By Siddharth Jalan

For decades, marketers have been addicted to the rush of a “big campaign.” I was the same. At the agencies I worked with before, we would fight to get onto those campaigns, partly for the thrill of seeing your work plastered across platforms and partly for the bragging rights at the next party. A killer idea, a burst of media spend, a “trophy” or two, and then silence until the next brainstorm. Just keep churning out filler content. 

But today, this just feels dated. One-off campaigns just don’t build brands anymore — narratives do. 

I’ve started seeing campaigns as chapters in an evolving story. Maybe this is because of the micro-adjustments we make with every social media post, allowing data to guide our steps. Or maybe it’s because brand memory is built by creating continuation. Don’t think of it as an isolated burst, but a steady rhythm that intensifies over time. 

Take Surf Excel as an example. ‘Daag Achhe Hain’ could have gone down as a campaign tagline which tried, succeeded, and drove off into the sunset. But even after two decades, the narrative lives on. Every year the campaign shifts and dances around the message, but it always calls back to the one breathing idea — stains are proof of a life lived. That’s cultural continuity for me. 

Narratives Compound, Campaigns Don’t

If we bring in the angle of social media and an attention-starved economy, the shelf life of a singular campaign can be brutally short. Because the short-lived sales bump is a fleeting recall. When the budget dries up, so does the attention. Unless it pulls people into the broader conversation, which helps accumulate meaning, trust, and equity over the years. 

Consider Coca-Cola’s ‘Share a Coke’, which created a cultural frenzy as people hunted for bottles with their names and shared them online. It generated massive engagement and sales in the short term. But once the novelty wore off and everyone had “found their name,” the hype naturally decreased. Coke still reuses the idea occasionally, but the initial campaign’s buzz was short and intense. Don’t know how many are still drinking Coke because of that campaign.

So Are “Campaigns” Really Dead? 

In a world that’s become a marketplace for distraction and where culture shifts daily, brands can’t afford to start from zero with every campaign. Consumers don’t reset their memory with each ad; they see a continuous brand. If your campaigns don’t connect as parts of a larger story, they vanish, just like that reel they watched five minutes ago. 

And here’s where maybe social media changed things. Platforms don’t just amplify a campaign, they stretch it, remix it, and keep it alive long after the media spend is over. A TikTok trend, an Instagram reel, a meme, these are today’s micro-chapters, giving campaigns afterlives they never had before. But, again, they only endure if they’re anchored in a larger narrative. Otherwise, they flash and fade like yesterday’s hashtag.

Because campaigns may win attention. Narratives, lived and shared across social feeds, win trust. And in the long game of branding, trust is the only currency that compounds.

(The author is the Founder & Chief Brand Strategist at SquidJC)