Is festive advertising in a race to catch up with the Q-Comm pace?

The festive quarter in Indian advertising moved to a familiar rhythm for years. Teaser films dropped weeks before Navratri, TV and OOH boards built anticipation through September and October, and the actual buying happened in a concentrated burst around Dussehra, Diwali, and the few days after. That rhythm seems to have been thrown off beat. Indian quick-commerce giants like Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart have shrunk the time from wanting something to owning it to a matter of minutes. Festive advertising is now being written for a shopper who no longer waits to be sold to; they buy the moment they decide.

The scale of that shift is visible in the numbers. Quick commerce advertising on these platforms stood at a modest ₹1,325 crore in 2024. It nearly tripled to ₹4,000 crore in 2025, and the Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2026 projects a further climb of close to 50% to touch ₹6,000 crore this year, a pace of growth no other category in Indian AdEx is matching right now. 

During the festive stretch specifically, ad rates on these platforms have reportedly climbed 40 - 50% over the rest of the year, as brands chase sales conversions of 3 - 8%, well ahead of the 1.5 - 3% typical of Meta and Google campaigns, according to industry estimates. Deloitte India has projected that the country's quick commerce market will touch $250 billion by 2030, a trajectory that has made instant delivery apps impossible for any festive media plan to sidestep, whichever category the brand sits in.

The compressed festive funnel

The old logic of festive advertising of ‘spend big early’ and ‘bank on recall’ is not obsolete, but it is no longer truly sufficient on its own. What is changing is the shape of the funnel itself. Brands can no longer plan for a single build-up curve. They now have to plan for two: one for the weeks of desire building that Indian festive advertising has always run on, and one for the final rush when a consumer standing in her kitchen realises she is out of diyas or has forgotten a friend's Bhai Dooj gift, and can have it at her door before the shop down the road even opens its shutter for the day.

“Festive advertising has always been built on anticipation. Brands spend weeks creating desire through films, TVCs and outdoor, then convert that demand during the festive shopping window. Quick commerce does not replace that build-up. It simply changes how the season ends,” said Aatsi Desai Jasani, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer at Theblurr, an AI-native, full-service marketing solutions company.

With categories like beauty, electronics, gifting and home decor now firmly established on quick commerce, she said festive strategies need to operate on two timelines: “emotional storytelling that builds brand preference weeks in advance, and agile media and commerce investments that capture intent at the moment of purchase”.

The platforms themselves have not stayed passive carriers of other people's ads. Their own witty, real-time social copy, the kind that riffs on a rainy day or a trending meme within the hour, has quietly reset what festive creative from brands is expected to sound like. Advertisers now find themselves competing for attention not just against rival FMCG players but against the very app carrying their sponsored listing.

“Quick commerce has fundamentally changed the rhythm of festive advertising. Earlier, festive campaigns were built around anticipation over several weeks. Today, brands must also win consumers in the moment, where discovery, purchase, and delivery happen within minutes,” said Yasin Hamidani, Director at Media Care Brand Solutions, a Mumbai-based PR and digital marketing agency.

This, he said, has led to sharper creatives, contextual messaging and agile media planning that respond to real-time consumer behaviour, with “the witty, topical communication from quick commerce platforms” encouraging brands to be faster and culturally relevant “while still retaining their broader festive brand narrative”.

A second surge in the final 48 hours

Much of this pressure concentrates in the last two days before a festival, when quick commerce sees a second, sharper spike in demand as shoppers scramble for forgotten gifts, last-minute essentials, and impulse upgrades. The money, chasing that spike, has grown correspondingly aggressive.

The popular quick-commerce platforms are together estimated to spend well over ₹2,000 crore on advertising and promotions this financial year, with Zepto alone accounting for the largest share. Ad packages on these platforms, priced anywhere between ₹2 lakh and ₹9 lakh for a three-month run, let brands buy guaranteed visibility across multiple stock-keeping units, a structure that increasingly resembles retail media more than a delivery app's ad inventory.

“Quick commerce has compressed the journey between seeing something and buying it. Festive advertising once had the luxury of building anticipation over several weeks. Today, a campaign can create a craving or tap into a festive moment, and the product can arrive at someone's doorstep almost immediately,” said Anupama Ahluwalia, Co-Founder and Producer at Zig Zag Films, a Mumbai-based ad film production house.

Production learns to move faster

That compression is being felt as sharply on set as it is in media plans. A single hero festive film, built to carry an entire season's messaging, is no longer built to do the whole job on its own. What brands and their production partners are now assembling looks less like one campaign and more like a content system, built to fire different assets at different moments across the festive calendar, from the emotional anchor film to occasion-specific cutdowns timed to a payday, a cricket match or the final weekend before Diwali.

“From a filmmaking and production perspective, this means brands increasingly need a larger, more flexible content ecosystem rather than one festive film expected to do everything,” Ahluwalia said. “Teams are planning for shorter formats, multiple edits and occasion-specific assets that can respond to different moments across the festive calendar. Timelines are tighter too, so decisions around scripts, shoots and post-production need to be made with greater speed and foresight.”

Speed cannot become the idea

None of this changes what festive advertising is fundamentally meant to do. It still has to make a family in Lucknow feel something about a brand of ghee, or make a young professional in Bengaluru want to gift her mother a particular saree, and quick commerce cannot manufacture that feeling on its own. It can only shorten the distance between feeling it and acting on it. Where a brand shows up first, and how quickly it can convert that instinct into a doorstep delivery, has become as much a part of festive strategy as the film that created the desire in the first place.

“In a world where the shelf is a search result, the brand that shows up first often wins the order,” Desai Jasani said, framing the platforms as the new point of sale rather than a distribution afterthought. Ahluwalia struck a note of caution against reading that too literally. “But speed cannot become the idea. Festivals are still rooted in people, rituals and relationships. Quick commerce may shorten the path to purchase, but the communication still needs a recognizable human truth that makes someone pause and connect,” she said. “The strongest festive campaigns will use immediacy as an advantage without losing the emotion that gives festive advertising its relevance.”

That, in the end, is the balancing act quick commerce has forced onto this festive season, and every one after it. The build-up still needs its slow burn, the film that makes someone pause mid-scroll and feel something about home and family. But somewhere in the final 48 hours, that same brand also needs to be the first thing that shows up when a search bar opens on a delivery app. Because in a market growing this fast, the wait between wanting and buying may never be this long again.