From renting attention to nailing intention

Brands that win, going forward, will not be the loudest. They will be the ones most helpful in the moment of need

For 20 years, Indian marketing ran on one simple formula: Grab attention, repeat often, convert later.

 

From Thanda Matlab Coca Cola to Daane Daane Mein Kesar Ka Dum, the goal was to be the loudest voice in the room. If people saw you 10 times, they would hopefully buy you at least once.

 

But today, that formula is under stress. Attention marketing is passé. Intention marketing is the new pivot.

 

The Attention Era of Dekha Kya? built most Indian brands we know. The logic was simple. India has 900+ TV channels, 100 million YouTube videos, 200,000 new Instagram reels daily. In this noise, only the loudest would survive. How did it work? Interruption: An ad during KBC, IPL, Bigg Boss. You didn’t ask for it, but you saw it. Add Celebrity + Jingle: SRK for Vimal, Alia for Garnier. Borrow fame to borrow recall. Emphasise Reach > Relevance: Spend ~200 crore to reach 200 million people. Even if 180 million don’t care, 20 million might. And it worked. If you were on TV, you were credible.

 

But three things killed it. First, ad blindness. GenZ today skips in 1.8 seconds. The YouTube “Skip Ad” button is the most clicked button in India. Second, price war on attention. To reach 10 million people today, Meta and Google auctions cost 5x what they cost in 2018. Third, trust crash. After pan masala notices, fake influencer reviews, and artificial intelligence (AI) deepfakes, people don’t believe ads they didn’t ask for. Attention is now expensive, fleeting, and distrusted.

 

So, enter Intention Marketing: Aapne Dhoonda Kya? Intention marketing flips the funnel. Instead of shouting to everyone, it listens for signals and answers only those who are already looking. The idea is simple: Don’t interrupt. Be present when the consumer is already searching, comparing, or buying.

 

Zepto, Blinkit, Flipkart don’t run ads on TV. They run ads inside the app when you search “chips”. A Lay’s ad shows up because you typed “chips”. That’s intention. You were already buying. Cost per conversion is 1/10th of a TV ad.

 

Brands are increasingly dropping emails. They are building WhatsApp broadcast lists and Telegram channels. If you joined “Boat Headphone Deals”, you intended to hear from Boat. Open rates: 80 per cent. TV ad recall: 12 per cent.

 

With ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, people don’t Google “best AC”. They ask “best 1.5 ton AC for Mumbai humidity under 40k”. Brands now optimise to be the answer, not just an ad. This is GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation.

 

Instead of Shah Rukh Khan saying “buy this phone”, 50 micro-creators on YouTube show “how this phone camera worked on my Goa trip”. People search “phone camera test”. They find the video. Intention captured.

 

Three Indian realities are making intention marketing explode:

 

1. Mobile-first buying: 80 per cent of ecommerce happens on phone. Every search, scroll, click is a signal. Brands can see intention in real time.

 

2.Trust deficit: After Maggi, gutka ads, fake reviews, Indians now verify three times before buying. They don’t trust ads. They trust answers to their own questions.

 

3. Language + Bharat: Attention TV ads are invariably in Hindi. Intention marketing can be Marathi YouTube, Tamil WhatsApp, Bhojpuri search. Cheaper, deeper, more personal.

 

This doesn’t mean attention is dead. You still need it. The smartest Indian brands are doing both. Attention to create demand. Intention to capture demand. But what does this mean for marketers?

 

Budget shift: From 70 per cent TV + 30 per cent digital to 40 per cent performance + 30 per cent content + 30 per cent brand. Chief financial officers increasingly ask: “What did this ad sell today”, not “how many people saw it”.

 

New skills: You need search engine optimisation (SEO), WhatsApp customer relationship management (CRM), retail media buying, and AI prompt writing. Less “jingle makers”, more “data + content hybrids”.

 

New KPIs: Not gross rating points (GRPs). Now it’s “search lift”, “retail media return on ad spend (ROAS)”, “community growth”, and “AI answer mentions”.

 

Intention marketing can, however, become creepy. “How did they know I was searching for diapers?" Privacy + Section 24 of the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 + Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 mean brands can’t exploit data blindly. And if every brand only chases intention, who builds new categories? No one would have known they “needed” Unified Payments Interface or Zomato if someone didn’t create attention first.

 

We are moving from Bharosa ads se to Bharosa answers se. In a country where 500 million people came online in five years, where every answer is on phone, the brand that wins, going forward, will not be the loudest. It will be the most helpful at the exact moment of need.

 

Yesterday, attention made you famous. Tomorrow intention will make you the chosen one.

 

The writer is chairman of Rediffusion