Always-On Always Relevant?

Think about the last time you genuinely switched off. No phone beside the bed, no half-conscious scroll before sleep, no reflex check of a notification that slipped through the night. For most of us, that moment is becoming harder to locate. The average Indian smartphone user now spends upward of seven hours a day on their device. We wake to it, eat with it, commute through it, and wind down beside it. Our attention isn’t captured in campaign windows anymore—it lives in fragments, scattered across feeds, inboxes, apps and streams, all day, every day.

This behavioural shift has quietly redrawn the rules of marketing. For decades, the dominant logic was simple: build a big campaign, buy a media burst, capture attention, convert, and move on. The funnel was linear. The audience was passive. The marketer held the remote control. That model still exists, but it no longer holds the power it once did. Today’s consumer doesn’t wait for a brand to show up on their terms. Discovery happens in the middle of a lunch scroll. The touchpoints are everywhere, and the moment a brand disappears from that stream—even briefly—a competitor fills the gap.

The evidence is everywhere, if you know where to look. Consider what Zomato has done with something as mundane as a push notification. While most apps fire generic discount alerts into the void, Zomato turned the humble push into a cultural touchpoint. “Suno? Don’t work on an empty stomach!” arriving at 11.45 am isn’t a promotional message—it’s a moment of connection. It knows your habits, mirrors your world, and arrives when you’re most probably feeling the pangs of hunger after missing your breakfast because of a morning meeting. Swiggy plays the same game with a different hand. Where Zomato leans into wit and emotional resonance, Swiggy leans into practicality—surfacing deals, nudging abandoned carts, reminding you of the restaurant you bookmarked or the food that is already in your cart. Quick commerce apps have made sure that their messaging makes ‘waiting’ for groceries feel like a crime. What ties these examples together is not budget or bravado. It is consistency—the daily, often invisible, work of being present in micro-moments that most brands still overlook.

For some brands, always-on isn’t a strategy they adopted—it is the architecture they were built on. ZEE5 is perhaps the clearest example of this in India’s streaming landscape. With 15 to 20 content launches every month across seven focus languages, the platform cannot afford to think in campaign cycles. Every week brings a new title, a new audience segment, a new reason for someone to open the app. The marketing organisation, by necessity, has had to become as continuous as the content itself.

Pranav Chopra, Head of AVOD, CLM and Performance Marketing at ZEE5, describes the model in granular terms. The platform operates within what he calls a structurally always-on marketing ecosystem, one that is continuously live, adaptive and performance-oriented. At its core is a digital marketing engine that systematically engages multiple user cohorts with relevance and precision—balancing new title launches with the long-tail monetisation of a vast content library. Spanning digital marketing, performance marketing, social media and customer lifecycle management, ZEE5’s strategies are tightly integrated across the full funnel: from prospecting and acquisition through retention, engagement and lifetime value expansion.

What makes this model distinctive is not just its scale, but its discipline. He says, “In today’s environment, engagement and retention are fundamentally driven by the strength of the content flywheel. Users are increasingly discerning and remain engaged with a platform only as long as there is compelling, relevant content to watch. As a result, an always-on marketing strategy is not optional—it is essential.”

In a sector like fashion, the always-on challenge takes a different form. While Myntra does follow the Swiggy pattern to remind you about ‘the shoes you left behind’ or ‘the skirt that you were looking for is back’, marketing for them, in general, has moved far beyond traditional video advertising.
Sunder Balasubramanian, Chief Marketing Officer at Myntra, views always-on marketing as the very foundation of modern brand storytelling. In his view, the most impactful brands today are those that show up consistently and coherently, weaving themselves naturally into everyday cultural conversations. “For us Myntra Glamstream—Myntra’s one-of-a-kind shoppable lifestyle content destination, creates an immersive, always-on layer of discovery where content, creators, and commerce seamlessly come together in real time.

Together, this balance allows us to blend the polish of high-production, celebrity-led storytelling with the relatability of micro-influencers and the immediacy of social commerce—ensuring we’re not just driving transactions, but building a dynamic, ever-evolving destination for lifestyle inspiration.”

The shifting patterns in marketing are not only visible in quick commerce or digital-first brands like Myntra or Z5, according to Arunima Yadav, Chief Marketing Officer, Hindware Limited.With brands where buying decisions are not impulse-based but thought through, consumers heavily rely on digital discovery. “An always-on marketing approach is not optional anymore, it is essential. Today’s consumer is exposed to a constant stream of content, and to stay relevant within the ecosystem, consistent visibility and recall are critical. Our shift to an always-on strategy has been driven by this need to build sustained brand salience rather than solely rely on episodic campaign bursts,” she explains.

While brands transition towards a continuous media presence, agencies—marketing and creative—are also evolving to keep pace. Sarath Nair, Senior Vice President at Tilt Brand Solutions, notes that adaptive agencies are entirely restructuring their workflows around the concept of ‘content velocity.’ Instead of working through rigid, sequential stages where strategy, creative development, and analytics happen in isolation, agencies are building integrated, cross-functional pods. These teams operate simultaneously, embedding real-time feedback loops directly into the creative process to turn performance data into instant messaging adjustments.

Dr Anirban Chaudhuri, Chief Strategy Officer, Hashtag Orange, expands on this, stating that modern big ideas are no longer designed as single, immovable executions. They are built to evolve fluidly across a multitude of distinct formats and cultural moments.

However, maintaining a constant presence comes with significant operational hurdles. Abhijit Avasthi, Founder of Sideways Consulting, raises a vital warning for the wider industry, cautioning against an aggressive overcorrection towards short-termism. He notes that by over-indexing on performance-led immediacy, brands risk underinvesting in the long-term, emotional storytelling that builds true brand equity. Furthermore, high-frequency production can easily dilute artistic craft if it isn’t carefully managed.

Despite the fear of fatigue, Bala Kumaran, Founder and Chief CEO of BrandStory Digital, emphasises that a continuous marketing framework shifts the definition of success from short-term performance to long-term value-creation. He notes that a consistent brand presence creates a much more balanced marketing funnel over time. Because the brand maintains steady familiarity and top-of-mind recall, customer acquisition becomes less dependent on expensive, high-intensity campaign bursts, which gradually reduces transaction friction and stabilises the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

For everyday menswear brand Estilocus, this strategic balance is central to driving sustainable retention. Ladeesh PC, Director and Co-Founder of Estilocus, explains that because clothing decisions are rarely instantaneous, consumers require multiple touchpoints to fully understand a brand’s quality and design philosophy. While traditional campaign bursts excel at driving short-term acquisition during a new collection launch—such as their recent ‘Genesis’ line—their always-on infrastructure provides the baseline visibility that keeps customers engaged during the quiet periods in between.

This focus on targeted, highly authentic continuity is equally visible in the functional innerwear space. Yash Goyal, Co-Founder and CEO, Krvvy, suggests that in an era where modern consumers are increasingly sceptical of heavily polished corporate messaging, raw authenticity easily outperforms sheer marketing scale. To build trust without making audiences feel like they are being constantly advertised to, Krvvy avoids mega-influencer partnerships in favour of collaborations with niche creators.


A prime example is their partnership with content creator Nidhi Tyagi, whose practical, problem-solving content style centres on real-world utility, affordability, and unedited user-generated videos. By treating the collaboration as an authentic everyday recommendation rather than a forced commercial endorsement, Krvvy secured a massive 96.8 per cent consumers, in page views and website traffic entirely driven by consumers who did not previously follow the brand’s social media pages.

Constant presence carries its own risks. poorly timed notifications can erode the goodwill that always-on marketing is supposed to build. For example, an alleged notification from Zomato over the ₹370 Biryani controversy turned the Internet against the brand, forcing them to issue a clarification. Their clarification, calling the notification fake, read: “Biryani is dinner, not consent.” In a situation like this, Kumaran emphasises on a thoughtful approach to relevance and variation. Ultimately, always-on marketing serves as the steady, reliable heartbeat of the enterprise—maintaining baseline visibility, gathering continuous data, and nurturing long-term customer relationships. Traditional campaigns are then layered directly on top of this baseline, acting as high-impact moments of amplification that accelerate the brand narrative, shock the market, and make the heart race.