Why a brand is a story you agree to believe

What an advertiser actually does all day

Muzamil opens by naming the gap most listeners will recognise: the mass market has no idea that advertising is a discipline at all, that there is thought and craft behind the thirty seconds it spends a lifetime trying to skip. Atiya Zaidi runs BBDO Pakistan, the largest agency in the country, with Pepsi, Shan Foods and MG Motors on the roster and a Cannes Lion on the shelf. Her answer to “what is your job” is disarmingly small. “In the end of the day I tell stories,” she says. Brands, purpose, an objective held in mind — that is the work.

The objective matters more than the story. Advertising, she argues, is always a solution to a problem. Brands that are content with what they earn often don’t advertise at all — Pakola has limited demand and a loyal base, Slims chips are sought out without a single ad anyone can remember. You advertise when something has to change: a new launch, a reformulated recipe, a bigger pack, a sales target to hit. “The more time you spend on figuring out what your goal is,” she says, “the more likely you are to hit it.” Muzamil reframes it as communication — the only real way to tell a consumer that a flavour is changing, but that they’ll benefit, is to advertise to them.

A brand is a mark burned into the imagination

The conversation’s central idea arrives early, and it’s the one worth keeping. A brand, Zaidi says, is anything that leaves an impression and lives in collective imagination. The word itself is literal: farmers heated iron and burned a mark into livestock to show which animal belonged to which herd. That mark is the brand. It leaves an impression — and so do all the things we don’t normally file under marketing.

Steve Jobs was a brand. Bill Gates built one. Countries are brands — “made in Japan” carries an assumption of engineering quality the country deliberately cultivated. Money is a brand: paper you can’t eat, valuable only because collective imagination agrees it is. Even time, she points out, is a story everyone signed onto — nature doesn’t care what minute the sun sets; a person decided what to call 3pm and everyone agreed. Empires, kingdoms, films, religions: each leaves an impression in the brain, and that impression is what lets a buyer pay fifty thousand rupees for a pair of Nikes and wear them with pride while refusing five thousand for a local shoe that does the exact same job.

From that she draws the line the whole episode rests on. “Perceived value is different from real value, and what advertising does is create perception of value.” The car gets you from A to B; which car you drive carries a story about whether you’ve arrived. The product is constant. The story is the thing with power.

Eighty percent burns, and a refusal to be a victim

Zaidi was born in Karachi, moved to Saudi Arabia at three when her father worked for what became AT&T, and grew up in a closed, controlled, very safe country with no cinema and no music shops — she discovered Star Wars in her late thirties. The most arresting part of her story is her father’s. As a teenager, he tried to light a lantern so he could play table tennis with friends; it exploded, and he suffered second- and third-degree burns over more than eighty percent of his body. He spent two years in Jinnah Hospital on morphine.

Each time he woke he asked his brother what he looked like, and each time the family deflected. The truth arrived by accident: an aunt who’d had cataract surgery came to visit in reflective glasses, his brother made her remove them, and in that moment he understood his face had burned and everyone had been lying to spare him. He made a promise that day — if he survived, no one would ever pity him. He got out, couldn’t finish his formal education, took technical courses, designed and built metal grilles by hand. One he made decades ago still hangs in Zaidi’s in-laws’ home. He is in his eighties, still creative, still never wears half-sleeves.

The lesson she takes from him becomes her own operating philosophy. “He never played the victim,” she says. “Ten percent of your life is not in your control” — the house you’re born into, your genes, your nationality, the storm that hits your car. “Ninety percent of your life is how you react to that ten percent.” A victim mindset, the why me, look how good everyone else has it, is a trap you dig for yourself, because no one’s life is in their control and everyone has their own monsters to slay.

Stumbling into the rabbit hole of advertising

Nobody plans to be in advertising, Zaidi says — everyone stumbles in and then refuses to leave. Her own entry was a chain of accidents. Sent from Saudi Arabia to Karachi for university, she was meant to apply to medical college. A family friend noted she could write; she’d taught herself through a correspondence course from a Singapore writing school she found advertised in Reader’s Digest, doing assignments by hand and mailing them off to come back marked a month later. That offhand “yes” became the pattern of her career: “I just keep saying yes to things and I’ll figure it out later.”

At seventeen she was interviewing the CEO of Pizza Hut for newspaper advertising supplements, pretending she knew what she was doing. A kind marketing head at Dawn pointed her to an agency — “honest people, go work there” — and she walked into her first interview at Adcom not knowing you were meant to bring a portfolio. She interned for two or three thousand rupees, then helped seed what became Synergy, one of Pakistan’s big agencies. She credits a teacher there, Imran Awan, who sat the department down and taught them how body copy worked and how ideas were built. Asked whether work taught her more than school, she goes further: “Life experiences taught me more.” Education, she paraphrases from something she’d read the night before, has a way of making you unqualified for the very jobs it was meant to prepare you for.

London, a pregnancy, and a statue that doesn’t look back

Her brother in the US, fresh out of a computer science degree, called the office landline and offered to fund her further education. She applied to art schools in London, got rejected by Central Saint Martins, refused a foundation year at the second school on the grounds that she already had a paid, printed portfolio, and was finally admitted to the Chelsea College of Art and Design with the foundation waived. Engaged for seven years and married for three months, she left for London while her husband stayed in Pakistan for work — and absorbed every “where’s your wife” question on her behalf. The night before her flight she told him to just say he didn’t want her to go and she’d stay. He said of course he didn’t want her to go, but if he stopped her she’d hate him for the rest of her life.

Then the twist: she got pregnant in her first year, not yet twenty-two, terrified, walking home through London’s grey weather and crying. She tells the moment through a story she’d half-remembered — a statue and a warning that if you looked back you’d turn to stone. Something in it landed. “If I listen to any of these voices right now, if I look back, I’ll turn to stone.” She finished the year, her son was born in Pakistan, and the Pakistani families around her in London became an unrelated support system, watching each other’s kids while everyone worked and studied at once. Her degree, design for communication, taught her that the answers live inside the question — and that ten people handed one brief will solve it ten genuinely different ways, a lesson she watched play out in classmates turning ten seconds of recorded sound into invented visual languages.

Advertising is commercial art, not art

Zaidi is generous about her own industry’s reputation — Pakistani advertising, she says, is more badnaam than bad. The ads people hold up as the standard are the best-of-class reels from the US, the UK, India; the actual everyday output in those countries is just as weak. The distinction she insists on is that advertising is not art, it’s commercial art. You borrow from pop culture and attach its coolness to a brand. Nike didn’t need to show Michael Jordan, but they latched onto something the consumer aspired to — and there are still Jordan stores, a shoe named after him, decades on.

Her clearest example is local. Pepsi leaned into rap, and it worked so well that at a concert sponsored by a rival drink, the crowd spontaneously sang the Pepsi song — unpaid, unprompted — because it had become genuinely popular. A branded tone of voice could never have bought that. The catch is the test underneath all of it: creative work has done its job only if it makes you feel something. Jealousy at the convertible you’ll never own, laughter, grief, the urge to call your mother — any of it. “If it doesn’t make you feel something, then it’s not done its job.” And she’s clear-eyed about the audience: nobody wants to watch advertising. A child who can’t yet read the alphabet already knows how to hit skip. The industry, she adds, takes itself far too seriously; no one is waiting for your campaign, and a typo in a printed ad is not a death. Tomorrow it’ll be wrapping samosas.

Digital ended the era of getting away with bad work

The throughline of advertising, Zaidi argues, never changed: you go where your consumer is. The business reader gets reached in Business Recorder; the cinema-goer in the cinema; the TikTok native on TikTok. Platforms rise and fall — everyone stampeded onto Threads, brands built pages, and then the thing stalled. What digital genuinely changed is the work. Each platform has its own physics: TikTok is sound-on, Facebook is mostly sound-off and needs captions, YouTube wants a six-second unskippable horizontal cut, stories want vertical. You can no longer shoot one film and crop adaptations; you have to think about every end-state before you execute.

The deeper shift is accountability. “You cannot get away with bad work now,” she says — because for the first time the consumer has a voice, and feedback, even cruel feedback, finally exists. Her worry is that digital is sliding into the trap it was supposed to escape: YouTube has rebuilt itself into television, with pre-roll, mid-roll, a longer second break and an autoplay ad the moment a video ends. She thinks YouTube should rethink it. And she pushes back on the obituary written for TV — it remains the biggest medium even in the US, partly because of the paradox of choice. Faced with fifty options, the brain chooses nothing, closes Netflix after an hour of scrolling, and reaches for the lazy default. Fifty ketchups on a shelf and you stop wanting ketchup at all.

Risk needs a place that’s safe to be wrong

Muzamil presses on why Pakistani brands so rarely take the swings her best examples represent. Zaidi’s answer is structural, not a matter of stupid brand managers. The average chief marketing officer now lasts under three years, handed a mandate to not rock the boat and deliver incremental gains. Risk only gets taken where there is psychological security, and most companies — multinational and local — don’t provide it. She watches clients get hauled in front of finance teams to justify the cost of talent, and feels for them. The brave choice requires someone above you saying go, make the mistake, I’m behind you.

Her version of safety is precise: make a mistake, fine — but don’t make the same one twice; bring me a new mistake. Pair that with transparency. A leader should be able to tell a team the honest reason behind a hard decision rather than feed them white lies, and be adult enough to say I screwed up when wrong. Seniority, she insists, is not a courtyard of people circling you — it’s a growth in responsibility and accountability, where your mistakes carry larger consequences than a junior’s. She folds in the quiet quitting debate as the same problem from the other side: the difference between doing the work and doing the job. “In my book there is no job which is big or small. Whatever gets the work done, you do that.” If your designation gets in the way of the work, the designation is the problem.

Hope, not a prediction

Asked the question Muzamil puts to everyone — where is Pakistan in 2050, no clichés about the youth bulge, no if this then that — Zaidi refuses to forecast. She can’t predict five years out, let alone twenty-seven; what she’ll offer instead is a dream, which she calls the nicer word for hope. She doesn’t think the country fails. There are 220 million people, a nuclear power, deep resources, and a long history of bad governance that other nations have also surpassed and left behind. The population, she argues, has survived far worse and risen again — not through revolution, which she calls a bloody thing, but through evolution, the way species actually persist: build on the genes handed to you, and keep building.

“I have a lot of hope,” she says, deliberately not using if. Muzamil, closing at the ninety-nine-minute mark, lands it where the whole conversation has been pointing — that hope shall die last, and that he’d like to see the Pakistan she dreams of. For a discipline most people never think about, Zaidi has spent the hour making the case that advertising is really a working theory of attention, value and feeling — and that the same refusal to play the victim that got her father out of a burn ward is the thing she’s still selling, one story at a time.