India, April 17 -- Last week, the ongoing debate on traditional advertising and brand-building losing out to social media and performance marketing was reignited by Sudhir Sitapati CEO of Godrej Consumer Products Ltd who said traditional TV advertising has lost its creative edge. Digital may be cool but the core of advertising is building brands and entertaining consumers with ads that stay with them, he said at an event in Mumbai. In contrast, Unilever, maker of brands like Surf, Dove and Pond's, said 50% of its advertising budget is shifting to social and influencer marketing. Deviating from its traditional advertising model, Unilever has amped up its influencer network from 10,000 to 300,000 content creators or brand advocates in the last two years ago, its CEO said recently. Abhijit Avasthi, founder of Sideways Consulting said Sitapati's observation on Indian advertising, though not new, is spot on. "Our ad films have lost the creative spark in storytelling found in older iconic campaigns. The reasons are manifold but the lack of understanding of what it takes to build a brand -- time, patience, nurturing an idea - is the biggest," Avasthi said. Marketers, focused on short term results, increasingly rely on performance marketing, he added. Sanjay Sarma, founder of a boutique brand advisory, agreed that iconic films like Fevicol's truck, Vodafone's pug or the Cadbury girl in the cricket stadium were the product of a particular ecosystem - one that was obsessed with pushing boundaries and raising the bar. "Clients gave agencies time. Agencies gave creative people space, and television commanded undivided attention in a way that only your mobile screen competes with today. Except, you don't want ads there," Sarma said. Those campaigns, built brand equity that lasted decades, surviving product changes, multiple price increase, and market disruptions. The focus has now shifted to performance metrics: views, impressions, likes, shares and measurable conversions. "When every creative decision has to be backed by a dashboard, you end up doing what has worked before, which is by definition not new," Sarma said. Though Rajesh Patalia, chief strategy officer at Agency09, advises brands on performance marketing and social media strategies, he too believes brand building is fundamental to advertising. "Current crop of marketers spend money to maximise sales. However, when performance marketing stops, sales drop since they did not build brand salience," he said. Abhijit Avasthi squarely holds brand marketers responsible for destroying good storytelling in their pursuit of immediate sales conversions. "Marketers should be inherently creative and love telling good stories." Brand storytelling has been replaced with activity, Sarma said, adding that a brand posting 200 pieces of content across platforms is not telling a story -- it is making noise across more channels. Yet Unilever's increased spending on influencer marketing signals its belief in higher credibility of brand messaging from individuals rather than from corporates. Of course, brand storytelling and performance marketing need not be competitors. "Storytelling builds the desire, the equity, the emotional permission that makes performance marketing work. Performance marketing harvests what brand-building has sowed," Sarma said, adding Sudhir Sitapati rightly said that the industry has forgotten how to sow. On Unilever's overreliance on the influencer ecosystem, he said that 300,000 influencers is distribution play, not a brand-building strategy. The brand risks giving up creative control over what thousands of pieces of content say about it: the narrative, the tone, the pitch, the production quality, the call to action, Sarma argued. However, he agreed that opportunities on digital media abound offering a rich canvas with long-form digital, branded podcasts, creator collaborations, short videos, etc. and some independent, idea-first agencies are producing work that is sharp, original, and platform-native without being disposable. Some argue that higher penetration of connected TVs -- with audiences returning to consume content on the big screen - may bring back creative ads. But Sarma said the screen wasn't the constraint -- diminishing consumer attention and slipping creative standards are....