Dussehra is done, Diwali is next, and AI is already lit

The first half of India’s festive season has already come and gone. Dussehra has just blown past, Diwali is coming up next, and the advertising industry is humming at full volume. Estimates suggest festive ad spends in 2025 will rise by about ₹5,400 crore over baseline, with consumer brands budgeting a 15–20% bump after a sluggish first half of the year.

The surge is being powered not just by rising consumption but by a sharp shift in the way campaigns are conceived, produced, and deployed: AI is no longer a curiosity in the marketer’s toolkit, it has become the electricity running through the festive machine.

That electricity is already evident in the way campaigns are running this year. Russhabh R Thakkar, Founder and CEO, Frodoh, says the change is obvious. “This year, we are seeing AI move from being a back-end experiment to becoming a frontline enabler in festive campaigns. In earlier seasons, AI was mostly spoken about in the context of targeting, personalization, or measurement. In 2024, it has really come into play on the creative side as well.”

He points to generative tools that can churn out 50–80 video variations in hours instead of days. A celebrity like Alia Bhatt can now front a marketplace’s Diwali campaign across refrigerators, microwaves, and ACs without multiple shoots, because AI adapts the creative seamlessly. Multilingual deployment has also become practical, with assets in 10–12 languages pushed quickly and cost-effectively. More importantly, dynamic creative optimization is live in the market.

In consumer behaviour, a report from InMobi notes that 64% of consumers prefer fully online purchases during the festive period; and 83% of consumers either research or buy online in that window, opening attention pipelines tailor-made for quickly deployable and personalised ads.

Meanwhile, Indian adtech/digital teams are increasingly deploying agentic AI systems (autonomous systems that dynamically manage ads across platforms), and in some cases claiming ROAS uplift of 20-25% and lower manual overhead.

Anjali Malthankar, Global Strategy Director and Co-Head GIPSI at Tonic Worldwide, highlights how consumer expectations are also evolving. “At every step of brand activity this festive season AI is an option – predictive, generative or both. AI can be a strategy, an idea or an execution. The key shift is in AI not as a marketer’s tool but a consumer’s tool and that really has changed the game this year,” she says.

Tonic’s GRWAi report frames the opportunity as turning consumer “mood boarding” into brand “mood setting.” The insights: be the festive assistant with higher share of model, engage through prompts as the new exchange currency, and deploy bot armies to seal deals. But she also cautions that categories like luxury must tread carefully.

“Campaign creation with AI cannot be a low budget execution option,” she adds, warning that marketers must “HI-proof” their work and avoid falling prey to trolls.

If the strategy side is about positioning, the production floor is already transformed. Ganesh Pareek, Partner at First December Films, says the comparison is straightforward. “When electricity was first introduced, people thought it was a demon. Then it became a luxury. Now it’s invisible — it’s just everywhere. AI has taken the same path. Last year in festive campaigns, it was still a novelty. This year, it’s electricity. It’s running through everything, from concept to media to measurement.”

He points to AI-built backgrounds, beauty passes for food shots, alt-edits and even voiceovers in final festive ads. Directors’ teams are pre-visualising entire sets in MidJourney or Runway before carpenters even step in. “We’ve almost stopped debating it — it’s just assumed AI will be part of the workflow,” he says. The result: faster production, sharper audience fit, and more room to take creative risks because the cost of iteration has collapsed.

The campaigns playing out this season reflect that shift. Maaza’s “Meri Chhoti Vali Jeet” used AI video generation and personalized packaging to turn small daily victories into emotional rituals. Samsung positioned its Bespoke AI Air Conditioners at the heart of its “Go Save Today” sale, highlighting energy efficiency and adaptive tech.

In Kolkata, a city-wide AI-generated alpona greeted Pujo crowds, merging tradition with algorithmic design. Behind the scenes, agentic AI systems are quietly running in e-commerce firms, automatically reallocating ad spend, testing creatives and tweaking targeting in real time, with early reports claiming ROAS uplifts of 20–25%.

Kruthika Ravindran, Director – Key Accounts at TheSmallBigIdea, argues that the engine has already switched on. “AI is no longer a side project for brands during the festive season; it’s the engine driving the magic. Teams now count on AI to whip up fresh ideas, find just the right audiences, and show results in real time. With AI doing the heavy lifting, brands have the freedom to get creative and take those bold leaps, knowing their campaigns will stay sharp and speedy at every turn.”

But even in the midst of this acceleration, creative directors are careful to underline that emotions still anchor festive storytelling. “This year, we’re seeing AI move from being a support tool to becoming an active part of campaign workflows,” says Ketan Shivadekar, Creative Director at AGENCY09. “It helps speed up creative generation, testing, and media optimization, which gives brands agility in a busy festive season. But while AI can accelerate execution, the core thinking still comes from humans — it’s brand strategy, cultural relevance, and emotional storytelling that make festive campaigns memorable.”

Industry sentiment is moving in parallel. Surveys suggest 73% of Indian marketers now say AI enhances creativity, though 69% still cite skilling as a major hurdle and 42% describe themselves as in experimentation mode. That spectrum plays out in real time: some campaigns positioning AI as infrastructure, others cautiously piloting. What unites them is the inevitability of adoption.

In 2024, AI in festive campaigns was still more of a showcase than a system. Brands experimented with chatbots, a few generative creatives for social, and some audience targeting pilots, but most of it was siloed or presented as innovation theatre. The big-budget Diwali films were still shot traditionally, and AI outputs rarely made it to the final cut. Fast forward a year, and that novelty phase is gone.

In 2025, AI has shifted from deck to delivery by not just aiding media optimisation, but building actual campaign assets, powering multilingual rollouts, and automating real-time creative shifts at scale.