Ambuja Cement

They don't make ads like this anymore...

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That’s the Nescafé jingle that has been humming in my head these last few days. I don’t even know when I heard it, probably caught it somewhere in the passing, but it just wouldn’t let go. And today I came across this old Amul ad, and just like that, I was back. Back to those IPL days a decade ago, those long summer school vacations where the same ads would play again and again on loop. You knew them by heart because you had no choice but to watch them. Those days feel so far away now.

But here’s the thing, it’s not just Amul or Nescafé. Remember the Vodafone ZooZoo ads? The Ambuja Cement one? These weren’t just advertisements. They were events. And I can still recall them almost frame by frame, as if I just watched them yesterday. Now ask me to name a single ad I saw last week? I’ve got nothing. And that got me wondering, why?

When you think about it, the answer is right there in how different the world was back then. There was one screen in the house, the TV, and the whole family sat around together. When your favorite show went to a commercial break, you didn’t reach for your phone or switch tabs. You just watche,d and because there was essentially one major platform for advertisers, the competition to earn those few precious seconds of your attention were mportant. Brands had to work for it. They brought in real thought and real storytelling. They HAD to connect, or it was wasted money. That pressure is what gave us some of the most iconic ads we’ve ever seen.

Now cut to today. You’ve got YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, and a gazillion other places all screaming for your attention at once. Content is everywhere, all the time, and switching between it takes no effortat alll. Something funny happened to me recently. I picked up my phone to check something specific, and by the time I unlocked it, my fingers had already opened Instagram on their own. And whatever I had originally picked up the phone for? Gone. That’s where we are now. Our brains have been trained to never sit still.

In this world, brands don’t have the luxury of slowly growing on you. Something new takes over the internet every other day, trends peack withing a week, and then they vanish like they never existed. So the pressure now isn’t to be memorable, it’s to go viral, and fast. That’s why you will see brands collaborating with some viral sensation to get some boost out of it. But memorable and viral are not the same thing.

This is especially true for our generation. We shift interest rapidly because everything is instantly and endlessly available; you name it. But it wasn’t always like that. When something was in trend back then, it moved through an entire generation at a steady, shared pace. Remember BlackBerry phones? When they were hot, practically every 20-year-old either had one or desperately wanted one. It wasn’t algorithmic, it was cultural.

And maybe that’s the real loss. Not just the ads, but the shared experience around them. The Nescafé jingle is stuck in my head, not just because it’s catchy, but because it carries an entire era, those bags of memories with it. The question is, what are we making today that willl do the same thing 20 years from now?

That’s all I had for today, and before I say goodbye for today, here’s a quote I’ve been pondering,

"Time will multiply whatever you feed it.”

Please don’t forget to share it with your friends, family, and strangers.

Have a Great Day 💖