Dhananjay Mehrotra, creative director of Delhi-NCR production house Mehrotra Productions, on why one glossy hero film no longer works, and what smart brands are doing instead.

For years, a consumer brand’s video strategy was simple. Save the budget, spend it on one lavish thirty-second film, book a name director, and hope it lands. That film was the campaign. Everything else was an afterthought.

That model is breaking, and the platforms themselves are the reason.

The platform changed the rules

Meta now runs on creative volume. It has dropped its long-standing guidance to cap ad sets at around six ads, and its Andromeda delivery system now decides which ad each individual person sees, rewarding accounts that feed it a wide, diverse set of creatives. A single concept that once stayed fresh for six weeks now fatigues in two to three. No single film, however beautiful, can keep up with that, and no budget is big enough to buy your way past it.

“The platform does not want your one perfect ad. It wants forty honest attempts and the freedom to pick the three that work,” says Dhananjay Mehrotra, creative director at Mehrotra Productions, which produces content for food, wellness and direct-to-consumer brands. “The moment you understand that, the whole economics of production changes.”

More is not the same as better

The catch is that volume alone is worthless. Thirty near-identical variations confuse the algorithm and fragment the budget. What works is structured concepting, genuinely different angles, personas and formats, produced on a predictable schedule rather than in a panic when the numbers dip. The sharpest brands now forecast their creative volume the way they forecast media spend, treating a steady monthly pipeline of fresh ads as a growth lever in its own right.

In practice, that means one product carries many stories. A protein brand might run a founder explaining how the product is made, a customer talking about a real result, a fast visual breakdown of the ingredients, and a quiet lifestyle cut, all in the same month, each speaking to a different buyer. When one angle tires, the others keep the account alive. That is the system Mehrotra Productions has built.

“We give a brand multiple finished ads for what a single film used to cost,” Mehrotra says. “Not by cutting corners. By fixing the process. Structured concepting up front, predictable timelines, and a visual identity strong enough to stretch across dozens of executions without falling apart.”

AI at every step, not in your face

Much of that speed now comes from AI, used at every stage. Claude and GPT shape concepts and scripts, Higgsfield builds and extends visuals, and the same tools carry through into post-production. What used to take a week of pre-production and a full shoot day can now be planned, drafted and partly produced in a fraction of the time. But Mehrotra is deliberate about where the line sits.

“The Indian consumer is not ready to be sold to by a fully AI-generated ad, and we respect that,” he says. “So we use AI inside real production. On our live shoots, every step is assisted by it, but the result still feels human. We are ready for AI. We are just not pretending the audience wants something it does not yet.”

From campaigns to supply

For marketing teams, the shift comes down to budget. Less goes into a single flagship shoot. More goes into building a repeatable visual identity and a pipeline that can feed every platform, every week.

“Stop thinking in campaigns and start thinking in supply,” Mehrotra says. “The brands winning right now treat content like a product line, not an event. They know their look, they know their message, and they can produce it at volume without the quality collapsing.”

He is clear about what this demands of production houses, including his own.

“Studios that only know how to make one beautiful film are in trouble. The ones that survive make a brand look sharp at volume, week after week, without the cost collapsing. That is exactly what we have built Mehrotra Productions to do. We are ready for where this is going.”

Dhananjay Mehrotra is the creative director of Mehrotra Productions, a Delhi-NCR video production studio working with food, wellness and direct-to-consumer brands. He writes about content, craft and AI in production on