For India’s FMCG marketers, television is no longer sacred

Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brands have long loomed large in India’s national psyche. From soaps and biscuits to toothpaste and tea, consumption here is not just habitual but almost ceremonial.

Historically, brands have chased ubiquity through repetition and memory, often turning to TV advertising with one strategy: Be everywhere, be familiar and trust that scale will do the rest. 

But TV’s place in this system is changing as many FMCG brands plan their 2026 strategies to balance reach, accountability and control in a more fragmented and regulated landscape.

TAM AdEx’s 2025 television recap shows linear TV ad volumes declining about 10% year –on year, with much of the softness coming from more cautious FMCG spending, even though the category remains one of the biggest buyers of TV ad inventory. TV continues to offer comfort and dependable reach, but it no longer enjoys automatic primacy in media plans.

Newer video formats are competing for that attention. Connected TV (CTV) — particularly in urban, multiscreen households — promises the familiarity of television with digital addressability. Industry estimates suggest India’s CTV ad spend reached roughly ₹2,500 crore ($273 million) in 2025, with forecasts pointing to around ₹3,500 crore ($420 million) by 2027 and growth rates that outpace linear TV. 

The shift is visible in how FMCG media plans are now built. Amit Verma, founder and CEO of DigitUp, recalled that not long ago the framework was simpler. “TV bought reach, digital bought performance and programmatic was treated like a cheap, targetable layer,” he said.

Today, he argued, planning looks less like a binary split between TV and digital and more like a portfolio decision about which ecosystems can prove impact. Video spans linear TV, OTT and CTV, YouTube and mobile; programmatic has shifted from “spray and pray” buying to more controlled supply through private marketplaces and safer inventory. 

Beyond TV: Commerce, new regulations and outcomes

Commerce-linked environments also beckon. Retail media and quick-commerce platforms are attracting a rising share of FMCG budgets, Verma said, because they sit closest to purchase and feel inherently measurable. For some brands, Verma estimated, quick commerce alone now accounts for up to half of digital media spend.

Signal loss, OS-level changes and tighter privacy norms are accelerating that reallocation. Practices such as aggressive retargeting, last-click attribution and rigid frequency control are becoming harder to sustain as data access narrows and India’s new data-protection regime begins to shape how systems are designed. 

CTV sits at the intersection of these changes. On paper, it offers exactly what FMCG marketers say they want: a large screen, a lean-back environment and the promise of digital accountability.

In practice, Verma is cautious. “In India, it’s not ‘TV with digital accountability’ by default,” he said. Almost anything in a digitized ecosystem can be made accountable, he argued, but only if brands are willing to ask vendors the right questions and pay for the infrastructure that goes with the answers.

Rajeev Jain, senior vice president of corporate marketing at DS Group, described priorities for 2026 as “far more measured and outcome-focused.” TV still gives brands the comfort of dependable reach, he argued. But he sees the real momentum in environments “where scale meets sharper understanding of addressable video, retail media and more intelligent use of data.” 

Both Verma and Jain told The Current they are starting to see higher completion rates and improved outcomes when CTV exposure is paired with mobile retargeting, especially in outcome-driven categories.

Digital-first FMCG brands, operating at smaller scale but with more agility, are often more willing to push those boundaries. 

At Fixderma, Chairman Anurag Mehrotra sees CTV’s potential but also its constraints. He argued that CTV has “all the right ingredients to become a major pillar” for FMCG advertisers, but, he said, it will only move from experiment to core budget line when cross-screen measurement is more consistent, inventory quality is more standardized and pricing is better aligned to genuine incremental reach. 

Once those fundamentals are in place, he said, CTV is likely to shift from “interesting test” to “dependable scale channel,” with appetite on the marketer side already clear.

What’s next

By the end of 2025, India’s advertising market was still expanding, if more deliberately than before. WPP’s latest forecast put total ad revenue at about ₹1.85 lakh crore ($20.7 billion) for 2025, up a little over 9% year on year, with further high single-digit growth expected in 2026 as spend tilts from linear television toward digital and commerce environments.

Within that digital engine, FMCG and e-commerce together drive around 68% of spending, according to the Ipsos “State of Digital Marketing in India 2025–26” report, with FMCG remaining the single largest contributor.

Taken together, these perspectives point to a market that is maturing, not simply accelerating.

FMCG media strategy in India is no longer defined by the search for the next channel, but by a more disciplined evaluation of what each channel can realistically deliver. Reach still matters. Familiarity still matters. But so does accountability, and increasingly, so does the ability to explain spend decisions in simple, defensible terms.