Higher CPCs and media costs certainly pressured performance outcomes in 2025: Prasun Kumar

2025 has been a year defined by media inflation, accelerated AI adoption, and a dramatic shift in consumer discovery patterns, a combination that also had an effect on real estate marketing. Rising digital costs compressed performance windows, pushing marketers to extract greater efficiency from every media rupee. At the same time, first-time homebuyers returned in strong numbers, with housing credit growth and improved sentiment indices signalling renewed confidence among younger buyers and mid-market segments.

Yet the year brought its own pressures. Escalating Cost-Per-Click (CPCs), fragmented discovery journeys, and Instagram’s emergence as a full-funnel ecosystem compelled marketers to rethink their playbooks. For a high-intent, high-ticket category like real estate, the response was swift: deeper reliance on automation, AI-led optimisation, and richer content formats such as walkthroughs, long-form explainers, and utility-driven video. For Magicbricks, this meant recalibrating the balance between brand and performance, sharpening first-party data intelligence, and scaling cost-effective ecosystems like MBTV.

At the same time, homebuyer behaviour evolved sharply. Gen Z and young millennials, once dismissed as ‘rent-first’, displayed a renewed commitment to ownership, gravitating towards compact, ready-to-move homes. Their priorities now blend aspiration with financial discipline, long-term stability, and wealth creation.

It is against this backdrop of rising opportunity, cost, and expectations that Prasun Kumar, Chief Marketing Officer, Magicbricks speaks to us about the campaign that moved the needle, the behaviour shifts redefining tomorrow’s homebuyer, and how marketing must evolve when performance expectations grow faster than budgets. 

This discussion also arrives at a crucial moment for the advertising industry. With large-scale agency consolidations reshaping the ecosystem, Kumar tell us what clients truly value today. He breaks down how these structural changes influence decision-making on the client side, what gaps still remain, and why the definition of a capable agency partner has fundamentally changed.

Excerpts:

If you had to pick one campaign that moved the needle for Magicbricks in 2025, which one would you deep-dive into and why? What impact did it drive?

If I had to single out one campaign that truly shifted the momentum for us in 2025, it would unquestionably be Pata Badlo. Life Badlo. It wasn’t just a communication exercise — it became a powerful proof point of how migration shapes opportunity, income, and long-term wealth creation in India. The findings from our Pata Badlo. Life Badlo. report only deepened the impact of the campaign, highlighting how moving to Tier 1 cities can offer up to 1.95x higher salary growth and how real estate appreciation in markets like Noida (+111%), Greater Noida (+105%), and Gurugram (+86%) between 2020 and 2025 has transformed mobility into a wealth multiplier.

This narrative created strong emotional and financial resonance and translated directly into business outcomes. We saw a clear uplift in website traffic and a sharp rise in engagement across our social channels as users connected with the idea at both an aspirational and practical level. It also strengthened supply acquisition, with more partners wanting to align with a narrative rooted in real consumer journeys. The campaign helped deepen brand warmth and relatability while giving us a unified platform to speak to audiences across age groups and markets with equal credibility.

What emerging priorities among new-age buyers drove new storytelling and product positioning this year?

A major shift this year was the growing seriousness with which new-age buyers, especially Gen Z and young millennials, approached real estate. The HSI JAS 2025 report reinforced this emerging behaviour — the overall housing sentiment rebounded to 142, with cities like Chennai (150), Noida/Greater Noida (148), and Kolkata (146) leading the confidence revival. What was particularly interesting is how younger buyers drove a significant part of this sentiment recovery, showing stronger appetite for compact, ready-to-move homes and mid-market properties in the ₹75 lakh–₹1.5 crore range. This reflected a more pragmatic, research-led mindset, where Gen Z sees real estate not just as an aspirational milestone but as a stable investment asset.

Their increased interest in informed, data-backed decisions pushed us to rethink our storytelling — making it more practical, clarity-driven, and reflective of a cohort that wants both emotional fulfillment and financial security from their first property.

These evolving priorities shaped how we positioned the category this year and will influence how we communicate with them going forward.

What behaviour shifts in digital discovery stood out in 2025, and how will they reshape your channel mix next year?

One of the most interesting shifts in 2025 was the solidification of Instagram as not just an engagement-led platform but a business-driving ecosystem in its own right. Users increasingly completed entire discovery journeys on Instagram — from exploring projects to learning about interiors, neighbourhoods, and even adjacent Magicbricks businesses. This evolution transformed Instagram from a supporting channel to a central driver of interest and intent. It played a significant role in expanding engagement for our interiors category and other verticals as consumers gravitated towards highly visual, fast-moving content. As a result, our channel mix next year will lean more heavily towards platforms that seamlessly blend inspiration with utility. Instagram, particularly, will continue to be a primary engine for early-stage discovery and brand affinity, pushing us to craft storytelling that feels native, intuitive, and aligned with the way consumers now explore homes.

How did rising CPCs and higher digital media costs affect your marketing performance in 2025, and how are these pressures shaping your budget split between brand-building and performance channels in 2026?

Rising CPCs and higher media costs certainly created pressure on performance outcomes this year. It pushed us to lean more heavily on optimisation frameworks, automation tools and AI-driven solutions that could extract greater efficiency from each campaign. The focus shifted from simply scaling spends to improving the quality of targeting, creative deployment, and real-time decision-making.

However, despite these pressures, the fundamental split between brand-building and performance marketing hasn’t changed dramatically. What has changed is the performance expectation. With media inflation coming into play, the outcomes from performance channels are harder to achieve, and that forces us to work smarter rather than simply invest more. In 2026, the emphasis will be on balancing both functions so that brand-building continues to strengthen intent while automation and optimisation ensure that performance remains viable.

What content formats or storytelling approaches delivered the best cost-effectiveness this year, and how has the role of first-party data evolved in your growth strategy?

This year, MBTV emerged as one of the most cost-effective and high-engagement content ecosystems for us. Long-form, utility-led videos helped audiences understand projects, neighbourhoods, and trends in a format that built trust and delivered clarity. MBTV created a strong pull because it addressed the need for credible, detailed information at a time when home-seekers want more transparency and guidance. Alongside this, first-party data continued to evolve as a core pillar of our growth strategy. It allowed us to personalise content distribution, sharpen targeting, and understand intent patterns with far more precision. The combination of high-quality video content and deeper intelligence from first-party data helped us create a more efficient, outcome-driven communication model that reduced wastage and strengthened brand-consumer alignment.

What new skills became essential in 2025, and what gaps must marketers close next year?

The most essential skill that emerged in 2025 was the ability to use AI meaningfully. It isn’t enough anymore to simply experiment with AI tools — marketers now need to master prompt engineering, understand model behaviour, and leverage AI to enhance speed, creativity, and efficiency. Another important shift is the need to use AI beyond content creation: for analytics, audience clustering, and optimising workflows. The gap that marketers must close next year is their comfort with these technologies. Those who learn how to use AI as an extension of their strategic and creative thinking will be the ones who drive demonstrable business impact.

If you could summarise 2025 in a single learning for the industry, what should we carry forward?

If I had to summarise 2025 in one core learning, it would be that technology disruptions are permanent, not episodic. The pace at which AI, automation, and content consumption patterns are evolving leaves no room for complacency. Businesses must factor technological change into every plan — whether related to marketing, product, or customer experience. The organisations that treat tech disruption as a constant rather than a curveball will be far better equipped to build relevance in the years ahead.

What belief or approach about marketing changed for you in 2025, and how is that shaping your plans going into 2026?

For a long time, I believed that automation could never truly replace the depth and nuance of human judgement in marketing. But 2025 challenged that assumption. The strides AI made this year showed that automation can take over a significant portion of execution, optimisation, and even certain layers of creative development. What has changed for me is not the belief in human value but the understanding that we must find the balance between machine efficiency and human perspective. Going into 2026, our plans reflect that blend — automation will handle scale and speed, while human intelligence will continue to anchor strategy, emotional storytelling, and brand stewardship.

With growing emphasis on Tier II and Tier III markets, how is Magicbricks adapting its regionalisation strategy, and what role will these cities play in 2026?

Tier II and III cities continue to grow in influence, both in terms of demand and digital maturity. Our approach has been to deepen localisation — not just language localisation, but cultural contextualisation, platform-level adaptation, and communication that reflects on-ground realities. These markets are diverse, aspirational, and increasingly confident in their real estate decisions, which makes them central to the category’s next phase of growth. In 2026, they will form a substantial share of our focus, shaping how we design narratives, choose channels, and build experiences that reflect India’s expanding real estate appetite beyond metros.

The agency landscape has seen consolidation, churn and a talent reset. What’s your advice for agencies in 2026, and what are they still getting wrong about winning client trust?

My advice to agencies is to evolve far more fundamentally than they currently are. While everyone talks about AI, automation, the rise of video-first consumption, and the decline of traditional ATL, very few agencies have actually changed their internal capabilities or workflows to match this reality. Many still operate with structures that belonged to a different era, and that limits the value they bring.

Agencies must now reinvent themselves — become more agile, more tech-aware, and more accountable. If they don’t tune themselves to the new environment, they risk being disrupted instead of being part of the disruption.

What are you asking from agencies today that you weren’t three years ago?

Three years ago, we prioritised large-scale productions and high-end creative work. Today, we expect agencies to be equally strong at producing high-quality, low-cost video content at speed. The market demands more agility and more formats than ever before, and agencies must be able to deliver efficiently without compromising on narrative quality.

By the end of 2026, what will success look like for Magicbricks’ marketing function?

By the end of 2026, success for our marketing function will be defined by two outcomes: meaningful growth in revenue and significant growth in traffic across platforms. Achieving these goals will reflect not only the strength of our brand but also the effectiveness of our technology, our creative agility, and our ability to connect with consumers across markets and moments.