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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.)

Why ‘Final Solution Should Be Discussed?

Final Solution

Some time ago, Anand Patwardhan, a documentary filmmaker chose the documentary Final Solution (2004) among “Ten Greatest Films of All Time” for Sight And Sound (BFI) placing it alongside brilliant works by several filmmakers across the world. Rakesh Sharma’s first reaction to the news was, “I never imagined that any of my films would ever be spoken of in the same breath as Patricio Guzman’s Battle for Chile, Wintonick’s Manufacturing Consent, John Pilger’s The War You Don’t See, Michael Moore’s Bowling for the Columbine or Avi Mograbi’s Avenge But One of My Two Eyes.” Earlier, Final Solution had won the Wolfgang Stautde Award (for Best Feature-length Film at Berlinale 2004 at its premiere, that no documentary ever won before or ever since.


Rakesh Sharma needs no introduction to Indians who have been following the human rights movement in the media. But Final Solution is not the beginning, and most certainly not the end of his journey that established him as one of the most outspoken and independent filmmakers who makes a strong statement against any violation of human rights. He fights with the powers-that-be and he fights with the censor board. His numerous awards won at international film festivals have not gone to his head. Rather, they have strengthened his determination to go ahead and make his statement in the best Aftershocks marked his return to documentary after a gap of 10 years. Though, today, Rakesh is better known for Final Solution that had to fight through a censor ban, he made an equally strong and powerful film, Aftershocks, before Final Solution.


Final Solution is a study of the politics of hate. Set in Gujarat during the period Feb/March 2002 - July 2003, the film graphically documents the changing face of right-wing politics in India through a study of the 2002 carnage in Gujarat in Western India. It specifically examines political tendencies reminiscent of the Nazi Germany of early 1930s. About what motivated him to make Final Solution, Rakesh says, “Post-911, we live in a world where politics of hate and intolerance has gained mainstream acceptance, even grabbed centre stage. The ‘War on Terror’ dominated the electoral discourse in the US presidential elections, with both candidates promising to hunt ‘em and kill ‘em better than the other.


The right wing seems to be tightening its stranglehold across Europe as well, a nationalism being fuelled by the anti-immigrant/anti-Moslem rhetoric. In a world where it has become legitimate to use fictitious intelligence to justify the bombing of innocents in Iraq, where it has become acceptable to launch precision bombs and rockets against non-“embedded” journalists, where shameless politicians divide up oil wells and farm out reconstruction contracts for their $36 million bonuses, where babies are killed and mutilated as acceptable “collateral damage”, we face a challenge greater than ever before. We have earlier lived through many dark periods in history, often justifying our barbarism by using similar rhetoric. Hate, despair, destruction and tragedy cannot possibly be the foundations of harmonious societies and a democratic world.


The Censors banned it but finally cleared it for public screening on the ground that it could incite communal flare-ups. Sharma had appealed to the board to send the film for a review. The Censor Board had previously said, “The film promotes communal disharmony among Hindu and Muslim groups and presents the picture of Gujarat riots in a way that may arouse communal feelings and clashes. Certain dialogues involve defamation of individuals. The entire picturisation is highly provocative.” But when the was shown on October 7, 2004, to the high-profile revising committee comprising Censor Board chairperson Anupam Kher, filmmaker Shyam Benegal, activist Teesta Setalvad, theatre personality Dolly Thakore and filmmaker Ashok Pandit, they said the film could be released without any change. The film has won the prestigious Wolfgang Staudte Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it also won the Special Jury Award.


One of the citations by one of the many awards the film has bagged goes like this. “It is an epic documentary focusing on a culture of hatred and indifference in the region of Gujarat, India. The simplicity, clarity and accuracy of the film enable viewers to reflect on the universality of the subject matter and to relate their own human attitudes to it. The filmmaker has chosen a documentary form that completely shuns the use of melodramatic effects and thus makes a stand against the omnipresent “infotainment; industry.”


His financial status though, is not even half as impressive as his grit, his string of awards and his fearlessness. “As a filmmaker, I am extremely poor. My savings have more or less run out. But I do not know what else to do except make films. I am improvising all the time with the tools I know a bit about, such as films and video, so that lack of funds does not become a serious block. I would love to make a funny documentary or a social-anthropological film on romance in changing times. I would to make a murder mystery too, and to play with a form where documentary and fictions merge, moving in and out seamlessly. But I have no choice when I meet people with sorrow in their eyes and hollowness in their spirits. So, I continue to remain an interventionist when something agitates me.”

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