In an exclusive piece for MediaBrief, Chandan Bagwe, Founder and CEO of C Com Digital, writes about India’s growing deepfake challenge, the rise of AI-generated avatars in advertising, and the fine line between synthetic media used responsibly and deceptively. Bagwe also shares insights on consent-led avatar marketing, the need for transparency and disclosure standards, and why trust, intent, and AI literacy will define the future of brand communication in the generative AI era.
In January 2024, a video of a famous Bollywood actor promoting a questionable investment scheme went viral on Indian WhatsApp groups. The voice, the expressions, and the mannerisms in the clip were all eerily accurate. It was, of course, completely made up. A fake video. Millions of people had seen it by the time the clarification came out, and a scary number of them had acted on it.
And yet, just a few months later, one of India’s largest FMCG companies used an AI-generated avatar of its brand ambassador to run a multilingual campaign across six regional markets — simultaneously, cost-effectively, and with measurable impact.
Same technology. Opposite intent. Worlds apart in outcome.
As someone who works at the intersection of digital marketing and emerging technology, I find myself navigating this paradox every single day. The question for India’s advertising and media industry is no longer whether AI-generated synthetic media will be used — it already is, widely. The real question is: how do we hold both truths simultaneously? That synthetic media can be weaponised to destroy trust, and that it can also be a powerful, responsible, creative tool?
India’s problem with Deepfakes is real
Cybersecurity researchers say that India is one of the top five countries in the world for deepfake content. There are three types of threats: financial fraud that uses fake celebrity endorsements; political misinformation that targets elections (for example, AI-cloned voices of politicians were used in the 2024 general elections); and non-consensual intimate images, which hurt women more than men.
What makes India particularly vulnerable is the scale and speed of social media consumption, combined with relatively low digital literacy in Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets. A synthetic video does not need to fool a media professional — it needs to fool someone scrolling through a family WhatsApp group at 11 PM. That bar, unfortunately, is far easier to clear.
The response from the government is slowly catching up. The IT (Intermediary Guidelines) Amendment Rules and the draft Digital India Act that was just sent out both talk about deepfakes, but there isn’t enough enforcement infrastructure or public awareness yet. There are rules for platforms like Meta and YouTube, but it’s still hard to find things on a large scale.
Also read: ASCI releases draft guidelines for responsible labelling of AI-generated content in advertising
Yet Avatars are transforming legitimate marketing
Step away from the misuse, and the legitimate potential of AI avatars in marketing is genuinely exciting. Consider what Indian brands are already doing.
Cadbury’s Not Just a Kadak Ad campaign used AI to allow small businesses to personalise their own ad featuring Shah Rukh Khan — a feat that would have cost crores in conventional production but was democratised through generative AI. Coca-India used an AI-generated version of their spokesperson for a regional festive campaign, reducing production timelines from weeks to days. Startups in the D2C space are using AI avatars as always-on spokespersons on their websites and social channels, cutting content costs by 60–70 per cent.
For marketers serving a market as linguistically diverse as India — 22 scheduled languages, hundreds of dialects — the avatar is not just a cost play. It is a reach play. An AI avatar trained on a single spokesperson can deliver a campaign in Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, and Odia in the same week. That is a capability that simply did not exist three years ago.
The divide is consent, transparency, and intent
So what separates responsible avatar marketing from the deepfake menace? Three things: consent, transparency, and intent.
Consent means the subject — the person whose face, voice, or likeness is being used — has knowingly agreed to the creation and deployment of their synthetic version. This seems obvious, but it is routinely violated. A contractual framework for AI likeness rights is something India’s entertainment and advertising industry urgently needs to formalise.
Transparency means the audience knows what they are looking at. The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has already issued guidelines recommending disclosure when AI has been used to create or modify content. This is the right direction. Markets like the EU are mandating watermarking of AI-generated content. India should move firmly in this direction as well.
Intent, of course, is what distinguishes the marketer from the fraudster. When a brand uses an avatar to communicate authentically with its audience — with the spokesperson’s knowledge and the audience’s awareness — it is a creative tool. When the same technology is used to impersonate, deceive, or defraud, it becomes a weapon.
What the industry must do
The advertising and media industry cannot outsource responsibility for synthetic media to regulators alone. We need to act within our own ecosystem. This means building AI literacy into teams — understanding not just how to use these tools but how to identify when they are being misused. It means standardising disclosure practices voluntarily, before compliance mandates force our hand. It means investing in provenance tools — technologies that embed metadata into AI-generated content so its origin can always be verified.
It also means recognising that brand safety in the AI age extends beyond social media adjacency. A brand whose spokesperson is cloned without consent suffers real reputational damage. Protecting against synthetic misuse is now a legitimate part of brand risk management.
The same tool, a different choice
The deepfake and the digital avatar are, at a technical level, siblings. What separates them is entirely human — the choices made about consent, transparency, and purpose. India’s digital economy is at a scale where synthetic media will only grow in volume and sophistication. The industry has an opportunity — and a responsibility — to lead on the right side of that growth.
Brands and agencies that use AI creatively while keeping in mind how it could be harmful will earn people’s trust over time. That balance isn’t a limit. In fact, it is the new creative brief.
Chandan Bagwe is the Founder & CEO of C Com Digital, a Mumbai-based digital marketing and AI communications agency. He has over two decades of experience in brand communications, digital strategy, and emerging technology adoption for Indian enterprises.
