Mumbai: Every marketing leader in India is being asked to prove the same thing right now: that the function is worth its enterprise value, not just its media spend.
That was the throughline of MMA India’s Q3 board conversation, drawn from a room deliberately weighted toward marketers but spanning agencies, tech enablers, and publishers.
Five insights came out of it on the state of Indian marketing right now:
1. AI’s first-mover window is wide open, and closing fast
– Fewer than 1% of enterprises anywhere are currently running AI agents in production. The board called this headroom, not a caution sign.
– Gartner projects 60% of brands will use agentic AI for one-to-one personalisation by 2028. WARC’s own CMO survey puts real, multi-agent campaigns today at roughly 8%.
– The board’s read: the early advantage is in smarter audience discovery, not flashy creative automation. India’s data density does not yet match the US or UK markets these tools were built for. Moving early still beats moving loud.
2. Creative is marketing’s biggest lever, and its least measured one
– Generative AI has made content nearly free to produce. More of it exists than ever, with no shared way to judge whether any of it actually works.
– The industry only got a joint attention-measurement standard, from the IAB and MRC, in late 2025. India still runs on proprietary, largely US/UK-calibrated norms.
– The board’s dividing line: judge creative on whether it creates new demand, not just how efficiently it harvests demand that already exists. Most current models only do the latter.
3. Marketing still fails the CFO’s test
– Barely a third of CFOs currently agree that marketing drives long-term growth. Most marketers admit their own leadership does not understand what advertising does for the business.
– CFOs are largely comfortable with performance spend. It is everything else, brand and long-term equity, that struggles to get signed off.
– The board’s diagnosis: this is not a communication gap, it is a translation gap. Marketing and finance are measuring the same outcomes in two different languages.
4. Commerce is quietly taking marketing’s budget, from outside marketing
– Retail media in India is growing an estimated 25% year-on-year in 2026, faster than almost any other channel. Some in the room believe it could overtake linear TV this year. Independent estimates still show TV meaningfully ahead, which the board called the honest read.
– Emerging D2C brands already route more than half their marketing spend through commerce and quick-commerce.
– The catch: those budgets typically sit with e-commerce teams, not marketing. The fastest-growing channel in the country is being planned largely outside the function meant to own the brand.
5. Results, not claims, decide who gets believed
– The same scrutiny hitting marketing in the CFO’s office is showing up everywhere else marketing’s work gets judged. A recurring observation from senior marketers this year: too many campaigns claim success without evidence built in to prove it.
– That is raising the bar across the board, in how work gets planned, measured, and entered for recognition in India’s marketing and creative award circuit this year.
– The common demand, from finance and from the industry’s own gatekeepers alike: show the number, not just the story.
