Trust Is the Actual Scarce Resource Right Now

Crafting trust in the era of deepfakes is an editorial headline. It's also a genuine strategic problem that most Indian marketing teams are treating as a comms exercise.

The deepfake problem is real and accelerating — synthetic media has made source verification a baseline consumer skill, not an edge case. But the trust deficit predates AI. The HDFC Bank story — Rs 45 crore in payments disguised as marketing spend — is a reminder that opacity has been baked into media buying for years. Deepfakes didn't create distrust. They just made it harder to ignore.

L'Oréal India consolidating media under Publicis as a single AOR is a structural response to this — fewer intermediaries, cleaner accountability, a tighter chain of custody from brief to placement. That's the logic, at least. Whether it delivers depends on execution.

Meanwhile, Brand Equity ran an obituary for Ramakant Dayama — an advertising figure most of the industry didn't recognise. That obscurity is telling. The people who built durable brand relationships over decades rarely made noise. The ones making noise now are often selling attention, not building trust.

For founders and brand teams: trust is built in systems, not campaigns. Audit your media supply chain the way you'd audit a vendor. The creative work is only as credible as the context it runs in.