI is a force for good or evil. I imagine in its day, a Xerox machine, a graphics software package and the internet itself could have been qualified as bigger and more imminent disruptions or tools. And I am serious. The marketing fraternity’s self-convened leadership has an adoration of the icing more than the cake. The younger talent may have a more balanced response, I suppose. 

I heard Sir Martin Sorrell say he feels there is no case for 10,000 media planners in the world and that an algorithm will always do a better job than a 25 year old media planner. I agree and I sense he knows this is already a ‘pending past due date’ reality.

Clay Shirky said something along the lines that society changes when it adopts new tools, not when it invents them. I think we must keep our focus on the technology adoption cycle. Hype hurts developments more than it hurts corporations. Look at Meta and look at Metaverse. Nobody talks about trains that arrive on time, so therefore they’re all late! If our ancestors had assumed the pose of Rodin’s The Thinker every time they had to decide whether to flee a predator or an enemy, humanity would have become extinct a long time ago. Urgency of assimilation is more important than urgency of innovation. 

So, can any man who buys a salon kit be a stylist? There is no entry barrier to harnessing generative AI to build creative assets, iterate and ideate, refine audiences, measure outcomes and engineer relevance into every prospect and customer interaction. 

That YouTube, Google, Amazon and TikTok were the biggest destination pavilions acknowledged that we are living in a digital advertising world but programmatic spending was under discussion. Wasted ad spends, programmatic transparency, inclusion lists and bright-listing of publications were spotlighted. 

Given where the world spends its digital money, I think a hard look at made-for-advertising sites based on the quality of the user experience and the ad to edit ratio is much required. The media agencies can seem like the pied piper leading both clients and platforms to a lower payoff. I am not being alarmist, just mindful.

There is an acute need for advertisers to tap into unduplicated reach through whichever publishers in digital, video and audio deliver it. Trusted news sources are top of the list.

More and more brands are dedicating budgets toward minority owned media outlets and taking a more thoughtful approach to media spend. This is an excellent step forward in creating a fairer environment and will only go farther as the industry adopts new standards for identifying these outlets and scaling campaigns. The separation between editorial and advertising must be reclaimed for journalistic purity’s sake. But, we must think of the world where as advertorials fade, so would many of the storied publications.

I felt the entire discussion on digital in a world of enforced privacy was a bit muted. It isn’t about the regulatory environment, privacy expectations or auditability. It’s about rebuilding the tech stack with a privacy-and-compliance-first mindset across all consumer touch points. Marketing in the post-cookie world will take cross-industry collaboration. The principle of advertising as an unavoidable interruption of the content experience rose from the ashes stronger than ever with the growth of digital media.

Publishers will scramble to leverage first-party data. Brand advertisers will need an understanding of the right audiences. There will be a new marketplace of first- and second-party data vendors set to change the future of buying. Apple is cracking down on tracking on Safari and iOS. Google's final deadline for cookie deprecation is quickly approaching. All of us must prepare for cookie-less solutions.

There are some fools who find it impossible to sleep when they are passengers; apparently they can sleep only when they’re the driver!

Finally, if you haven’t already, do get influencers aboard. The creator economy is mainstream. Influencer work is the main campaign in many cases especially lifestyle, alcobev, luxury and fashion. The creator economy is a big business, and after gaming, it best delivers messaging in an environment of attention. 

It was a privilege to be there at Cannes. It was a personal trip for me cutting days out of a family vacation. My daily trek from the, not so nearby, Mandelieu was not the easiest. I was high on ideas more often than on expensive wine. The arrangements at all festival venues were first rate. McDonald’s fed me many a McSwirl and convinced me of in moment marketing.

In conclusion, as I took the train to Paris, I thought of the debates on the rules of engagement, part industry talk, part frenemy warning. I was reminded that the world is in a withdrawal from globalisation and growth is the key deliverable. All of us are impacted by fragmentation. 

Then, as the afternoon sun bounced off the shimmering waters on the Côte d'Azur, I remembered that attention is the mother of memory. In my world, it’s the brand first and always and my business is producing wow ideas that scale.

Then I ordered a beer. Yes , We Cannes !

Shubhranshu Singh is vice president, marketing - domestic & IB, CVBU, Tata Motors. He writes Simply Speaking, a weekly column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

Simply Speaking: All about the Olympics of creativity

Building reach is the start of all glory in marketing. Reach before you preach. Get famous before you try to persuade. Facts feed narratives that in turn get woven into stories. These stories create a reputation, and a brand is nothing but a ‘reputation of reputations’. This is taken as sine qua non across categories. When it comes to prestige and luxury, the essence holds but mutates in form. In this world, the knowing must invoke the craving not the having. It is important for luxury to remain accessible at a stretch. Those who desire desperately often never end up deserving, that’s the cruel reality. This need to belong to the ‘in crowd’ is what fuels the fire of desire.Reach many but be accessible to a few.

A velvet rope has become the very hard boundary between the in and the out crowd. The red carpet lies beyond this red rope. A ‘velvet rope’ is used literally of course, but even more so figuratively. It marks the barrier which may be only a foot or two off the ground yet it may take a lifetime or even generations to cross over.

The velvet rope is credited to George and Louise Boldt when they opened the first Waldorf hotel, later to become The Waldorf Astoria, on 33rd Street and 5th Avenue in New York City in 1894. But it was at another New York legend, Studio 54, in the year 1977 that Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, made it a high symbol of ‘admission restricted’ as the marker of status and cool. The dance club ran for four short years, but it burned into collective memory the desire is to make it past that velvet rope and belong to the select few.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous, existentialist dictum ‘L’enfer c’est les autres’ – ‘Hell is other people’ can be a benchmark for successful modern ‘prestige roping’. Make no mistake, the ultimate goal for all prestige brands is maximization of revenue but being rare and scarce builds and protect a brand’s equity. Traditional mass marketing is about serving needs, prestige brand building is the business of creating desire. Their job is to keep us wanting …to stand and shine above and beyond their competition, creating an allure that goes beyond reason. The desperation should be such that the response can only be a rush to splurge and indulge.

The one major defining conflict -largely subconscious- is that between individualists and collectivists. A modern prestige powerhouse brand relieves this contradiction by only staying slightly out of reach, balancing inclusivity with exclusivity. You are never permanently in but never out forever either. Forever longing for a sense of belonging. 

How is this balance between inviting proximity and maintaining distance made possible? The brand expansion is always done top-down. The showcase targets are very aspirational to the volume targets. Immense care is taken to nurture and foster relationships with a small base of tastemakers and trendsetters. Growth is best when gradual, carrying along original fans as continuous proof of their superiority and desirability as well as advocates/evangelists to help them target and convert the broader market. 

The entire approach must preserve a sense of rarity, a feeling of exclusivity strategically controlling supply to foster demand. Underlying it all is a simple outpricing of some consumers to give the rest a feeling of being in. Broadly the quest for status via consumption is an intended outcome of prestige brand consumption. It signals that we have access, to something exciting, enriching and more fun.

Man is pulled by two contradictions the need to belong and the need to stand out. The urge for exclusivity assumes that the others will know of it. Even when exceptional, man wants recognition of the envious collective. To make bonds, connections and emotive associations is the nature of social man but all the while he craves the halo of singularity. Indeed, we are unified in our hunger for exclusivity.

The MINI brand is a great example of this act particularly since its re-launch in 2001, with the BMW group, A classic case on how to market without over-marketing. They built desirability and equity while growing at double digit rates, all the while adhering to a rule of ambiguity that folks buy into the lifestyle with the MINI, but they need a lifetime to belong. 

When it launched in the US, it deliberately limited sales to 25,000 cars of the 200,000 that were then produced annually. Of course, they wanted to conquer this most important market of all, but they wanted to build and protect their elusive-exclusive equity at the same time. A tightrope indeed, and quite a gamble, but it paid off. Playing hard to get and yet, or rather because of it, making it all the way to the top. They created a sense of scarcity and exclusivity of belonging to a certain aspirational elite of creative and cultured sophisticates. 

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller describes this as ‘the two audiences’ in his seminal work Spent. Advertisements for accessible luxury goods typically find themselves in magazines with broad circulation. The brand can reasonably assume that most people reading that magazine are unlikely to make a purchase, but widespread advertising serves the goal of informing wider social circles of a brand’s lofty status. Everyone knows that BMW is the “ultimate driving machine” even though less than 1% of us has ever driven one. “The advertising of luxury brands educates the general population to help elevate the status of those -and only those - who can afford their products” points out Miller. 

This broad, socially widespread, acculturation is necessary for signalling to take place. This is key for all industries, from cars, to handbags, to clothing. As Miller states, “They advertise in Vogue and GQ not so much to inform rich potential consumers that they exist, but to reassure rich potential consumers that poorer Vogue and GQ readers will recognise and respect these brands when they see them displayed by others.” 

The results are brands and products that project an aura. Luxury, especially affordable luxury, unlocks the power of symbolism by associating brands and products with certain desired attributes. Luxury brands do this through building this symbolic meaning not only in the minds of their target set, but in the broader public as well. 

For brands in the luxury sector, attributes tend to centre around wealth, status and personal style. However, with the right strategy and execution, any characteristic can be symbolised. Luxury brands may have perfected the symbolism game, but they’re not the only players. Using a similar playbook, brands in all industries can harness this creation of aspiration.

Status is an elusive concept. It spans across social interest, attraction and deference. In any species of social primate, a higher-status animal is simply one who is looked at and groomed more often by others and who is solicited more often as a friend, ally, or mate. Robin Dunbar in his book ‘Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language’ has shown that we humans use verbal grooming—talking and trading gossip—instead of physical grooming to ingratiate ourselves with higher-status individuals. Possession of brands advertise one’s status and acts as status symbol. But the awe and status are conferred unto us by other people. It dwells in the minds of observers. 

Brands that confer such exclusivity are – by design – being false. They have perfected the balancing act between keeping folks in and keeping even more folks out.

The highest order of exclusivity is, of course, that which cannot be bought.

Simply Speaking: Velvet rope - the tightrope between longing and belonging

“In modern thought, (if not in fact)

Nothing is that doesn’t act,

So that is reckoned wisdom which

Describes the scratch but not the itch.”

- Anonymous Stanza referenced in Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man when mentioning Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’

Our lives, careers, reputations and identities are now essentially digital constructs. We must understand this well whether it attracts or repels us. The internet is impacting our methods and capacities for concentration, attention, interpretation, assimilation etc. Our monkey brains are now distracted by a hundred lit screens and links. Social media has folded inside out from being a circle of friends to an always on performance of manicured imagery on a stage. Its cadence is faster, its content shorter. It is now enabled through learning which humans cannot match.

This is not a Luddite scare. It is a well rationalised body of knowledge. We must appreciate it to be able to use it well. As early as 2011, Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, painted a dire picture of the effect of the Internet on our mind. Since then, smartphones and cheap bandwidth has made the internet truly ubiquitous. It is the phone screen that has become the canvas of our lives. 

I have been a student and practitioner of communication. I have read many of the 20th- century media theorists and thinkers namely — Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer Marshall McLuhan, Umberto Eco, Walter Ong, Noam Chomsky, Neil Postman, Shoshana Zuboff. All of them foretold or saw this reality. Zuboff’s termed it ‘The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism’ in her eponymously titled book.


“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us” said Marshall McLuhan and his axiom that “the medium is the message” is fully manifest. McLuhan’s view is that mediums matter more than content. Media is impacting its own matter. Mediums are not neutral, and content is anything but king. An oral culture is distinct from a written culture. Television turned everything into entertainment, and social media taught us to think with the crowd. Do not imagine that exceptions will make the rule.

It is the common rules that govern all creation and consumption across a medium that change people and society. Eventually the medium acquires a vice like grip over content. Switch on any news channel and keep aside the search for ideological neutrality, objectivity etc. Just see the format - the look, tone, temperament of the anchors, the graphics, the conflict, the decibel levels, the absence of depth, the sensationalism. This is true across the world, in varying degrees. Why? Simply because it is a business. The news content is assessed for return via ratings in every minute of its existence.

In his deeply impactful book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” published in 1985, Postman argued that junk television is the belief system that every subject in the world is a branch of entertainment. And there is no biz like show biz. “Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.” said Postman, in an aggrieved, moralising tone.

Entertainment subsumes our expectations for everything. Viable candidates in all fields of life must be able to capture the screen. Media platforms now algorithmically obsess the world with the same narrow spectrum of topics and sameness is now ingrained.

In the recent past, be it on account of the rise of radicalism, post-truth narratives, the absence of facts or the growth of manipulation – the mood turned against Silicon Valley. Henry Kissinger, no less, wrote a book on Artificial Intelligence. Elon Musk warned of its dire consequences. But for the most part, the spotlight has been on successful billionaires, corporations and methods. It has not been on the development and direction of technology itself.

The pace of development is such that anyone armed with only facts becomes outdated soon. A generic, fact-based critique is attacked as Luddite. The furore on privacy is a bit passe. Generative AI is only accelerating the mode of compliant dullness. Where is the freedom to choose?

Social media is a show cabinet for the individual. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist claims that the way the Instagram works is changing how teenagers think. The need for approval of how they look and what they say and what they’re doing, is forever increasing. The view of self is now constructed from online evaluation of others. Twitter compressed ideas to a finite set of alphabets. You originate but more often you join a discussion. How others react and respond decides your idea’s worth.

In 1970s for the first time, it became manifest that it’s attention not money that is our most precious commodity and a threatened resource. Economists Thomas Davenport and John Beck called it the driving force of our society and termed it ‘the attention economy’. Jenny Odell’s book - “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” was published in 2019. She explains how attention becomes driven by norm. You are compelled to pay attention to what others pay attention to.

Traditionally, fetching and retaining attention was the job of advertising agencies and media. Today, attention wielding is an essential life skill. In the past, the patent solution for breaking through noise was to be the loudest, flashiest, and most repetitive. Brands would pay for buying attention off a rate card. Institutions owned and gated information. Managers lived in a command-and-control organisational environment. Cut to date, and we’re all competing for one another’s attention in a downwards spiral.

We must think of this at the level of society and culture. Who we are and who we may become. The availability of technical means for self-projection and a wider community building has transformed social networks to social media. This social media turns everything we share into content. The playing field is catering to the lowest common denominator. Grand ideas for public consumption are tossed around in the same chaos as capsules of bawdy humour. The notion that our thoughts, beliefs, family, friends, feelings all feed a brand is yet not grasped and appreciated. Yet, every moment of our lives feeds the personal brand even if we do not wish it so.

This phenomenon has affected democratic politics. Governance is less critical than topicality and fame. Everything is measured in terms of likes and shares. The power a social network brings to politics is, by itself, something worthwhile. After all, fame is the basis for electoral politics. To become visible and develop a brand doesn’t not necessarily implicate skills, accomplishment, dedication to service or good governance. But the issue is that the algorithm rewards theatrics, spectacle and conflict. Performance, intelligence, institution building is secondary.

In an era of online personal brand management, distinctions between “who am I?” and “what I do for fame” fade away. Everything is temporary content. This flux invades our life, thoughts, work open to the world online.

To reduce ourselves to brands, however, is to do make us smaller than who we are.
Certainly, we will risk a typecasting of our own invention. We are not rated products. We are not popular currency. We are not a leader board. 

Think in terms of institutions, intrinsic merit, the majesty of the truth and empathy for others.

Is that only about becoming a popular brand, or can it mean more?

Shubhranshu Singh is vice president, marketing - domestic & IB, CVBU, Tata Motors. He writes Simply Speaking, a weekly column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

SIMPLY SPEAKING