The total and the trend
Reports converge on roughly ₹3,000–3,500 crore of influencer marketing spend in India in 2025, growing around 20% a year toward ₹4,500–5,000 crore by 2027. Within advertising overall it is still small; within digital it is the fastest-growing line, and most large advertisers now treat creators as a standing budget rather than an experiment.
Who spends
- E-commerce and marketplaces lead at roughly a quarter of spend — codes and affiliate make attribution easy, so budgets scale.
- FMCG follows at around a fifth, moving regional budgets into vernacular creators for reach and sampling.
- Beauty and personal care, fashion, consumer electronics, fintech and ed-tech make up most of the rest, each with its own creator type and rules.
- Everyone else — retail chains, restaurants, real estate, automotive, healthcare, travel, agri — is the growth: categories that never had a creator line and now do. Our industry pages cover fifteen of them.
From faces to squads
The structural shift is in how the money is split. Reports find close to half of brands now prefer micro and nano creators for cost-effective reach, with nano creators posting the highest engagement of any tier. The budget that bought one celebrity now buys a hundred local creators, a bank of usable content and attribution by city. Celebrities have not disappeared; they sit on top of a base that did not exist five years ago.
What brands measure now
Reach and impressions are table stakes. The metrics that move budgets are code redemptions, cost per order or footfall, saves and shares by location, sentiment in comments, and content reused as ads. Weekly reporting has replaced end-of-campaign decks — which is how Oye reports by default.
Where the next rupee goes
Regional, small-creator, always-on, measured. Every report on this page says the same thing in different numbers.