Popular lifestyle content creator and digital influencer Muskkan Rawat delivered a sharp wake-up call to legacy brands, explaining that corporate executives must learn to co-create with digital storytellers rather than command them if they want to successfully win the attention of Gen Z consumers.
Speaking during a broadcast panel discussion titled Gen Z Trend Check, which was produced by media platform CNBC-TV18 Storyboard18 in partnership with Snapchat India, Rawat emphasized that the youngest consumer demographic possesses an incredibly sharp radar for inauthentic marketing and will immediately scroll past standard commercial formulas.
The panel discussion, which explored the shifting dynamics of the attention economy, highlighted a growing disconnect between traditional corporate marketing practices and the actual digital behaviours of younger audiences.
According to Rawat, modern viewers are fully aware when a creator is delivering a paid endorsement, but they are entirely willing to accept the corporate partnership if the brand integrates seamlessly into an existing digital ecosystem.
She noted that traditional advertising strategies frequently build narratives around minor aesthetic flaws to pitch items like cosmetic concealers, a tactic that she argues is completely losing traction with self-accepting younger shoppers who are tired of being sold to through artificial insecurities.
Rawat advocated for total creative freedom, explaining that her most successful campaigns involve deep co-creation with corporate partners rather than reading rigid scripts.
She noted that a brand cannot always be the absolute star of the show and must instead find a way to stitch its message naturally into a creator’s daily life updates.
The platform dynamics of the contemporary creator economy have dramatically altered how content earns attention organically versus trying to game the algorithm.
Muskkan Rawat explained that younger demographics are suffering from immense feed fatigue due to identical trends, causing users to seek out true personal expression over repetitive content formats that exist solely to satisfy digital metrics.
She added that mainstream media platforms have been entirely replaced for her generation, with critical news, lifestyle updates, and consumer trends now discovered entirely within personalized social media feeds. If a story, news event, or product is worth knowing, Rawat stated that it will naturally appear on her audience’s social feed.
The live broadcast also featured prominent industry leaders including Snapchat India head Pulkit Trivedi and WPP media expert Shekhar Sharma, who agreed that traditional corporate advertising metrics are failing.
Both executives noted that metrics like VTR, or view-through rate, which tracks the percentage of people who watch a digital video ad to completion, are increasingly becoming ghost impressions due to users looking at multiple screens simultaneously.
Muskkan Rawat, a prominent lifestyle, beauty, and fashion influencer with over 340K followers on Instagram and over 130Ksubscribers on YouTube, has built a career around aesthetic storytelling and highly relatable daily vlogs.
Based out of Mumbai, her videos regularly focus on lifestyle updates and interactive getting ready with me videos, where she frequently collaborates with international cosmetic giants like Maybelline and L’Oreal.
