top of page

By:

Prateek Sethi

1 October 2024 at 3:15:42 am

Too Much Content, Too Little Craft

In the age of user-generated content, Indian automotive brands must rediscover the craft of storytelling amid a sea of visual noise. By 2026, India’s automotive brands are producing more visual content than at any point in their history. Scroll through social-media feeds and one encounters an endless stream of gleaming SUVs tackling Himalayan passes, hatchbacks threading through monsoon traffic, and owners proudly posing beside their new machines. Launch calendars are crowded. Marketing...

Too Much Content, Too Little Craft

In the age of user-generated content, Indian automotive brands must rediscover the craft of storytelling amid a sea of visual noise. By 2026, India’s automotive brands are producing more visual content than at any point in their history. Scroll through social-media feeds and one encounters an endless stream of gleaming SUVs tackling Himalayan passes, hatchbacks threading through monsoon traffic, and owners proudly posing beside their new machines. Launch calendars are crowded. Marketing pipelines rarely rest. User-generated content (UGC) pours in from every corner of the country.   On the surface this abundance looks like progress. Engagement numbers are strong. Real owners are visible. Brands appear present in everyday life rather than confined to glossy advertisements. In a market where purchase decisions are often shaped by peer opinion as much as by engineering specifications, the rise of UGC seems both natural and welcome.   But beneath the sheer volume lies a growing problem. While automotive brands have embraced participation, many have diluted coherence. The result is a visual ecosystem rich in quantity, but increasingly inconsistent in quality, tone and intent. Faked authenticity has been prioritized and often at the cost of craft, clarity, and brand memory. Visual storytelling, once shaped by deliberate craft, has become fragmented.   The next phase of automotive storytelling in India will not be about choosing between professional production and user-generated spontaneity. It will be about learning how to shape both.   The UGC paradox User-generated content has undeniably transformed automotive communication. After all, nothing conveys credibility quite like a real owner describing a long highway drive, or capturing a dusty trail from behind the wheel.   In India, this authenticity carries particular weight as buyers often rely heavily on community recommendations.   Yet, today, brands are encountering what might be called the ‘UGC paradox’ wherein engagement is high, but recall is weak. Content is abundant, yet visual identity is fragile and coherent storytelling becomes harder to sustain. Over time the brand ceases to speak and instead merely hosts.   Part of the problem lies in the relentless pressure to remain visible. Digital platforms reward frequency and algorithms favour those who post constantly. For marketing teams, the temptation to keep feeding the machine is strong.   But brands are not algorithms and visibility alone is not communication. In India’s fiercely competitive automotive market, where mechanical differences between vehicles are narrowing and emotional appeal increasingly shapes purchasing decisions, indiscriminate content production carries real strategic risks.   Endless Content The first is the erosion of premium perception. Even mass-market brands rely on a certain aura of aspiration. When a brand’s feed becomes a chaotic mix of uncurated images and videos, that aura can quietly fade.   The second is the loss of visual distinctiveness. When every manufacturer shares the same kinds of owner clips - cars against sunsets, SUVs splashing through puddles, interiors filmed from shaky phones - brands begin to resemble one another.   The third risk concerns the most important marketing moment of all: product launches. These are events where companies invest heavily in production, messaging and design. Yet when surrounded by a constant stream of casual content, even these carefully orchestrated narratives struggle to stand out.   This is where the older discipline of visual stewardship needs rediscovering.   Production houses and visual-communication specialists were once central to automotive storytelling. Their role was not simply to film cars attractively but to translate engineering, aspiration and lifestyle into coherent visual narratives.   In the era of UGC, their relevance is returning but in a different form. The real purpose of great production lies in knowing which moments to elevate and which to leave untouched; understanding how raw material can be refined without losing its authenticity.   In a content environment saturated with owner footage and community contributions, curation counts. Someone must decide which user stories genuinely reflect the brand’s character and which do not.  These decisions cannot be made solely through dashboards or engagement graphs.   The craft of visual storytelling which is shaped by taste, cultural awareness and production experience remains indispensable. There persists a common suspicion that professional production inevitably undermines authenticity. Many marketers fear that involving specialists will ‘over-script’ reality or sterilise spontaneous moments.   Hybrid Approach In practice the opposite is often true. Modern production is less about control than direction. Rather than replacing real voices, skilled production partners can function as narrative editors. Their role is to translate everyday experiences into stories that carry emotional clarity and visual coherence. A subtle change in framing or a more deliberate rhythm of editing can transform a simple owner clip into something memorable.   This matters particularly in India, where visual cues often carry layered cultural meanings. Aspirational imagery, landscape symbolism and everyday lifestyle markers shape how audiences interpret a brand. Finesse, in other words, is not artificial. It is intentional.   The most future-ready automotive brands in India will not abandon UGC. They will architect around it. This hybrid approach allows brands to scale authenticity without sacrificing identity.   Production houses and visual communication experts play a critical role here in ensuring those voices collectively sound like the brand. Today, the most progressive automotive brands in India will recognize a simple truth that authenticity does not mean absence of craft.   As visual noise increases, brands that invest in refinement, coherence and storytelling leadership will stand apart.   User voices will remain essential, but without expert stewardship, they risk becoming fleeting moments of noise rather than lasting brand equity. And the role of production houses and visual communication specialists, far from diminishing, is evolving into something far more strategic as guardians of quality in an age of excess.   (The writer is founder and creative director at Trip Creative Services, an award-winning communication design house. Views personal.)

Silence! This Court is not in Session

The 71st National Film Awards will be remembered for the silence that buried a four-decade prize for cinema’s writers.


“Silence is Golden” goes the famous saying. But silence cuts both ways. “Silence is the unbearable repartee,” said G. K. Chesterton.  But in case of the 71st National Film Awards announced in August this year, silence has come like deadly arrows shooting out of a massive quill to attack 27 innocent authors who had entered their books on cinema for the Best Book on Cinema Award.

 

These authors, dedicated and committed in writing significant books shedding light on different aspects of Indian cinema, had entered their books for the coveted award. The wait stretched on to eleven months as entries closed in September 2024. But the three-member jury for the Best Critic Award and the Best Book on Cinema award was conspicuous by its absence at the PIB’s August 2 briefing while the press conference organized by the PIB blithely skipped over why the award had been dropped.

 

This award for the Best Book on Cinema was instituted 40 years ago but was never met with such complete silence. No one said that none of the books was deserving of the award. Or, that the jury had been disbanded and the Chairman had fallen very sick. This came from an insider.

 

Every author not only spent hours, research and dedication in the writing of the book, leaving aside (a) the struggle to get a publisher ready to publish a book on cinema which has a narrow market in terms of sales, (b) read the proofs and okay them, (c) organize the documents to go with the entry, (d) pay an entrance fee of Rs.5000+ besides (d) parcelling five copies of the book entered for the award which will never be returned. What happens to these entrants now? Will the five copies of their book entered along with the entrance fee be refunded by the National Awards organizers? Ethically, it is the entrants’ right to get back the books and the money because the award has been withheld without forwarding any reason for the same.

 

Among past winners of the same award have been graced by celebrity names like Vijaya Mulay, B.D. Garga, S. Jayachandran Nayar, Madhu Eravankara and many others including late actor Gopi. Books could be entered in any Indian language recognized by the Indian constitution. For regional languages a jury member did not know, he/she was asked to find out a master in the said language with a love for cinema in the city where he/she lived, and then vest on him the responsibility of going through the book with a tooth-comb and then decide on the quality of the book. This writer was once a jury member for this award so she knows.

 

What happened remains a mystery. Unless the committee deigns to reply to her emails, silence will have to stand in for explanation. If the award was to be scrapped, why invite entries? And if none of 27 books was deemed worthy, why not say so? (a claim hard to credit given the range and quality submitted)

 

Two entries, I can attest, were more than worthy: one a meticulous study of Sridevi’s work across four southern languages that doubled as a history of cinema in those states; the other a sweeping volume of 75 reviews charting Indian film over 75 years of independence.

 

Isn’t it really strange that Shahrukh Khan with his 32-year-long track record in Hindi cinema should have to share the Best Actor Award with a rank newcomer like Vikrant Massey never mind the latter’s excellent performance in Twelfth Fail? Equally strange that Shahrukh bagged the award for ‘Jawan’ - a film that raises strong questions not only about its qualitative elements but also about Khan’s performance as compared to his superb turns in ‘Swadesh’ or ‘Chak De India.’ I genuinely think Shahrukh Khan was more surprised for bagging Best Actor for a film whose sole aim was to rake in several crores within the first week of its release. Or did (as the yellow press would have it) Ashutosh Gowarikar, the main jury chairperson, try to compensate for his Swadesh actor not having won the award for his film? Think about this. As the late Ghatak kept on saying, “Learn to think. Practice thinking.”

 

(The author is a noted film scholar and a double-winner for the National Award for Best Writing on Cinema. Views personal)

 

 

Comments

bottom of page