This holiday season, advertising moved at a pace rarely seen before. Campaigns were conceptualised, produced and released in record time, powered by generative AI tools that promised scale, cultural relevance and cinematic visuals at a fraction of traditional costs. From hyper-localised creatives to visually extravagant festival films, AI was everywhere, quietly shaping the look and feel of holiday advertising in India.
Yet, even as brands flooded screens with polished, AI-generated festive content, something felt amiss. While the ads caught attention, many struggled to earn emotional trust. Social media reactions ranged from mild discomfort to outright backlash, with audiences calling out campaigns for feeling generic, soulless or emotionally off-key. The season revealed a growing tension in advertising: the race for spectacle versus the need for authenticity.
At the heart of the issue lies a fundamental question—can AI truly understand festive emotion, or does it merely replicate the aesthetics of celebration?
There’s no denying why brands leaned heavily into AI this year. Festive advertising demands volume: multiple languages, regional nuances, platform-specific formats and rapid turnarounds. AI offered an efficient solution. As Rathin Lahiri, head – Marketing & CSR, SBI General Insurance, puts it, “AI is another tool: a powerful accelerator for creativity and a tool for mass personalisation, but it cannot be a replacement for creative thinking yet.”
At SBI General Insurance, AI has been deployed to tailor communication in 16 different languages, ensuring accessibility and clarity across a diverse customer base. “This allows us to connect meaningfully, rather than sending generic messages,” Lahiri says, adding that AI-led social media campaigns have also delivered strong ROI.
But even proponents of AI agree that efficiency alone cannot carry festive storytelling. “Any campaign starts with a customer insight which can arise from data, but it still needs human decision making to start the process,” Lahiri explains. Especially in categories like insurance, where trust and empathy are non-negotiable, AI’s role remains firmly supportive rather than central.
One of the most visible criticisms this season was sameness. Despite different brands, many festive films shared similar colour palettes, visual rhythms and emotional beats. According to Abhinav P. Pyati, Co-founder & Business Head, Cutting Fillum Entertainment, this happens when AI is treated as a shortcut.
“Festive ads start to feel generic when AI is treated as a shortcut rather than a creative system,” he says. “Most similarity comes from using default outputs: similar camera angles, familiar settings, predictable colour palettes, because the AI is being asked to generate, not to interpret.”
Pyati argues that the creative hierarchy often gets reversed in AI-led campaigns. Instead of starting with emotion and intent, brands jump straight to execution. “The balance begins by putting human creativity first,” he notes. “Humans bring cultural understanding, emotional judgment, and decades of learning around consumer behaviour. Those decisions have to be made before AI enters the process.”
Without this clarity, AI defaults to what it knows best, visual clichés derived from its training data. The result may look festive, but it rarely feels personal.
Festivals in India are deeply sensory and emotional. They are about shared rituals, unspoken pauses, familiar chaos and intimate moments inside homes. These nuances, experts argue, cannot be generated from datasets alone.
“AI is incredibly efficient at generating visuals, but it still doesn’t understand emotion, especially festive emotion,” says Pyati. “What it lacks is lived experience.”
This gap becomes particularly evident in categories like food and FMCG, where emotional credibility hinges on micro-details, how a character pauses before taking a bite, the rhythm of a family conversation, or the body language during a shared meal. Pyati references a recent Christmas AI film for Britannia, developed under CFE AI Labs, where the challenge wasn’t image quality but emotional truth. “We had to guide the AI through highly structured prompts that defined micro-details… because those are the cues audiences subconsciously respond to.”
Brands that managed to strike the right balance were those that clearly defined where AI stops and human judgment begins. Cleartrip’s festive work offers a telling example. In its statement, the brand emphasises that AI is used to amplify creativity, not replace emotional intent. “The core idea came from a familiar truth, the fear of forgetting long weekends and missing travel opportunities,” Cleartrip notes, adding that while AI added a playful pop-culture twist, “the emotion, humour and message remained firmly brand-led and consumer-first.”
This philosophy is echoed by Kiran Giradkar, Group CMO, BN Group, who stresses deliberate restraint. “The thinking, the insight, and the emotional core are always human-led,” he says. “Only once that clarity is in place, then we use AI to translate that idea into visuals or narratives.”
For Giradkar, every AI output must pass a simple but crucial test: does it feel natural, relatable and true to the brand? If not, it’s reworked or dropped. “AI accelerates expression, not judgment,” he adds.
Vaishal Dalal, Co-Founder, Excellent Publicity, draws the boundary even more sharply. “The line is crossed the moment speed starts deciding the story,” he says. While AI can optimise formats and distribution, “the narrative, tone, and emotional arc are non-negotiably human-led.”
Audiences today are more media-literate than ever. They can sense when emotion is engineered rather than earned. Ads that felt “technically impressive but emotionally empty,” as Dalal puts it, struggled to leave a lasting impression.
Holiday advertising has always been about emotion, belonging, nostalgia, hope. AI can help brands reach faster, wider and smarter, but it cannot yet replicate the cultural memory and emotional intuition that festivals demand.
The lesson from this season is clear: spectacle may grab attention, but authenticity earns trust. Brands that treat AI as a creative partner, guided by human insight will likely build deeper emotional recall. Those that chase speed alone may win views, but lose connection.
As the industry moves into the next phase of AI adoption, the real competitive advantage won’t lie in how quickly ads are made, but in how honestly, they make people feel.
