Why more digital spends won’t mean more certainty in 2026

In the last year, many marketing executives might have found themselves in a predicament. Their brands might have tripled their digital advertising budget over four years, split across Instagram, YouTube, programmatic display, retail media networks, and Connected TV. While the dashboards showed millions of impressions and the platforms reported engagement, understanding which campaigns drove sales was the issue.

This is how digital advertising evolved in India between 2020 and 2025. In 2020, digital accounted for just 24% of India's advertising market. Traditional media, television and print commanded 65% market share. Then came the acceleration. In 2021, digital ad spend surged 50% to Rs 25,438 crore from Rs 16,974 crore. By 2022, it climbed another 35% to Rs 34,405 crore. In 2023, growth moderated to 15% reaching Rs 39,714 crore. By fiscal 2025, digital advertising crossed Rs 59,200 crore, claiming 46% of total ad spend.

There has been a tremendous transformation. India's overall advertising market crossed Rs 1 lakh crore in fiscal 2025, growing at 6 to 7% annually over five years, according to Crisil Intelligence. Digital has been reshaping the entire landscape. FMCG companies that allocated 30% to digital in 2020 now dedicate 55 to 60%. Automobile companies increased their digital investments from 15 to 20% to 35 to 40%. E-commerce players pushed digital to 60% of advertising spend. The first half of 2025 alone saw $1.56 billion in digital ad spend, generating 3 trillion impressions as per Sensor Tower. 

But growth created its own problems. As digital budgets multiplied, so did complexity. Social media's share of digital spend grew to 40 to 45% in 2025, powered by creator-led content and short-form video, according to Crisil Intelligence. YouTube's share climbed to 20 to 22% on reach and free ad-supported content. Retail media emerged as the fastest-growing channel, projected to reach Rs 303.6 billion in 2026, representing 15% of total ad revenue and growing at 25% year-on-year per WPP Media. Quick commerce players like Blinkit and Zepto grew advertising revenue at 100%-plus rates from smaller bases.

This fragmentation drove media inflation. As advertisers rushed into high-performing channels, inventory costs climbed. Television ad revenue declined 1.5% in 2025, but Connected TV inventory prices rose as viewership migrated. Programmatic ad rates increased as demand outpaced supply in premium environments. Globally, wasted programmatic spend crossed $26.8 billion, up 34% in two years, according to ANA. India's market is headed toward Rs 2 trillion in 2026 with 9.7% growth as per WPP Media projections, but costs are rising faster than results.

Meanwhile, signal quality eroded. Research suggests queries with AI summaries drove half the clicks of traditional search results. Search advertising, growing at 8% to Rs 232.7 billion in 2026, matured as advertisers diversified toward retail media and social platforms. Each channel operated with its own logic, metrics, and attribution claims. Walled gardens pushed proprietary measurement. Platform dashboards optimised for their own ecosystems, not business outcomes.

Digital advertising has scaled in five years. But scale without a coherent strategy, without unified measurement, without signal ownership, can create more noise than insight. As brands enter 2026, how should they invest in digitally fragmented channels?

Build compounding assets in 2026

"The smartest way to fight media inflation in 2026 is synced thinking, where every marketing effort compounds instead of competing," says Sabiha Khan, Managing Partner at Dentsu Creative Isobar. "Brands think in silos even today with respect to their branding, content, creator and performance efforts."

"The biggest shift brands need to make is to stop chasing more media and start designing better media," argues Prrincey Roy, Co-Founder and CEO of Huella Services. "The answer cannot be negotiating harder or finding cheaper inventory. The answer is making every impression matter more through better creative, experience and engagement, using channels like CTV and programmatic for control over frequency, storytelling and impact, not just scale."

Khan emphasises building compounding brand assets instead of renting attention. "The one emerging challenge that isn't discussed enough is brand memory decay, which is quietly killing effectiveness," she notes. "Brands chase novelty per platform and abandon working formats. With the content vortex audiences face today, there is erosion of brand memory and severe lack of distinction."

According to her, the solution lies in building ownable intellectual properties that are platform-agnostic, recurring and memorable. In the algorithmic era where algorithms decide whom, where and when to target, data infrastructure and creative consistency matter most.

Akash Chadha, Associate Vice President - Key Accounts at Omnicom Production (India) shares, "In 2026, if a brand doesn't speak the local dialect, it simply is less heard. Brands must anchor their 2026 strategy in Identity Resolution fuelled by Regionalisation. With specifications at the forefront on branded content, the humanisation aspect has become limited to only one subset of the outreach touchpoint - Content creators, creating an identity crisis and vacuum in any category."

Chadha believes that knowing the customer in this fragmented landscape isn’t enough; brands must speak their "neighbourhood dialect."

When branded content and third-party outreach are done in local languages, the clinical data signals turn into genuine, neighbourhood-level conversations that resonate with consumers. 

Roy adds that what worries her is the fragmentation quietly diluting effectiveness. Brands navigate CTV, retail media, social commerce and programmatic, each with its own logic. They feel present everywhere but lose a coherent view of what works. The risk isn't fragmentation itself, but fragmentation without a unifying strategy or learning.

Need to anchor strategy to intent, not impressions

One of the advertising and media ecosystems that is likely to see exponential growth this year is retail media and quick commerce. Chadha comments that while others chased AI buzz and relevancy last year, Amazon and the Q-commerce sector built the "real 2026 powerhouses."

Amazon, with its AWS backbone, is pivoting from a search engine to a Discovery ecosystem, marrying high-intent data with massive Prime Video reach. Simultaneously, Q-Comm has compressed the entire marketing funnel into a 10-minute window. The ultimate transactional media, offering a closed-loop reality." Brands can't underestimate their impact going forward.

"Retail media is likely to see exponential growth in 2026, not just in scale but in strategic importance," says Swati Nathani, Co-Founder and CBO of Team Pumpkin. "What is changing is not inventory, it is intent. Retail media sits at the intersection of discovery, decision and transaction, which traditional digital media struggles to do efficiently."

Brands still underestimate retail media because they view it as a performance add-on rather than a core brand-building environment. In reality, retail media is becoming the new lower-funnel television, especially as CTV and commerce converge.

"With social, CTV, programmatic and retail media increasingly overlapping in audience exposure, the risk isn't fragmentation, it is duplication," Nathani notes. "Brands that don't anchor strategy to unified measurement and frequency control will pay media inflation without gaining incremental growth. The principle is simple: one consumer view, one measurement spine, and channel choices flowing from that."

Jyoti Chugh Bhatia, Group Director at Gozoop Creative, points to creator-led communities as another underestimated ecosystem. Not celebrity influencers, but smaller creators with genuine credibility. India's influencer economy is expected to reach Rs 2,200 crore by 2025. With this, the focus on regional creators needs to increase.

"Brands still underestimate this because it is messy and not always easy to measure," Bhatia observes. "But by 2026, trust and relevance will beat reach every single time. The real issue won't be lack of media options, it will be people simply switching off. Brands without strong voice will blur into the scroll."

Own your signal before platforms own your data

This year is not without its challenges. "One problem that is quietly creeping up on brands is signal collapse," says Prashant Puri, Co-Founder and CEO of AdLift. "As AI answers, zero-click search, retail media, CTV and walled gardens grow, the old feedback loops are breaking. Fewer clicks mean less learning, even when spend is going up."

"If there is one principle to anchor to, it is this: own your signal," Puri emphasises. "Channels will keep fragmenting, but your learning cannot. When budgets are split across social, retail media, programmatic and CTV, relying only on platform dashboards means optimising in silos. The brands that win in 2026 will focus on strong first-party data, test what drives lift, keep messaging consistent, and understand whether they are being considered before a click happens."

Similarly, Nathani shares that one underestimated issue is the silent erosion of signal quality even as data volumes increase. Brands believe they have more data, but much is platform-reported, non-comparable and modelled. As privacy changes, walled gardens push their own attribution logic. By 2026, many brands may lose the ability to independently validate performance. This will appear as steadily declining ROI confidence.

This is why Amit Relan, CEO and Co-founder of mFilterIt, believes, "In 2026, data transparency will be non-negotiable. Brands must have absolute clarity on who sees their ads, where ads are served, and whether outcomes are driven by genuine users or automated activity."

"Ad traffic validation needs to sit at the core of strategy, not just as safeguard, but as control layer enabling full-funnel visibility and confident decision-making," Relan emphasises. According to MMA India, 25% of digital ad spend is lost to fraudulent activities.

As India's market heads toward Rs 2.8 trillion by 2030, commerce will be the largest share gainer. The lesson for 2026 is clear. Organising around outcomes, building memory structures that compound, and owning data infrastructure that makes learning possible across channels is crucial.