Festive advertising has never really been about the festival itself. The diya, rangoli, mithai, family gathered around a table and the perfectly dressed home are only visible markers of a much deeper advertising territory: the small, often contradictory behaviours that make celebrations feel personal.
It is the person who spends the year complaining about traffic but drives eight hours home for Diwali. The mother who insists she is not making anything elaborate but has already started preparing sweets. The father who says he is not waiting for his child to arrive while checking the time every few minutes.
As Manika Juneja, COO, Dentsu Creative Isobar, puts it, “The best festive advertising doesn’t create emotion. It recognises an emotion that already exists.”
For years, this recognition has been the foundation of festive advertising. Campaigns such as Surf Excel’s Daag Achhe Hain and Asian Paints’ Har Ghar Kuch Kehta Hai built their emotional worlds around human behaviour rather than simply relying on the visual vocabulary of a festival.
That distinction is becoming particularly relevant as generative AI moves deeper into advertising. From consumer research and ideation to visualisation, production, personalisation and media optimisation, AI is making it possible to create and adapt advertising at a scale that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago.
Festive advertising is already demonstrating that evolution. In Cadbury Celebrations’ Shah Rukh Khan My Ad, AI and machine learning enabled Shah Rukh Khan to appear in personalised versions of the same Diwali advertisement for local businesses. The campaign used technology to scale a single creative idea across more than 500 pincodes and 2,500 local businesses.
Coca-Cola’s MagicWaaliDiwali took a different approach. Instead of using AI only behind the scenes, it invited consumers to create personalised Diwali greetings using OpenAI’s DALL-E and GPT-4.
The evolution is significant. AI is no longer simply helping advertisers make an existing campaign more efficient. It is increasingly becoming part of how an idea is personalised, produced, experienced and distributed.
But festive advertising presents a particular challenge. The objective is not merely to create something visually impressive or emotionally coded. It is to make someone see themselves, their family or their culture in the work.
And that raises a question for the industry: Can a technology trained on patterns understand the lived experiences behind those patterns?
The Festive Insight Isn’t Always in the Festival
For industry experts, the starting point is remarkably consistent. The best festive ideas begin with people, not festival symbols.
Vinit Patil, Creative Director (Copy), SW Network, Mumbai, says, “I think the best festive ideas come from watching people, not watching festivals.”
His point is that the most resonant festive observations are often mundane.
“Watch what happens when everyone comes home. Who gets up early? Who complains about the sweets? Who is waiting for the one person who is late? Those little things are where the real festival is.”
Hetal Khalsa, Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer, PivotRoots – A Havas Company, makes a similar argument using an even more familiar domestic setting.
“A good festive idea does not begin with the festival. It begins with people. It begins with their habits, tensions, little dramas and the things they do every year without even noticing.”
Her advice to creatives is telling: “Don’t start with the diya. Everyone has seen a diya.”
Instead, she points towards the mother hiding kaju katli from guests, the son stuck in traffic promising he is going to be home in ten minutes, or the cousin who arrives once a year and immediately behaves as though the house belongs to them.
This is also what makes some of India’s most memorable festive advertising work. Mehak Chawla, Director – Marketing and Growth, VDO.AI, points to campaigns such as Surf Excel’s Daag Achhe Hain and Asian Paints’ Har Ghar Kuch Kehta Hai as examples of communication that moved beyond simply depicting a festival.
The common thread is recognition.
“A festive ad resonates when it earns a place inside a real family moment,” she says.
And that may be the first limitation of AI-generated creativity. A model can learn that families gather during Diwali, but that does not necessarily mean it understands why one particular family moment feels emotionally significant.
Juneja calls this the difference between cultural intelligence and cultural memory.
“AI can know that people travel home for Diwali. It doesn’t know what it feels like to sit in a packed airport at midnight and hear your mother’s voice asking, ‘Kahan pahunchi?’”
From Scale to Creation
The role of AI in advertising has also changed.
In its earlier applications, the technology was largely about scale: taking an existing creative idea and making it work for more people, across more formats and markets. AI could personalise, optimise and adapt what humans had already created.
Generative AI is now moving closer to the creative process itself, helping brands create the visuals, films and worlds that audiences see.
Coca-Cola’s Holidays Are Coming offers a useful example of this shift. The brand’s iconic Christmas campaign had historically relied on elaborate, human-led production, from the original 1995 film to years of animation and filmmaking.
Its 2024 version, however, was created using generative AI. The move demonstrated how far the technology had entered the production process, while also triggering criticism from viewers who felt the execution lacked the warmth and magic associated with earlier versions of the campaign.
The example highlights an important distinction: being able to generate something does not necessarily mean being able to create something people feel connected to.
Ankit Agrawal, Director, Mysore Deep Perfumery House (MDPH) and Zed Black Agarbatti, sees AI as an extension of the creative process rather than a replacement for it. He estimates that AI could contribute around 20–25% of the overall creative process, particularly at the conceptual and exploratory stages, while human thinking and judgement continue to drive the larger part.
“AI can help creative professionals generate ideas, explore different possibilities and overcome some of the limitations of time and resources,” he says. “The human role is particularly important when it comes to understanding emotions, cultural nuances and the overall purpose of a campaign.”
Recognition Is Not the Same as Feeling
There is already evidence suggesting that consumers may respond differently to AI-generated advertising, even when they cannot consciously articulate why.
NielsenIQ’s neuroscience research compared AI-generated advertisements with traditionally produced ads using EEG, eye tracking, implicit response testing and surveys. The research found that AI-generated ads, including those perceived as high quality, showed weaker memory activation than traditional video advertising. It also found that viewers could detect AI-generated advertisements and were more likely to describe them as annoying, boring or confusing.
That does not mean AI-generated advertising cannot work. But it raises an important distinction: getting an emotional reaction is not necessarily the same as creating an emotional memory.
Chawla breaks this into two parts.
“Emotional connection has two halves. The first is the reaction, the goosebumps, the eyes welling up, the urge to send the video to your mother. The second is recognition, the moment a viewer thinks ‘that’s us’ or ‘that’s my family’ rather than ‘that’s nice.’”
According to her, AI has become increasingly capable of engineering the first.
“The harder part is recognition.”
That is because recognition requires the viewer to connect the work to something they have actually experienced.
Patil makes a similar distinction. AI may know that a reunion should involve an embrace, a particular kind of music and a certain emotional arc. But, he argues, “Sometimes the most emotional thing in a room is the thing nobody says.”
A father looking at his son before he leaves. A mother pretending she is not worried. A friend remembering something another person had forgotten.
“We recognise these things because we have lived them. That lived experience is still very difficult to manufacture,” Patil adds.
Agrawal sees the distinction similarly from the brand side. For him, festive communication continues to depend on emotions, traditions, memories and relationships that AI can process but not necessarily experience.
“AI can process information, identify patterns and respond to the right prompts, but the excitement of waiting for a festival, the happiness of meeting family, or the nostalgia associated with a particular tradition comes from human experience,” he says.
At the same time, Agrawal does not see this as a reason to keep AI out of the creative process.
“AI can certainly assist in developing ideas and creating certain aspects of a campaign,” he says, adding that the technology still needs human direction, context and perspective to make those ideas meaningful.
The Dangers of Cultural Compression
If there is one concern that comes through particularly strongly across these conversations, it is not that AI will destroy festive advertising, but that it could make generic festive advertising easier, faster and cheaper to produce.
Juneja calls this “cultural compression” — taking something layered and reducing it to the handful of symbols that an algorithm associates with a festival.
“Diwali becomes diyas and rangolis. Rakhi becomes a thali, rakhi and sweets. Ganesh Chaturthi becomes an idol and marigold. Christmas becomes Santa and snow.”
The problem, she says, is not that these symbols are incorrect.
“It’s that they are only the visible layer of something much deeper.”
Khalsa describes the same problem from the perspective of regionalisation.
“Take one Diwali film, change the language, add local clothes, a local dish, perhaps a local celebrity, and call it culturally relevant. That is not localisation. That is one ad in different costumes.”
For a country as culturally and linguistically diverse as India, this becomes particularly important. The same festival can carry different meanings across households, cities, generations and communities. Even the same ritual can have different emotional significance depending on who is performing it and why.
Khalsa offers a useful test:
“Adding a regional sweet is a detail. Understanding why that sweet is brought out only after a particular ritual, who is expected to serve it, or why it reminds someone of home, is a truth.”
Her question for creatives is therefore not, “Can we make this look local?”
Rather, “Would this idea still work if the props were removed?”
If not, she argues, culture may simply be functioning as decoration.
The Creative Role Changes, But Doesn’t Disappear
Perhaps the most interesting implication of this shift is what happens to creative jobs.
If AI can generate the first draft, visualise the storyboard, produce variations, create language adaptations and resize assets, what exactly should creative people spend their time doing?
Agrawal sees AI as an extension of the creative process rather than a replacement for it. He estimates that AI could contribute around 20–25% of the overall creative process, particularly at the conceptual and exploratory stages, while the larger part continues to be driven by human thinking, creativity and judgement.
“AI can help creative professionals generate ideas, explore different possibilities and overcome some of the limitations of time and resources,” he says. “The human role is particularly important when it comes to understanding emotions, cultural nuances and the overall purpose of a campaign.”
For Khalsa, the answer is observation.
“The junior team should not become prompt writers. They should become better observers.”
And the senior team should not simply become approvers of AI output. They should instead become better editors, better mentors and stronger guardians of the brand.
Patil sees the role similarly:
“Less time making things. More time noticing things. More time asking better questions.”
Juneja calls this creative sovereignty — the responsibility to decide what deserves to exist.
And that may ultimately be the bigger shift for festive advertising.
As the process of making work gets faster, knowing what is worth making becomes more important. With more versions and possibilities on the table, creative judgement matters more. And when cultural details can be reproduced easily, understanding what actually feels true to people becomes the real differentiator.
So, Can AI Keep Up With the Human Touch?
The industry’s view is not an either-or choice between AI and human creativity.
AI is already helping teams analyse consumer behaviour, explore ideas, create multiple versions and adapt campaigns across markets and formats. The bigger question is what happens to the human insight at the centre of the work.
For festive advertising, that insight often comes from lived experiences: a mithai associated with a grandmother, a song that brings back a memory, or the first festival spent away from home.
These are the details that can turn a familiar festive setting into something personal.
As Juneja puts it, “Emotion doesn’t just happen. It comes from somewhere.”
That is where the creative role continues to matter. AI can generate and adapt the work at scale, but creatives still have to decide which ideas feel relevant, which cultural details matter and what is worth putting out.
“AI can give creativity infinite possibilities. Our job as humans is to give those possibilities a reason to matter,” Juneja says.
For festive advertising, then, the opportunity may not be about making AI more human. It is about using AI to do more of the work around an idea while keeping the human insight at the centre of it.
Because the future of festive advertising may not belong to the technology that can generate the most convincing celebration.
It may belong to the creative teams that understand what makes a celebration feel like home.