The Creative Question: Building a full-funnel brand engine with Rusk Media’s Rahul Arora

When Rahul Arora joined Rusk Media in 2021 as the Associate Director of Sales in the Northern region, it was not the obvious career move. He had spent decades on the video sales side, meeting brands, pitching agencies, and navigating the corridors of large broadcast organisations. He knew that world well. Rusk Media, at the time, was a very different proposition.

"Most of the entertainment content till that time was mostly TV-plus. There was no curated content. Companies like Rusk Media were all coming up, creating this snackable content, and some people were just beginning to understand what a creator even was," he recalls. He wanted to be part of that growth.

"It's a high-risk move. Who wants to move out of a large-ish organisation? But in hindsight, I'm glad I participated," he says.

Today, as Head of Rusk Ads, Arora is the commercial engine behind Rusk Media's growing portfolio of culturally attuned IPs: gaming, fitness, dating, business reality, fiction, and an upcoming slate that includes anime and premium vertical dramas. The instinct that drew him to Rusk in the first place, to read where audiences were headed before the industry had consensus, is also what now informs how he thinks about brand monetisation.

Beyond plugins: the full-stack pitch

There is a version of brand integration that the Indian advertising industry has run on for years: a slot in the show, a few seconds of in-content placement, and a burst of ad inventory around the break. It is a model built for television and broadly migrated, unchanged, into digital. Arora argues that this template is not just limiting; it is increasingly wasteful.

"Go to a television channel, and for a large part of it, you will say: 'I'll give you a lot of relevant inventory on the show, and with that, some plugins within the show.' Larger integrations — less than 2-3% of brands will do those. Mostly, 90% get basic plugins and a lot of inventory, which they run in their ad breaks," he says. The model has scale. It does not have depth.

What Rusk Ads offers instead is what Arora calls multiple touchpoints, more like an interwoven web, where one piece of content spreads into many. "There is no point in taking one integration and loads of inventory. You need to have multiple touch points, multiple content pieces hammering the same message — that is what we might solve for." The protagonist inside a show endorses a product; the same protagonist amplifies it on their own Instagram handle. The long-format storyline is cut into shorter formats for YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. And then, in the best cases, the brand narrative is extended into a gamified experience for the consumer entirely.

He reaches for two case studies. For energy drink brand ‘Thums Up Charged’, Rusk built a customised mobile game around its gaming IP ‘Playgrounds’, placing the product at the heart of the mechanic. Think Mortal Kombat, energy depleting with every fight, a sip of ‘Charged’ to keep going. Cricketer Shikhar Dhawan was embedded in the campaign, dangling a meet-and-greet for the best players. For fashion e-commerce platform AJIO, creator Carry Minati, one of the most-subscribed Indian YouTubers and a reliable barometer of Gen-Z taste, fronted a Temple Run-style game where clearing levels unlocked brand coupons, redeemable directly on the AJIO app. "Every time you cross a level, a coupon is unlocked. You can redeem that coupon back on AJIO," Arora explains. "That is the engagement we end up creating."

The ambition is to eventually move the brand all the way through the purchase funnel. Right now, Rusk Ads reliably delivers awareness and pushes into the middle funnel. Bottom-funnel attribution (direct, measurable conversions) is still a work in progress, tied to the maturation of Rusk Media's own app. "At some point, we will try to solve the entire content-to-hammer cycle completely," he says. "If I can grab the bottom funnel, tell a brand, ‘I will get you a lakh test drives in three months’, I will be able to monetise it way more than what any other player has to offer." That destination is still some time away. But the direction is set.

Cohorts over crowds

A persistent critique of digital advertising has been its over-reliance on reach as the primary currency: the logic that more eyeballs, by definition, means more value. Arora is sceptical of this, and the brands he works with, he says, are increasingly sceptical too. According to the Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2024, digital advertising in India crossed ₹57,000 crore, making it the largest medium by spend. Yet the industry conversation has visibly shifted from scale to relevance, from impressions to engagement quality.

"Plain views, plain reach doesn't solve anything," Arora says. "Hundred people have seen it, but 90 out of 100 don't care about that product or that content. Then that reach is useless." The alternative, in his framing, is cohort thinking: identifying the specific cultural communities a brand wants to own, and showing up there consistently, with content that belongs.

He points to brands that have done this well. iQOO and KFC have both staked a claim in gaming: KFC explicitly working toward the position where every time a gamer thinks of eating, the answer is KFC. Coca-Cola's ‘Coke Studio’ has made music the through-line of its youth engagement for years. Several alco-bev brands have followed a similar logic around the live music circuit, a space that is getting louder each season. Rusk Media's own IP, ‘I-Popstar’, a platform for independent original music, has worked with Tuborg and Magic Moments in this space. "It's all about creating something. We kind of figured it out and built on that," Arora says.

The lesson, he argues, is simple: "You need to identify what cohorts resonate best with your brand and work towards it. It's a process, it's a journey. Just mass reach — I don't think that is very effective. You need to consistently work around that community." One or two brand plugs will never move the needle. The brands that are winning in these spaces are the ones treating communities as a long-term investment, not a campaign destination.

The creator problem

The creator economy in India is now a multi-thousand-crore market, with the Ficci-EY Media and Entertainment Report 2024 placing the influencer and creator segment among the fastest-growing lines in digital ad spend. Yet the relationship between brands and creators remains, in Arora's view, structurally awkward, and the awkwardness is almost always the brand's doing.

"Brands realise they want custodians in every corner who can connect with their audiences in their own way," he says. "However, the moment they reach out for a collab, they want to do things which they have been doing with everyone. So the purpose gets defeated." What follows is what Arora calls a glorified ad: a collaboration that strips out the very quality that made the creator worth working with. Authenticity, which is both the hardest thing to manufacture and the only thing audiences will not forgive the absence of, is the casualty.

"If you want to make somebody the voice of your brand, you cannot let go of the authenticity of it. They end up wanting to give a hundred things, and it becomes just another ad. What is the point?" he asks. "When brands let creators do it the way their audience likes them, then they are connecting more. That's it."

He invokes stand-up comedian and streamer Samay Raina as the sharpest illustration of what happens when you get this right. Raina's community is one of the most engaged on Indian digital, built entirely on the specificity of his sensibility and his refusal to soften his edges for broader palatability. "Unless he does what he does, people won't connect to him," Arora says. "If you let them do it the way their audience likes them, it will just be more authentic. It's for everyone."

The industry, to its credit, is catching up. Arora does not frame this as a binary failure but as a lag. "They are evolving every day. It's a new methodology of reaching out to the customer. I think they are still figuring out how to do that — some have figured it out, some haven't." The plateau is real, and the question of what creator integration looks like at the next level of sophistication remains, for most brands and agencies, genuinely open.

Redefining ROI for the attention economy

Brand ROI has always been a contested metric, but the parameters of the contest are shifting. Arora observes that brand custodians and CXOs are increasingly supplementing traditional delivery metrics with a softer but arguably more meaningful indicator: are people actually talking about the brand? Are they searching for it?

"Brands are very smart. While all these numbers are relevant for evaluations, they actually want to know — are they able to talk to their real customers? A very basic thing that is becoming a metric for a lot of branding now is search queries. Are people talking about the brand or not? Are people searching for the brand or not? No matter how much reach, how many numbers were delivered — if the brand is not being searched, not being talked about, all of this is a waste," he says.

This is not, he is careful to clarify, a replacement for data-driven planning. Media buying still runs on impressions and engagement rates, and none of that changes overnight. "We cannot do away with data. That is how it will happen. It will keep happening. But the brand marketer is aware that only numbers don't work now. Relevant reach, relevant attention — all of that is now becoming equally important, if not more." It is, he says, complementary. The two exist in the same system.

Frequency, meanwhile, has become one of Arora's sharpest convictions in brand building. One-off integrations, however premium, do not move the needle the way a consistent presence does. "One plug, two plugs — it has to be consistent. You need to talk to your customers, because everybody has a very short attention span. Especially for brands that want to build a legacy, frequency will be a critical factor." He draws an analogy to Gillette's long-standing philosophy of capturing a consumer before their first shave, securing lifetime value by showing up early and not letting go. The same logic, translated to digital, applies to fintech startups building gamified onboarding for Gen Z investors. "They are finding ways to connect early. If you own a 17-year-old on your platform today, you potentially own them for life."

What wins, eventually

Asked to distil what will separate strong ad monetisation engines from the rest, like content quality, data intelligence, or the depth of brand partnerships, Arora resists picking one. "It has to be a mix of all, almost. There has to be the right content at the right price, leading to the right results," he says. But pressed further, he lands on something precise: relevant attention, at the right frequency, delivered at the right price. "Right metrics of right eyeballs — if you can deliver that to a brand at the right price, that would be very, very relevant for all of this."

The larger ambition of cracking the full funnel, using tech to drive attributable outcomes for brands, outpacing rivals on monetisation, is explicit, even if the timeline is honest. "We are still some time away from that. But eventually, we would want to do the full funnel for a brand. If we are able to grab that with the help of tech, I think we will be ahead of other players. But that is an ambitious thing we want to do."

For a man who left the relative certainty of broadcast television for the unpredictable energy of creator-led digital in 2020, ambition was always part of the brief. The bet on Rusk was a bet on where audiences were going. So far, the bet looks sound.