GenZ in India, aged 12-27, represents a powerhouse demographic, accounting for 40% of the country’s population—more than the entire population of the United States. With a direct spend of $200 billion last year, projected to grow ninefold in the next decade, this generation is setting new benchmarks for consumption and consumer behaviour.
Understanding their unique values—authenticity, optimism, and a penchant for immersive, trend-aware experiences—has become essential for brands looking to resonate and thrive in a rapidly shifting market.
The Influencer Edge in GenZ Marketing: India’s GenZ looks to creators for inspiration and purchasing guidance, making influencer marketing the go-to strategy for connecting with this demographic. With influencer marketing spends in India already reaching Rs. 5,700 crores and growing annually, creators are outpacing traditional advertising in driving GenZ engagement and loyalty.
Animeta said that it is redefining GenZ marketing through data-driven, strategic influencer partnerships that combine cutting-edge technology with human expertise. Its hybrid model aims to ensure impactful, ROI-driven campaigns tailored to GenZ’s values and preferences.
With over 70% of campaigns targeting GenZ audiences, Animeta has partnered with brands like Amazon Fashion, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Tanishq, Fastrack, and Croma to craft marketing strategies.
Animeta’s blend of technology and human insights look to bridge the gap between brands and India’s most influential generation.
Medianews4u.com caught up with Anish Mehta, Founder, Animeta, Krishna Desai, Chief Product Officer, Animeta and Biswamitra Ray, SVP – Branded Content & Creator Strategy Animeta.
Q. What was the market gap seen that prompted the launch of Animeta?
Anish Mehta: The creator economy in general and within it, influencer marketing, is growing at an incredible pace. In India, we saw clear gaps in current state of the industry being largely un-organised and un-structured when it comes to both analytics and creativity. More importantly, the industry is biased towards opportunity to for a small fraction of influencers from India’s large creator universe.
Animeta was launched to help usher the industry to its future organised potential – for which we created a unique approach of combining cutting-edge technology via our product Animeta Brandstar – our platform for influencer marketing and social commerce – and expert human curation via our core team of GenZ specialist team, with a laser focus on ROI for brands.
Q. So far what progress has it made in terms of helping digital creators grow their communities and maximise their earnings?
Anish Mehta: In just a few months of our business operations, we have worked with over 1000 creators across 14 industry verticals with a win-win outcome: fair pricing for creators and high ROI for brands.
Q. How many content creators and influencers does Animeta work with?
Krishna Desai: While many influencer marketing companies boast quantity – millions upon millions of creators – which anyways have access to, but we focus more on quality – which creators are relevant for brands and do we know them to onboard them for a campaign.
Animeta tech product, Brandstar’s advanced intelligence layers and enriched datasets enable us to pinpoint the perfect creators for specific marketing objectives. Animeta Brandstar has over two million creator profiles, within which lie 200K relevant creators for branded campaigns, of which 70K (and growing) are verified by Animeta – meaning we have a first degree of connection with them and can onboard them quicky.
Q. As Animeta and the content creators it works with look to scale up is fair compensation going be the big challenge?
Anish Mehta: Our approach towards ROI for brands is biased towards actual deliverables, like asset views or actual product sale from a creator – rather than metrics like just follower count. This approach is the foundation of how we model our commercials – both for the advertiser and the creator, which ensures brands pay for outcome-based metrics that really matter and creators get fair compensation of what they deliver. Brands and creators have welcomed this approach, and we hope that more brands and creators will do so in the coming days.
Q. Could you shed light on the different verticals that Animeta focusses on like gaming, jewellery?
Biswamitra Ray: Animeta has worked with brands across Fashion, Beauty, Jewellery, Apparel and Accessories, Food & Beverage, Media & Entertainment, Gaming and has worked with creators from 20 different genres catering to these industry segments.
Q. One area of focus has been helping brands market to Gen Z. Could you offer examples of work done with companies like Amazon Fashion, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Tanishq that stands out?
Biswamitra Ray: By leveraging technology and human expertise, Animeta empowers brands to authentically connect with GenZ audiences, driving meaningful engagement and measurable results. For example, Animeta won and executed campaigns for ‘Amazon Fashion-Up,’ where the challenge was to deliver creators with high notability at a very low guaranteed campaign CPV.
Using a mix of Animeta Brandstar and our GenZ specialist teams – who themselves are GenZ – we onboarded given notable + alternate creators + TV/Cinema actors who are known for their credible fashion sense. We ensured a quality creative adoption of the vision template provided by the brand. We met and bettered the CPV objectives and got campaign extension, which we delivered even better results.
Q. Gen Z accounts for 43 per cent of the country’s consumption. Have we reached a situation where no brand can afford to ignore them? Many brands continue to ignore Gen Z from what I understand.
Biswamitra Ray: GenZ already directly spent $200 billion last year, which will grow to 9X over the next 10 years. GenZ’s reliance on creators for inspiration and guidance is reshaping the marketing landscape. Authentic content from influencers often outweighs traditional advertising in driving opinions and purchasing power.
As a result, India’s influencer marketing spends have reached Rs. 5700 crores and are expected to grow in double digits annually, already accounting for 10-12% of digital marketing budgets, which indicates a wide-spread acceptance of the import of GenZ in mind of brands.
Q. Trends apparently are more important to Gen Z than loyalty in making purchase decisions. They like gifs, images, immersive content. How important are these factors in marketing to them?
Biswamitra Ray: Very important indeed! For a brand to target GenZ, they really need to understand their distinct values and preferences to help shape their marketing plans:
· Authenticity: They value genuine relationships and are unapologetic themselves.
· Positive outlook: GenZ is optimistic about India’s social and cultural landscape.
· Inner circle influence: They prioritize opinions from close friends and family.
· Immersive experiences: Visual and interactive content captivates this generation.
· Experimentation: GenZ is eager to try new things, products, and experiences.
· Creator-driven discovery: They find and engage with brands through their favourite creators.
· Trend-aware: GenZ is open to exploring new trends and products.
· Informed spending: Research-driven purchasing decisions are the norm.
Q. In terms of shopping Gen Z uses a phygital strategy. If they are in a store they check for information online much more than older age groups. How do brands and content creators have to adjust their marketing and digital platform strategy given this scenario?
Krishna Desai: GenZ exhibit the most research-driven purchasing decisions compared with any other cohort, which gives rise to their preference for a phygital purchase cycle. Brands need to embrace omni-channel strategy to enable effective communication and purchase on both offline and online channels. It is no wonder, for example, large consumer electronic brands have both online presence and a growing stores footprint.
At Animeta, we have created a tech-based solution to accurately attribute offline activities like store-walk ins, in-store purchases, etc. to online initiatives like influencer marketing, creator led-commerce, etc. The process accurately maps and does attributions, is tough to ‘game’, easy to implement has minimum friction to customer journey and also supports data privacy.
Q. How is Animeta leveraging AI to enhance its products and solutions?
Krishna Desai: AI is a much-abused term. We at Animeta have actually filed a patent which enables creators to receive customized AI powered creative inspirations and ideations.
We have created an AI solution which enables a content-first approach to influencer marketing. For a given influencer marketing campaign’s brief and given list of creators, our AI powered solution can identify the best content route/theme/mode for each creator, which plays to the creators’ creative strength to maximise reach and engagement outcomes for the campaign. We have a few other exciting things lined up in our product that uses AI which we will announce soon.
Q. How does Animeta use data analytics and business intelligence to help clients drive measurable business outcomes?
Krishna Desai: Animeta Brandstar’s unparallel creator discovery is the basis from which it is able to drive measurable business outcomes from brands. Animeta Brandstar’s advanced intelligence layers and enriched datasets enable us to pinpoint the perfect creators for specific marketing objectives. Our powerful Creator Discovery module assesses key criteria, including:
· Content genre, tone, and relatability (to ensure for brand-fit)
· Creator type: culture movers, trusted experts, or niche (beyond follower size)
· Audience authenticity (to ensure minimal % of fake followers)
· Demographical footprint (for maximum GenZ coverage)
· Geographical and linguistic alignment with target markets
· Audience reachability – quality of followers & their followers (for virality)
· Cost efficiency – pre-measured ability to deliver campaign outcome (against cost)
Q. One of the challenges of influencer marketing is inauthenticity. What should the way forward be? Are ASCI guidelines a step in the right direction?
Krishna Desai: Both ASCI and DPDP policy helps give strong guardrails for the influencer marketing industry to help protect its foundation – authenticity. Moreover, at Animeta, we are able help determine and weed out creator accounts that are likely to be inauthentic, fake using data analytics.
For example, social media profile that has a high percentage of audiences that have a disproportionately high number of followers, points towards something fishy. Animeta Brandstar actually gives an Authenticity ‘score’ to each social media account basis multiple such metrics.
Q. Apart from Gen Z does Animeta focus on other TGs?
Biswamitra Ray: Brand focussed on GenZ cohort comprised about 70% of all the campaigns we have done so far. Other campaigns include focus on older cohorts for brands in the CPG category like many under Jyothy Laboratories (e.g.: older moms for Henko), Consumer electronics like Voltas (Gen X audiences), specialised cohorts (doctors) for VConnect Health to name a few.
