Every August, advertisements use the rhetoric of independence. Flags emerge in advertisements, jingles become patriotic, and companies race to say something about the country. But ask those who work within agencies what freedom means to them, and their response has nothing to do with a campaign schedule. It is about who gets to speak in a meeting, who can fail without losing their job, and if a 24-year-old can tell a customer that the brief is incorrect.

For Vinay Singh Sangwan, Co-founder of Verve Media, that distinction is more important than ever. “To me, freedom in advertising today goes far beyond creative expression; it’s about creating an environment where people have the trust to question assumptions, contribute ideas regardless of hierarchy, and take ownership of outcomes,” he states.

Amitabh Sreedharan, EVP Growth, INNOCEAN India, holds a similar outlook, believing that independence extends beyond the creative sector. For him, it means having the freedom to query what a brief appears to be asking for, to probe the underlying problem, and to present views that the client may not have considered. It also entails collaborating across typical agency roles and expanding a concept into areas including as technology, culture, data, or even new business models.

Advertising in India was political before it was creative. B Dattaram & Co., the country’s first advertising firm, started in Bombay in 1905, the same year the Swadeshi movement began urging Indians to shun foreign goods in favor of native industries.

Ads from that era did not sell lifestyle; they sold identity, encouraging readers to purchase Indian-made soap, linen, and oil as a form of resistance. In the first chapter, freedom meant employing persuasion against a colonizer.

Independence altered the struggle, but not the strain. The motivation to exaggerate increased as Indian brands grew in number. That is why the Advertising Standards Council of India was established in 1985 by advertising and media experts to ensure that Indian advertisements are polite, fair, and honest. The industry imposed a necessary constraint on itself. False health claims, bogus purity indicators, and fabricated advantages over competitors did not limit advertising’s flexibility, but rather increased its trustworthiness.

Today, the boundaries being pushed are less about what an ad may claim and more about who has a voice in creating it, as well as if there will be a job left to fill. Forrester now expects AI, automation, and efficiency initiatives to reduce the US advertising workforce by 15% by the end of next year, doubling its previous prediction. Closer to the ground, Indian agencies are thought to be covertly laying off approximately 10% of their workforce each year to safeguard profits, even while multinational companies reduce employment. For example, Omnicom acknowledged almost 4,000 layoffs following its merger with Interpublic, while Dentsu indicated it will lay off 8% of its worldwide workforce due to a drop in revenue.

This is layered on top of a society that was never known for its gentleness. Women account for about 40% of the advertising workforce in India, but the industry’s bias against women is most visible when they become mothers, when career pauses and maternity leave are quietly used as excuses to avoid leadership responsibilities. In that context, freedom becomes a need for stability, respect, and a say in choices that influence one’s livelihood.

Rajni Daswani, SoCheers’ Chief Growth Officer, People and Business, sees this transition as the most significant at the moment. “Can I question a brief without being perceived as difficult? Can I argue with a senior without fearing the consequences?” she inquires, adding that while AI allows anybody to generate 10 variations of an idea in minutes, “the true value of a human is not only generating more, but recognizing which route is worth pursuing.”

Himani Mangtani, Business Head of SW Network in Bombay, defines freedom as having agency over one’s decisions, such as how individuals think, what they say, and how they choose to work. She contends that this necessitates trust and responsibility rather than strict guidelines for how to approach a short or complete task. “For me, that’s what freedom at an agency looks like today: trust, ownership, and the ability to make choices within the responsibility you have,” she says.

The labor that freedom once constructed.

It’s important to recall what unshackled advertising used to look like in India, since it explains why the industry still romanticizes the term. Alyque Padamsee, who led Lintas during the 1970s and 1980s, based his most renowned piece on a simple observation. His investigation discovered that the ordinary Indian housewife’s sole private time was the ten minutes she had to herself in the shower each day, a brief respite from a life of responsibilities. That understanding resulted in the Liril girl dancing by a waterfall in 1985, a picture that had little to do with soap and everything to do with a woman claiming a few unwatched minutes for herself.

It became one of the most well-known campaigns in the country’s history precisely because Padamsee had the freedom to pursue an idea.

Piyush Pandey created a new type of freedom, based on words rather than pictures, giving Indian advertising a voice outside a worldwide template. Work like Fevicol’s advertising or Cadbury’s ‘Kuch Khaas Hai’ lasted because agencies were permitted to trust their instincts.

None of this would be possible unless agencies were ready to allow people to go beyond the scope of their briefs. Rashi Garodia, Team Pumpkin’s Business Head, feels it is an issue of trust. “Freedom in an agency today is not about removing boundaries; it is about giving people the confidence to push those boundaries,” she asserts.

“When you give people the room to make decisions, and the comfort to learn when things don’t work, you don’t just get better ideas, you build people who think and act like leaders.”

According to Punt Creative’s Head of Business, Upasana Naithani, the youngest individuals in the room have the most confidence. “The work we finally ship looks nothing like what the brief originally asked for, but it solves the actual brand or business problem underneath,” she says. “It’s generally our youngest team members, and they’re given the opportunity to speak up not just internally but also in front of a marketing director, or perhaps a CMO. Creative freedom was always the license to create something unexpected.

The freedom that matters now is the ability to say, ‘the brief is asking the wrong question’ and be heard, regardless of how long you’ve worked.”

Sreedharan argues that authorities should provide employees more leeway to challenge the existing quo rather than merely carrying out what has already been determined. He claims that agencies may provide teams with a clear business challenge and guidelines while enabling them to decide how to tackle the problem. This is especially applicable with AI and developing technologies, as smaller teams may be allowed to evaluate whether a tool truly improves a client problem, workflow, or concept.

What the next generation asks for

That question, “What will the next generation of advertising professionals value most?” is answered differently once you get from hierarchy to identity.

Saumya Baijal, Executive Vise President, Strategy at Virtue Asia, India, says that the next generation demands license to make mistakes in public. “We have put far too much pressure on getting to answers quickly,” she states. However, the next generation knows the value of mistakes–what they teach, how fascinating the path becomes, and how stressful life gets when compelled to constantly search for methods to live without them. They will want freedom to fail. The other will be the ability to reinvent oneself. Choose a different course halfway.”

Similarly, Mangtani feels that the future generation would cherish the ability to remain dynamic rather than being limited to the function for which they were employed. She cites an increasing desire among younger workers to comprehend the “why” and “what” rather than merely executing the “how”. A creative person may wish to express ideas, appear on television, contribute to strategy, and pursue a career outside job descriptions.Mangtani believes that the future generation will place the most priority on the freedom to be dynamic.

Similarly, Sneha Desai, Design Lead at Wife, views it as a release from the strain of certainty.

“The freedom to make mistakes, experiment, and explore the unknown, without feeling like every idea needs to have a guarantyd outcome,” she feels the next generation of talent want the most.

Dipshika Ravi, National Creative Director at Schbang, holds a similar viewpoint, but places disagreement at the heart of that freedom. She feels that the best work is typically produced when individuals feel comfortable criticizing an answer, regardless of categorization, which needs trust and psychological safety. According to her, independence for the next generation involves questioning assumptions, challenging the brief, and having a meaningful voice in defining the work.

“For me, freedom now means the ability to disagree. The finest work I’ve done has come from rooms where people felt safe expressing, ‘I don’t think this is the proper solution,’ regardless of their position,” Ravi adds.

Given what young talent is looking for, the practical challenge is whether agencies can genuinely pass up ownership rather than simply exposure. Naithani says, “Let people own problems, not tasks… Real ownership is giving someone a whole client question end to end, including the freedom to get it wrong.”

Baijal wants organizations to create internal “thinking labs,” which are locations dedicated to ideas that can fail until they succeed.

Desai identifies social media as the apparent training field, “an evolving space without a fixed playbook,” in which junior teams may make the rules rather than inherit them. Daswani also connects ownership to confidence: giving a young planner or designer a thot to take “from observation to execution,” she says, because that is “where confidence, judgment, and, ultimately, better advertising are built.”

Sangwan says, “Agencies that empower employees to experiment with new formats, AI-driven workflows, strategic thinking, and cross-functional collaboration without the fear of failure will not only build stronger teams but also create more innovative work for their clients.”

There is a version of this business that requires less flexibility, not more. The limits against deceptive claims, things marketed as miracles, and advertisements that lied to sell were well worth having. They held advertising responsible to the people it reaches. But David Ogilvy, one of the industry’s pioneering voices, recognized the flip side of the coin. “Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from proclaiming its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed,” he said. “The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.”

That tension, between the restraint advertising needs and the freedom it depends on, is not new. What has changed is who gets to hold both concepts at once. It was previously the responsibility of the creative director or the CEO. Now, if the individuals quoted here are correct, it belongs to the person who is closest to the issue, regardless of their position or length of service.