I had not considered making a list like this earlier. But someone wrote to me the other day after seeing my Indian ads list if I can also make time for an international ads list too. It wasn’t difficult, but it was time consuming. I keep track of every ad I watch even though I choose to write about very few (relative ratio). And I archive all my notes, so it becomes easy to assemble all the ads, go through them, and pick my favorites.

The 10 that you see below is from a pool of about 4,500-5,000 odd international ads that I watched all through 2025.

The same caveat remains – I do not have access to how these ads performed. That is something available only with the brand team and the agency (media buying) teams. So, I do not bother with what I cannot control and focus on what I can. That is how I reacted to the ads and what made me like them, over many others.

And so, here are my picks for the top 10 international ads of 2025.

—

1- Chicken Licken (Agency: Joe Public)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

Stupendously good use of exaggeration in service of the product! The narrative trusts and respects its audience, does not explain/over-explain and lands the point beautifully. The sheer imagination just before we see the man-hole and after the man enters the man-hole is brilliant! This is the kind of creativity that AI cannot imagine (yet)!

2- King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre (Agency: Publicis Middle East)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

The one ad that touched me THE most in 2025. Like the first ad (above), the narrative (and the run time) trusts the audience to tell its story well, with patience and empathy. I also liked all the creative liberties taken while telling this story – they made me view the ad the second time, this time, not to be wowed by the payoff in the end, but to simply admire the writing that went into this ad.

3- Liga Contra el Cancer (Agency: Cheil Peru)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

This ad’s idea was the most inventive I came across all of last year. It’s a very topical idea, but framed in a completely unique way that is also perfectly meaningful. Cancer is a genetic disease. But the way to frame it as an ‘inheritance’ makes the narrative bold and noteworthy. Inheritance need not always be good (money, property). There are a lot of other things we inherit from our parents and this ad flips the popular notion around inheritance for a great cause.

4- British Airways (Agency: Uncommon)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

Very, very funny, and very relatable too! Excellent use of a quirky creative device to bring to life how jarring office work during a holiday would look like.

5- Netflix (Agency: Isla, Buenos Aires)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

Valentine’s Day campaigns are all about bringing people (couples) together, but this Netflix campaign from Argentina confidently splits them, but meaningfully, in service of an appropriate product feature. Solid thinking!

6- Amnesty International (Agency: BAR Ogilvy, Portugal)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

Phenomenally topical ad idea, and the best use of framing among ads I saw last year. As we see the things we take for granted around us break down gradually and the world going to __, here’s at least one ad that tells it as it is, while also making the narration smart and intelligent.

7- Pella (Agency: Singlethread)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

This ad is a sheer joy to watch! I watched it a lot of times last year Great choice of song and excellent moves by the young girl. Very imaginative way to show an otherwise routne product, in the most exciting and interesting manner mainly because the agency and the client decided not to focus on the product, but on what it enables! Yes, I did have a crib about the sequencing, but I presume that this is the full version of the ad while shorter versions without the jarring sequence we used in actual ads.

8- Dreamies (Agency: adam&eveDDB)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

The best billboard idea I recall seeing last year. It’s not a flat, 2D design, of course, but whatever’s been done (3-dimensionally) is brilliantly in service of the product being sold! This is thinking-out-of-the-box, quite literally!

9- Amazon Audible (Agency: Droga5)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

Strikingly imaginative story-telling for a product that I’m a huge fan of! The narrative brings to life how the product operates in our minds and what happens during the pauses. Even if you have never experienced this product, you could visualize how wonderfully it works inside your head!

10- Apple iPhone (Agency: TBWA\Media Arts Lab LATAM)

My LinkedIn note on this ad.

Terrific thinking behind this ad’s narrative – one that thinks up the most extreme use-case for a product feature and concocts a heartwarming human-interest story to land it! Very Apple!

The post The 10 best international ads of 2025 first appeared on beastoftraal.com.

I actually do this on my other blog – my top 20 songs across Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada films + my picks for top 20 Hindi pop songs, Tamil pop songs, and the rest/assorted languages. That’s 170 hand-picked songs across 9 playlists!

The point is, there is no one perfect/satisfactory way to make a/any list. I have written about all these ads all through 2025 and have faced comments like, “This ad doesn’t sell the product”, “But how effective was this ad?”, “This ad is too long”, “I lost interest after 10 seconds”, “Making such ads is pointless these days; better let influencers create UGC”, “This ad proves why CMOs should be fired and content creators should take over marketing”, among others.

As an ad industry outsider, I do not have details on whether these ads “sold” the products they are pitching or not, or in what numbers. In fact, expecting one ad to sell a product is quite something. ‘Sales’ happen as a result of a lot of actions by companies, not just one ad. It may also be quite a task to extract sales due to just one ad since things are not so easy and linear. 

So, since I’m not into astrology… or predicting how ads would “perform”, I focus on the things that I can control: Did the ad move me in some way? Did it make me think? Did it light a bulb in my head? Did it make me admire the craft? And so on. Since I see a LOT of ads day after day, year after year (easily about 20-30+ per day) it helps that I am able to see a larger picture, get bored with functional ads, and genuinely admire a very few… that I end up writing about. 

But I also criticize a LOT of ads. And I write long explanations of why I dislike or do not like some ads. So, from that point of view, point no.3 in this meme by Ramana Charan is misleading

And no, I do not intend to make a list of Top 10 turkeys (bad ads) of 2025. At least not yet. Do follow me on LinkedIn where I dissect ads I do not like quite often.

Here are the previous year’s top 10 Indian ads, in case you wanted to check them out: 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.

And now, for my top India 10 ads of 2025.

1- Native RO by Urban Company (Agency: Manja)

My detailed LinkedIn note on this ad.

This is an audacious—and hilarious—idea to sell this product. But it is rooted in something most users of this product are very familiar with, uttered by the servicing professionals. So, it sets the context for the product’s USP really well. And it is totally entertaining too, with a droll musical score (interjected only by a 1980s style Bollywood rain dance) and excellent acting by the leads.

2- Britannia Marie Gold – Avani Lekhara’s Special Edition (Agency: Talented)

My detailed LinkedIn note on this ad.

There are so many things worth lauding in this campaign. It’s actually a documentary-style communication – it informs, but while doing so, it also entertains. While informing, it helps us understand scale (or the size of the target) using a very relatable context. And while doing so, Britannia also goes the whole hog by actually producing a resized biscuit (even if it is a limited-edition release).

3- Cadbury Dairy Milk: New Neighbour (Agency: Ogilvy India)

My detailed LinkedIn note on this ad.

This is one of those ads that I would use the word ‘adorable’ for The narrative in this ad is a terrific hat tip to empathy and inclusivity. That it does the hat tip while using a hugely divisive topic like language is a sheer delight. Just observe the way the lady considering how to tell her husband’s scooter story without the complete comfort of her own language… only because there is at least one person in the audience who may not understand her!

4- Assana Colorectal & Gut Wellness Clinic billboards (Agency: BePositive24)

My LinkedIn note on this ad campaign – Post 1, Post 2

For a category known for hesitance to talk about issues faced, something of this sort was needed. The idea is to bring it all out in the open, loudly so that people know that they can seek professional help without hesitation or shame or doubt. Assana’s billboards are short, crisp, subtly humorous, and very, very eye-catchy. It’s no wonder they went viral globally.

5- Feel at Home: Furlenco (Agency: Very Multimedia Solution)

My LinkedIn note on this ad film.

A very rare ad selling a gender-agnostic product (unlike products specifically targeted at men or women) that showcases an independent woman first, despite having a bigger male celebrity in the ad! Plus, the inclusivity of adopting strays, twice. This ad is proof that even functional communication can be elevated by thinking harder on the details and making every little detail matter.

6- We are all investors: HDFC Mutual Fund (Agency: Publicis India)

My detailed LinkedIn note on this ad film.

True triumph of writing here, making wonderful use of Hindi to paint analogies to ‘investment’ from various parts of life, removed from financial terminologies. Great way to showcase the effect of compunding in the most non-financial manner.

7- Shark Tank India Season 5 – Registrations Now Open: Do Not Apply (Agency: Moonshot)

My detailed LinkedIn note on this ad film.

Stupendous satire that is used to direct interest and attention towards the program’s core idea. The Moonshot team has been coming at the same crux from multiple angles almost every year – employment vs. entrepreneurship. And each year, they do a great job in presenting another facet of the theme, like last year’s Bidaai (of 2 employees, by colleagues). This year’s promo uses topical keywords like nfosys Narayana Murthy’s pet project of ’70 hours work week’ and relies entirely on the big bosses’ perspective for the sarcasm.

8- Truly Irresistible – Vinsmera Jewels (Agency: Nirvana Films/Prakash Varma)

My detailed LinkedIn note on this ad film.

The one truly pathbreaking jewellery brand ad of 2025. Jewellery brands using male celebrities is not new at all. Fahadh Faasil did it too in 2024, for Kavitha Gold & Diamonds.

And quite a few male celebrities front platinum jewellery ads. But what made Vinsmera’s ad special is how the narrative showed a man to be interested in the jewellery. The start of the ad makes it seem like Mohanlal has been tasked with talking over women fawning over Vinsmera’s jewellery, but things take a curious turn when Mohanlal vanishes… along with a piece of jewellery! It’s a lovely idea, made even better by Mohanlal’s acting and the background music.

9- Safe Second Account for daily spends: Airtel Payments Bank (Agency: Fundamental)

My detailed LinkedIn note on this ad campaign: Post 1, Post 2

Probably the sharpest positioning differentiation I have seen in 2025, for any product category. A bank that consciously wants to be your second bank account, not the primary. And it offers a strong reason for this positioning, based on its nature (as a ‘payments’ bank licence holder), rooted in present-day needs and dangers.

10- Shree Anandhaas Sweets and Savouries: Chennai launch (Agency: Desert Hawk, Coimbatore)

My detailed LinkedIn note on this ad campaign.

The most ambitious (narrative-wise) advertising effort, from a regional brand, by a regional advertising agency. Consider the thought process that may have gone into it: Chennai launch of a famous Coimbatore brand. There is bound to be a lot of crowd on launch day. So, getting what you want that day is bound to be difficult. So, should one prepare for jostling with the crowd and making sure you get something? If so, how should you prepare? This paves way to some splendid exaggeration that makes you laugh at both the audacity (of the idea) and the grandness of the presentation

The post The 10 best Indian ads of 2025 first appeared on beastoftraal.com.

More than lamenting the end of a beloved neighborhood departmental store, I think what I am truly sad about is the death of serendipity in discovering products and brands.

In a physical store like MK Retail, brand discovery felt ambient. As I walked past shelves, I noticed new packaging and new products, compared variants, and picked up things out of curiosity. And I have shared so many such discovery pictures on social media too, most of them from this particular branch of MK Retail! Brands paid for trade schemes at the store, no doubt, but organic footfall guaranteed discovery in terms of incidental exposure.

Quick Commerce (Q-comm) aka Zepto, Blinkit, BigBasket, Instamart breaks this flow completely.

Q-comm’s interface is zero-waste. This means no idle browsing, only search, reorder, and/or order what is suggested. Discovery is not random or organic – it is algorithmic and paid. The “endless aisle” collapses into a pay-to-play feed. What this means is that if a brand is not in the top 20 results or promoted tiles, they effectively do not exist.

This implies is that brand building is now, to a large extent, decoupled from “shelf presence”.

Traditional FMCG brand building relied on 3 layers: mass media for awareness, shelf presence for consideration, and promotions for conversion. Now, the middle layer (the shelf as a physical billboard) seems to be disappearing, gradually. Q-comm replaces it with sponsored ranking, paid tiles, ‘frequently bought’ widgets, and first-party recommendation algorithms. This means brand building is no longer partially earned; it is almost fully bought.

I can hear someone pointing to the fact that D-mart stores are thriving all over India.

Sure, a neighborhood (near Carmelaram railway station) D-Mart is always crowded, but D-mart’s model is completely different. D-Mart thrives on velocity, not variety. And Q-comm is basically D-Mart’s logic wrapped in software – limited SKUs, high throughput, and assortment chosen for operational efficiency. As more offline variety-first stores (like MK Retail or Nilgiris) shut down, consumers will be (they already are) trained to expect less variety and more convenience. And long-tail brands lose free shelf visibility.

This means brand-building costs will skyrocket because brands now have to buy their way into visibility at multiple layers – paid placement, performance ads, influencer seeding, social ads, and offline activations for trust (because people see products far lesser). Ironically, Q-comm makes launching a brand easier, but scaling becomes much more expensive.

To some extent, this also extends to brand recall shifting from visual memory to semantic memory. Offline discovery is/was visual (“I remember that yellow noodles pack”). Online discovery is keyword-driven (“protein bread”, “sugar free muesli”). So, brands must now win category keywords, build semantic associations (“gut health”, “immunity”, “10g protein”, etc.), use packaging more as a thumbnail than a physical standout, and brand identity effectively shifts from packaging presence to searchability.

Long-story short: Brands losing independence! In offline retail, even a powerful retailer could only influence a brand’s fate. In Q-comm, the platform can determine who wins by controlling visibility, search results, recommendations, and category expansion. We may be moving into a world where brand-building (and hence, brand success) is platform-mediated, not consumer-led. In other words, brands don’t win the market, but platforms choose who gets a chance to win.

The new FMCG brand-building stack looks very different, now, as a result. Winning brands will excel at:

1. Cultural brand-building – because the shelf no longer builds awareness, culture-level brand building must generate social buzz, video moments, register memetic hooks. Add founder-led storytelling to the mix, across social platforms like X, Instagram and LinkedIn.
2. Algorithmic optimization – paid visibility + high throughput + good unit economics.
3. Community-led trust – reviews, user-generated content, influencer validation… all geared to replacing the ‘touch and feel’ reassurance of offline.
4. Multi-platform presence – brands must exist on: Zepto, Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart, Amazon, Big Basket, Nykaa (where relevant, for the category) + others, to ensure that the consumer sees them repeatedly. One-platform brands may find it very difficult to survive.

The post From the end of an MK Retail store to FMCG brand-building stack 2.0 first appeared on beastoftraal.com.

Subramania Bharathi (1882–1921) and Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920) were contemporaries. They lived during the same historical period, in the early 1900s. Their lives overlapped for 33 years (1887–1920). Both died very young.

They came from very different worlds: Bharathiyar was a poet–journalist–freedom fighter; Ramanujan was a self-taught mathematical genius. But they were shaped by the same era: British colonial rule, the rise of Indian nationalism, and a cultural-intellectual churn in Tamil Nadu.

Though they lived at the same time and within the broader Tamil region, they did not share a city long enough to have likely met.

Except, possibly, in 1914!

From 1910 to March 1914, Ramanujan lived in Madras (Chennai), supported by patrons like Ramaswamy Iyer and the University of Madras. He left for Cambridge in March 1914. Bharathiyar was in Pondicherry between 1908–1918 due to political exile. However, he occasionally sneaked into Madras during this period. So it is possible (hypothetically) that Bharathiyar visited Madras in 1914.

So, I have always wanted to imagine a meeting and conversation between the two diametrically different geniuses – what would a left brain genius and right brain genius talk if they met, while knowing about each other’s prowess?

Given that both were very devout, here’s an imaginary meeting between Subramania Bharathi and Srinivasa Ramanujan, sometime in 1914, at the Parthasarathy Temple in Madras (yes, the very same temple where Bharathi was struck by the temple’s elephant. Although he survived the incident, his health deteriorated eventually, and he died).

The morning sun slants across the front mandapam of TiruvallikeNi’s Parthasarathy Temple as Ramanujan, thin, deeply absorbed, sits near a pillar scribbling numbers on a piece of paper. A priest passes by, but Ramanujan barely notices. A cow wanders unbothered between devotees.

Bharathiyar sidesteps the cow and notices Ramanujan.

Bharathiyar, to Ramanujan: “You write as though the Gods themselves are waiting for your answer”

Ramanujan looks up, mildly startled. Then, recognizing Bharathi, he says, with an amused expression, “The Gods already know the answer, sir. I’m just trying to catch up”

Bharathiyar chuckles. Ramanujan’s smart repartee pleases him.

Bharathiyar: “I have heard of you. The young man whose notebook confounds half of Madras University!”

Ramanujan: “And I of you! The revolutionary poet who frightens governments but comforts the common man!”

A moment of quiet. Bells ring from the temple’s inner sanctum.

Bharathiyar: “You trust numbers quite a lot to reveal the deepest truths, don’t you?”

Ramanujan turns, faintly defensive but polite.

Ramanujan: “Numbers do not lie, sir”

Bharathiyar: “Neither do poems. But both are misunderstood”

Ramanujan gestures to the temple gopuram, and asks, “Can poetry build this?”.

Bharathiyar: “Can equations move the heart that built it?”

A spark of respect appears in Ramanujan’s eyes, and he says, “Fair. But numbers describe the universe”

Bharathiyar: “… and poetry gives the universe meaning”

Ramanujan pauses, considers, then counters: “Meaning is subjective. Mathematics is truth”

Bharathiyar: “Truth without meaning is a lamp without oil”

The challenge hangs in the air. Ramanujan stands, intrigued.

Bharathiyar continues, breaking the silence, “Tell me, do numbers speak to you… or do you speak to them?”

Ramanujan: “Neither. They reveal themselves, when they are pleased. And poetry? Does it arrive, or is it pursued?”

Bharathiyar: “It arrives like lightning… and then must be chased before it disappears”

Ramanujan nods, recognising a familiar truth.

Ramanujan: “Then we are both servants of revelations that come uninvited!”

Bharathiyar: “Ah hah! But we must make ourselves worthy of receiving them”

Ramanujan: “Tell me – do you believe wisdom is given or earned?”

Bharathiyar: “I believe it is both! Given by grace, earned by courage.”

Ramanujan’s eyes soften, “Then may we continue to be worthy, in our own ways. I think we are climbing the same mountain… but from opposite sides”

They smile – two different minds recognising the same fire in each other.

A distant conch blows in the vicinity. Bharathiyar folds his hands and says, “I suspect, young sir, that the world will have a lot to say about you very soon”

Ramanujan (softly): “And about you, perhaps even more than you expect”

Bharathiyar gives a slight bow and turns toward the inner sanctum.

Ramanujan watches him walk away, then returns to his paper, a new idea suddenly forming, as if the conversation had nudged something loose.

The post When Subramania Bharathi met Srinivasa Ramanujan first appeared on beastoftraal.com.

The sameness.

A selfie, usually.
Then a few lines in staccato rhythm.
Short sentences.
Each on its own line.
Even when the thought doesn’t need it.
It looks like a manifesto. But it’s just formatting theatre.

I was just trying the template. Made me cringe

The dramatic “hook” about quitting a job or failing bravely. Then the inevitable question at the bottom: “What do you think?”. Or a specific ask for a specific phrase to be added in the comment so that something can be sent via DM.

And if one person’s “My kid did/said this, and this is what I learnt…” post seemed popular, you can find hundreds more like that, with or without actual kids, babies, Uber drivers, house helps saying or doing things that lead to a ‘LinkedIn lesson’. With a selfie featuring the kid/baby, mostly.

Or you may have seen this too – one person writes about how his parents led simple lives, invested in fixed deposits. It gathers a lot of Likes. And then it also gathers copycats – more people talk about the simple life of their parents, their interest to store old plastic covers, investing in fixed deposits and so on.

Many such posts end up in a really funny Reddit/Twitter compilation called ‘LinkedIn Lunatics’. For a reason.

Different faces, different companies, same content skeleton. This is the “LinkedIn algorithm hack” in action. And it’s killing more personal brands than it’s helping.

Why? For that, let me take you first into the ocean, with sharks!

When Jaws made everyone see dollar signs

Back in 1975, Steven Spielberg released Jaws. You already know the story: the shark, the beach town, the music that makes you hear danger even when nothing is on screen.

What’s interesting is what happened after.

Hollywood saw that a formula was ready to be cracked: giant shark, suspense, terror in the water. And soon, Hollywood was flooded with shark movies. Orca. Great White. Deep Blue Sea. Sharknado. IMDb lists over 180 shark films in total!

Most of them were terrible.

But they got made because the formula worked once. Studios thought: “Why risk originality when we can repeat what the market clearly likes?”

That’s the same logic people now apply to LinkedIn posts. Something works, so people copy it. And then another copy. And another. Until the whole feed looks like the cinematic wasteland of shark knock-offs.

The LinkedIn hack playbook

Here’s the current recipe people swear by:

The manifesto format. Every post written like a declaration, broken into 2–3 word sentences, one below the other. Even when the content doesn’t need it. It looks dramatic, but mostly just looks like everyone else’s feed.

A selfie, because faces grab attention. Even when that selfie has no context whatsoever to that post… your selfie/photo is already in your display picture, remember… if people didn’t know how you look!

A hooky first line, because you need people to click “see more”.

These are all attempts to “play the algorithm”.

Ironically, LinkedIn or its employees have never ever advocated using one or more hacks that are in vogue now, or ever. It’s always someone else assuming what works, anecdotally. 

Do they work? Sometimes (more on how it “works”, below).

Do they build your brand? Almost never.

Because your brand isn’t the number of likes you collect. Your brand is your distinctiveness. And nothing kills distinctiveness faster than looking, sounding, and posting like everyone else.

Enter Netflix: The Atlas problem

Now, let’s leave LinkedIn and the sharks, and head to Netflix. Because this is where the parallel really hits.

Netflix has mountains of data. They know what you click, how long you watch, when you stop, even which thumbnail makes you press play. They crunch all of it to predict what you’ll binge.

That sounds smart. But here’s what it looks like in practice.

Take Atlas, a sci-fi film. Screenwriter Aron Coleite originally opened the film with a wild scene: Jennifer Lopez interrogating the severed head of a robot terrorist! It was strange, and hence memorable. But also “risky”.

But Netflix said no.

Their data told them viewers need a “hook” immediately, and that the window for attention is shrinking. So the severed-head scene was scrapped. In came a safe, conventional SWAT-team raid.

Coleite admitted he was swayed by the numbers: “I see [the window] shrinking as attention spans are harder to corral.”

And just like that, a distinctive opening became a generic one. Not because of creative vision, but because the algorithm wanted safety.

When the algorithm becomes the director

Netflix isn’t shy about this. Filmmakers quoted in the Guardian article described getting notes like: “Have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who are on their phone can still follow along”!

Think about that. Scenes rewritten not for story, but for distracted scrolling.

It’s the cinematic equivalent of “add a selfie” on LinkedIn. Or the equivalent of the manifesto style formatting. Engineered for quick engagement, not putting the thought first.

The riskier choice — the robot head, the ambiguous moment, the quiet pause — gets tossed aside. Because it doesn’t test well in the data.

LinkedIn feeds = Netflix catalogs

Do you see the parallel?

On LinkedIn:
A manifesto-style format is your forced exposition.
A selfie is your SWAT-team raid.
The hooky “You won’t believe what happened” line is your algorithm magnet.
The endless “What do you think?” is your closing instruction.

It’s all engineered for visibility. And it works, in the shallow sense.

But just like Netflix’s endless catalog of safe, bland algorithm movies (sometimes called “mockbusters”), LinkedIn feeds fill up with clones. Distinctiveness gets sanded down. Few remember who said what.

The other side of Netflix — and the illusion of “hits”

To be fair, Netflix isn’t just a graveyard of algorithm clones. When it dares to think away from the herd, it has produced some of the most successful programming of the past decade. Think Stranger Things, The Crown, Squid Game, and KPop Demon Hunters. These worked not because they were safe, but because they carried bold, distinctive creative visions.

KPop Demon Hunters, in particular, is a remarkable case. It’s made by Americans (produced by Sony) who have beautifully imbibed what makes ‘K’ content tick, and now even the Koreans love it. Not very different from ‘Avatar – The Last Air Bender’ series earlier that many people assume was written by Asians and was based on some anime series. It wasn’t. It was written by an American duo!

But here’s the catch. Even Netflix’s “hits” are often proclaimed as such because of how Netflix itself defines a “view.” Once upon a time, a “view” meant you’d watched at least 70% of a film. Later it became two minutes!

The goalposts keep moving, and suddenly almost anything can be called a “hit.”

LinkedIn’s algorithm does something similar. When you post something that panders to the algorithm—the manifesto, the selfie, the bait question—the algorithm “shows” it to people, of course. You get impressions, maybe a burst of likes.

But just as with Netflix’s view counts, that doesn’t mean people truly engaged with you, or that your reputation grew.

Visibility is not the same as credibility. Reach is not the same as brand.

And that’s the trap.

It’s also a cycle. You read about what ‘works’ on LinkedIn. You try it yourself. The algorithm liked it and showed it to people. People saw it. You liked that people saw it and your ‘impressions’ zoomed. So, you want to repeat the same process by doing more of what ‘worked’.

The cost of pandering

When you let the algorithm dictate your output, you confuse attention with identity.

Yes, you might get more impressions. Yes, a post or two might “go viral”. But what happens after? Do people remember you? Do people associate you with something specifically? Or just the formula you used?

Your brand may not grow stronger. It just gets noisier.

That’s why many people on LinkedIn end up frustrated. They chase metrics, they get some reach, but when they step back, they realize: “All this posting, and my brand doesn’t feel any clearer.”

It’s the same reason most shark movies after ‘Jaws’ are forgotten. Same reason ‘Atlas’ will never be remembered like the bold films Netflix could have made instead.

To be sure, if you think of yourself as a “content creator” or as an “influencer”, you are perfectly right in chasing impressions and pandering to an “audience”, based on what “works” in terms of the metrics that LinkedIn offers you. It’s just that the purpose of personal branding is very, very different.

The alternative: Resonance over replication

So what’s the way out?

Track the right signals. Comments are nice. But DMs, invitations, speaking gigs, client calls — that’s the personal brand impact.

Even better? Take the stithapragya approach: The stithapragya framework for personal branding.

Don’t trade the robot head for a SWAT raid.
Your brand is the severed robot head. 
Distinctive. Risky. Memorable.

When you follow the hack playbook, you swap it for a generic SWAT raid. 

Familiar. Forgettable.

Just like Netflix. Just like the shark movie glut after Jaws. Just like every cloned post on your LinkedIn feed right now.

Algorithms will always push you toward the middle. Toward what’s safe, what’s repeatable, what “works”. But your brand lives in the edges.

So the next time you’re about to post, ask yourself: am I writing what I really want to say, or am I just giving the algorithm another SWAT-team raid?

Because nobody builds a brand on clones.

PS: The larger problem is why people are chasing the LinkedIn algorithm and cloning others’ so-called successful posts. That happens because they have not spent enough time defining their personal brand sharply and creating content pipelines for themselves. This is a separate topic, and worth a detailed post in itself!

The post Why Playing the LinkedIn Algorithm Is Ruining Personal Branding first appeared on beastoftraal.com.