He reaches for the kulfi like someone who’s been waiting for it all day, peels back the wrapper, licks it in slow motion from different angles until someone capturing this on a smartphone says, “Done.” He hands the half-melted kulfi back to the ice-cream vendor and moves on. You’d assume an ice-cream brand was shooting an ad. Except no director called “action”, no crew hovered behind the camera, no agency head watched from a monitor. This was a creator-led activation event.
Quick-commerce companies and e-commerce marketplaces have found a new marketing tactic: invite creators to themed fairs and tap into Gen Z’s appetite for products wrapped inside experiences. They build entire worlds around a theme: a wedding, a nostalgic summer at grandma’s house, or a beauty carnival. Brands rent stalls at these setups. Influencers stream through the venue, pausing at every stall to shoot a promotional reel, collect a freebie, and move on. It’s like wholesale manufacturing of ads, often without any real cost to the company hosting the event. Zepto has run wedding-themed editions and one on “Nani Ka Ghar” in the last eight months; Flipkart recently hosted Glam Fest for lifestyle and beauty creators.
“We see creator-led experiences as a way to build genuine participation, not just visibility,” says Chandan Mendiratta, chief brand officer at Zepto. “We measure success beyond impressions—whether people keep talking about the idea and create their own content around it.”
That promise of “genuine participation” runs into the problem of scale. Search any of these campaign titles on social media platforms and you’ll likely find feeds filled with near-identical photos, videos, and captions from creators who attended the same event. The more people produce content in the same setting, the less spontaneous it looks.
There are other, more tangible problems as well. Shay Mehta, founder of digital marketing agency Biz Box Story in Gurugram, compiled a reel of creators’ complaints from Flipkart’s Glam Fest last month at Delhi’s Pragati Maidan. He says he barely had to search; the videos were “all over Instagram.” The clips showed creators scrambling for goodie bags because organisers reportedly invited far more influencers than planned. Some called out brands for distributing expired products. “People were coming from every part of north India who didn’t even know the brands,” says Mehta. “Everyone who promotes your brand is not the one you want as your brand ambassador,” he adds. Flipkart has not yet responded to Lounge’s queries.
“Brands need to retire the idea that a room full of creators plus free products equals a strategy,” says Zahra Khan, who runs Good People Studio, a fractional CMO consultancy for consumer brands. “A barter activation optimises for the wrong scoreboard, because whoever signs off isn’t measuring whether the content is any good—they’re measuring how many creators they activated this quarter, because that vanity number looks great in a deck to leadership.” Glam Fest, she argues, “showed how quickly that can backfire. The reputational damage did more harm than any customer returning damaged goods ever could,” Khan adds.
In trying to manufacture authenticity, these events almost make you nostalgic for the days when ads at least pretended they weren’t ads.