In an exclusive piece for MediaBrief, Aditya Tibrewal, General Manager – Brand Solution Strategy – Mobile (Global) and Growth Businesses for India and MENA at AnyMind, writes about the need for brands to rethink festive advertising, the rise of active attention across mobile and gaming, and how interactive formats, AI-driven UGC and dynamic creative can create more meaningful consumer engagement. Read on.
Every festive season, the exact same type of brief finds its way to most strategy and creative teams. A global hero film, cropped to 9:16, a ‘Shop Now’ button bolted on, running across standard display, social, and OTT. It’s the same media plan every market uses, built around the same traditional funnels. It racks up impressions, but it rarely commands actual attention.
What this approach misses is a fundamental shift in Indian consumer behaviour: the smartphone isn’t primarily a screen for scrolling anymore. It is a screen for playing, creating, and engaging.
India has well over 500 million mobile gamers now. This isn’t a niche demographic hiding behind console controllers; it is the absolute mainstream. Nearly seven in ten players are between the ages of 18 and 34, and women represent a massive, fast-growing, daily-play share of that base. It’s practically a mirror of India’s entire mobile-first population.
“When the industry talks about personalization, planners often assume the answer is churning out fifty different ad variants. But with highly coded, premium interactive RMI units, that is incredibly inefficient.”
Now, layer the festive season on top of this. Daily active users surge. Session times spike, specifically clustered in the late evenings, right after the pooja, the shopping runs, and the family dinners wind down. Casual formats, puzzles, and simulation games see the sharpest lift because they fit how people actually socialize during festivals: in quick bursts, often in a group, passing the phone around.
At the exact moment a family finishes their evening rituals, they aren’t picking up their phones to aimlessly kill time. They are unwinding. They are leaning in. Most festive media plans are built to interrupt a passive scroll, which is why they fail to capture this genuine, high-intent dwell time.
The Era of Active Attention
This is where creative strategy needs to aggressively evolve. Inside a gaming environment, or even high-engagement non-gaming inventory, a user’s active attention span is already switched on before your ad even appears. We need to stop treating mobile ads as static interruptions and start treating them as immersive experiences.
Think about what is commercially scalable right now with Rich Media Interactive (RMI) formats. We have moved far beyond standard playable ads. We are looking at hands-free gaming experiences driven by gestures and voice commands.
Imagine a Diwali campaign where a user physically smiles at their camera or speaks a festive greeting into their microphone to unlock a reward or interact with a brand narrative. The novelty and deep immersion of these formats generate a level of active attention that standard social benchmarks simply cannot touch.
“The festive living room has changed. Co-viewing is a massive part of the Indian festive experience, which means Connected TV (CTV) and Live YouTube streaming have to be woven into this interactive ecosystem.”
Furthermore, we are moving firmly into the era of Branded AI UGC (Generative UGC). The smartest brands aren’t just broadcasting messages; they are letting users generate personalized, AI-driven festive greetings or avatars within the ad unit itself. The user creates something they actually own and immediately want to share across their WhatsApp family groups. You aren’t just serving an ad, you are facilitating cultural behaviour.
Intelligence Over Volume
When the industry talks about personalization, planners often assume the answer is churning out fifty different ad variants. But with highly coded, premium interactive RMI units, that is incredibly inefficient.
The modern approach to Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) isn’t about building endless ad versions. It is about running a single, high-impact, full-screen interactive master creative, where the DCO engine dynamically swaps out specific localized assets in real-time. The core interactive experience remains the same, but the narrative shifts—a gifting-led message for one segment, a discount-led asset for another, or a culturally specific greeting based on the user’s region. It is about intelligence built into a single unit, rather than just inflating the volume of creatives.
Beyond the Mobile Screen
Crucially, this behavioural shift isn’t restricted entirely to the 6-inch screen. The festive living room has changed. Co-viewing is a massive part of the Indian festive experience, which means Connected TV (CTV) and Live YouTube streaming have to be woven into this interactive ecosystem.
A consumer’s journey frequently starts with a high-impact interactive mobile ad and connects seamlessly to a shared CTV experience, or vice versa. The screen size changes, but the demand for active engagement remains constant.
“If there is one thing that should stick this festive season, it is this: stop asking how to adapt your global campaign for India. Ask what you would build if you started mobile-first, interactive-first, and India-first from day one.”
At AnyMind, and specifically through platforms like POKKT, this is the exact gap we spend our time closing. We focus on connecting this massive, behaviourally distinct audience across both gaming and premium non-gaming environments, serving them with immersive RMI formats that actually respect and utilize their attention, without brands losing the thread across five different vendors.
This isn’t just an India-only lesson. Whether it is Ramadan in Southeast Asia, Golden Week in China, or Lunar New Year across East Asia, the exact same mistake plays out anywhere a market has its own high-intent season. Brands localize the surface visuals but leave the underlying strategy entirely untouched.
If there is one thing that should stick this festive season, it is this: stop asking how to adapt your global campaign for India. Ask what you would build if you started mobile-first, interactive-first, and India-first from day one.
It is a harder brief. But it yields a fundamentally better outcome, this Diwali, and long after the diyas are packed away.
