MUMBAI: When it comes to building brands in today’s attribution-obsessed world, traffic isn’t just on the roads, it’s the lifeblood of every founder’s morning routine. That was the cheeky starting point at the CXOs Unplugged: Building Brands in the Age of Attribution session at the 3rd India Brand Summit 2025, where candid confessions flowed as freely as marketing buzzwords.
Bartisans co-founder Jovita Mascarenhas admitted she checks Shopify impressions before coffee: “How many people even got to know about us? Conversion comes later. Awareness is the scariest metric.” For Abhinav Pathak, CEO & Co-Founder of Escape Plan, the stress of traffic is daily revenue pressure: “Yesterday’s traffic, today’s revenue. I’d be on my toes with WhatsApp broadcasts to make up the gap.”
But traffic panic wasn’t the only anxiety in the room. Aseem Shakti founder & CEO Swati Singh delivered a sharp warning on the limits of AI: “A major disruption will come from the growing skepticism around AI-generated content. Trust is diminishing. Offline marketing will be just as important as digital in the next few years.” Her mantra: trust-building is oxygen for the present, but authentic storytelling is the food that sustains brand longevity. “If you feed your company junk food weak storytelling, it may survive today but not thrive tomorrow.”
Taboola advertising account director Vibhu Anand pushed back gently, arguing AI is less about hype, more about real-time insights. “AI is a phase everyone’s jumping on, but it’s about finding your niche. It’s still going to need people to guide the insights. Trust-building will require heavy investment in technology.” Taboola itself is testing Deepadive, an AI engine to keep readers loyal to publisher sites in an age of content drift.
The conversation veered into funding scars when Mascarenhas recalled her early VC experience: “They once told me, ‘Shut down.’ Cocktail mixers in India? People thought it was fruit juice. Building a category takes patience VCs often don’t have.” Her solution has been doubling down on storytelling, a mother-son brand journey, clean ingredients, and unapologetic positioning in a culture wary of drinking at home.
Pathak echoed the need for balancing numbers with narrative. “Performance marketing is oxygen, but content is fitness. I want my brand to last 10, 20, 50 years, not just today.” She confessed Shark Tank still drives virality every month, but admitted splurging on radio and film premieres despite fuzzy attribution because “it builds trust and perception.”
And if consumer trust is wobbling, commerce itself isn’t slowing. Mascarenhas quipped that “quick commerce will continue disrupting retail for the next few years,” underscoring how founders now battle both shrinking consumer patience and multiplying competition.
Wondrlab COO Sanju Menon, session chair, kept the banter flowing, but the takeaway was clear: in an age where every click is tracked, brand-building is about patience, authenticity, and choosing when to lean on dashboards versus when to lean into storytelling.
As Anand put it, “It’s more expensive to acquire a new user than keep a repeat one. Storytelling and trust may not show up on a dashboard tomorrow, but six months down the line, they slash your acquisition costs by 25 per cent.”
Attribution may be the age we live in, but as the CXOs unplugged, it’s still trust, traffic, and timeless storytelling that keep brands truly alive.
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