e4m Report Card 2025: How retail media took over Indian advertising spend plans

You heard it here first, folks.

Retail media did not dominate Indian media horizons in 2025 because it was new, clever or fashionable. It dominated because it solved problems that other digital channels spent the year explaining away. 

At a moment when marketing budgets were under sharper scrutiny, performance expectations were harder to defend, and procurement teams were no longer content with modelling assumptions, retail media offered something deceptively simple: proximity to transaction, clarity of outcomes, and delivery that could increasingly be written into contracts.

By the second half of 2025, the debate had effectively ended. Retail media was no longer competing for experimental budgets or innovation headroom. It was competing with core performance lines and, in many cases, replacing them.

The scale of that shift is visible in the numbers. WPP Media’s This Year Next Year 2025 estimates put India’s retail media advertising revenues at over ₹24,000 crore for the year, growing at more than 26 percent year-on-year. By 2026, that figure is projected to approach ₹30,000 crore, taking retail media to roughly 15 percent of India’s total advertising market. 

Read On: India’s ad spend to cross Rs 1.8 lakh crore this year; retail media growing fastest: TYNY

With overall ad spends expected to cross ₹1.8 lakh crore by the end of 2025, retail media emerged not just as the fastest-growing digital channel, but as the most aggressively prioritised one.

What made that growth distinctive was not just its pace, but where the money came from. Retail media budgets in 2025 did not sit neatly alongside search, social or display. They were carved out of them. 

In planning conversations across the year, retail media absorbed funds that had previously lived in performance marketing, trade spends, and increasingly, unexciting social lines. This was not additive growth. It was a reordering of priorities.

The reason is straightforward. Retail media collapsed multiple conversations into one place, as we've noted earlier. Measurement, attribution, delivery assurance and transaction lived closer together here than anywhere else in the digital ecosystem. While other channels asked marketers to trust black boxes or probabilistic models, retail media pointed to baskets, orders and repeat behaviour. In a year when CMOs were repeatedly asked to defend not just efficiency but effectiveness, that proximity mattered.

But the more decisive shift in 2025 was not technological. It was contractual.

One of the most consequential developments in retail media this year was the normalisation of Service-Level Agreements. Large advertisers increasingly pushed retail media networks to commit not just to impressions or placements, but to delivery guarantees, visibility thresholds and, in some cases, outcome-linked metrics. This was not framed as innovation. It was framed as accountability.

SLAs changed how retail media was evaluated internally. Once delivery and performance parameters were codified into agreements, retail media stopped being treated like a media line item and started being treated like a business lever. Procurement teams were more comfortable signing off on spends that came with enforceable commitments. Finance teams were less sceptical of allocations tied directly to transaction environments. In 2025, SLAs quietly unlocked larger and longer-term retail media budgets.

This shift is visible in platform revenues.

Read On: India’s retail media boom now runs on fulfilment, not discounts

In FY25, Amazon India reported advertising revenues of over ₹8,300 crore, growing at roughly 25 percent year-on-year. Flipkart and Myntra together crossed ₹7,200 crore in advertising income, posting similar growth trajectories. Combined, India’s largest e-commerce ecosystems generated more than ₹15,500 crore in advertising revenues in a single financial year.

These are not incidental numbers. Advertising is no longer a secondary monetisation layer for marketplaces. It is a core revenue engine that increasingly subsidises logistics, seller incentives and platform expansion. As seller competition intensified through 2025, sponsored visibility became less about advantage and more about survival. Retail media, in effect, became the toll charged for access to demand.

Meesho’s evolution reinforced the same dynamic from the value end of the market. While the platform does not disclose retail media revenues with the same granularity, its expanding brand services, promotional tools and discovery surfaces reflect the same underlying logic: as commerce scales, advertising becomes unavoidable. Retail media is no longer optional infrastructure.

Quick commerce accelerated this shift, and altered its texture.

If marketplaces delivered scale, quick commerce delivered frequency. In 2025, platforms such as Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart transformed everyday consumption into a near-constant monetisation surface. Short purchase cycles, impulse-driven behaviour and hyperlocal demand created a retail media environment that behaved very differently from traditional marketplaces.

Crucially, this shift is now visible in revenue terms, not just anecdote. Blinkit’s advertising and promotions revenue crossed ₹1,000 crore on an annualised basis in 2025, cementing quick commerce as a material retail media contributor rather than a tactical add-on. 

Zepto, which scaled its ads business aggressively through the year, reported advertising revenues in the high hundreds of crores, with brand spends expanding well beyond grocery into electronics, personal care and lifestyle categories. 

Swiggy Instamart, meanwhile, continued to build its ads and brand partnerships business as part of Swiggy’s broader monetisation push, with advertising emerging as one of the fastest-growing non-delivery revenue lines.

Taken together, quick commerce retail media is now operating at a multi-thousand-crore annual run rate, a figure that would have seemed implausible even a year ago. More importantly, these revenues scaled without the long gestation periods typical of marketplaces.

Read On: India’s retail media growth: Will new players find room against Amazon and Flipkart?

For brands, the appeal was speed and control. Campaigns could be launched, optimised and evaluated within days rather than weeks. Attribution windows were tighter. Delivery was easier to enforce. SLAs were simpler to operationalise. 

As the year progressed, quick commerce retail media budgets grew not because gross merchandise value exploded overnight, but because efficiency did.

By the second half of 2025, quick commerce retail media had moved beyond tactical bursts and festive spikes. It became an always-on performance layer for FMCG, grocery, personal care and adjacent categories. In planning discussions, it increasingly sat alongside search and marketplace retail media, not below them. 

The tolerance for higher CPMs was driven by predictability. In a year where volatility elsewhere became expensive, quick commerce offered reliability.

This is how brands actually used retail media in 2025.

Defensively, it protected share on marketplaces where organic discovery continued to erode. Offensively, it powered launches, new SKU discovery and category expansion. Tactically, it salvaged conversions when social and open-web performance softened. Structurally, it stitched together media plans that struggled to maintain coherence across fragmented channels.

Retail media also changed internal power dynamics. Performance, brand and trade teams increasingly found themselves negotiating shared ownership of budgets that had previously lived in silos. Retail media became the insurance policy in the plan, the place money flowed when misses elsewhere could not be afforded.

This did not eliminate complexity. It redistributed it.

Fragmentation across retail media networks remains a planning challenge. Measurement standards are inconsistent. Incrementality continues to be the industry’s unresolved anxiety. As retail media networks expand offsite, familiar questions around walled gardens and data access are resurfacing.

But in 2025, these concerns followed budgets rather than blocking them.

Looking ahead to 2026, the direction is clear even if the contours are still forming. Retail media will continue to grow, but the terms will harden. Fewer networks will command meaningful allocations. SLAs will move from differentiators to table stakes. Incrementality will shift from being debated to being demanded. Offsite retail media will become the next competitive battleground.

Retail media did not quietly, or rather loudly, take over Indian media plans in 2025 because it was exciting. It did so because it made financial sense, operational sense and, increasingly, contractual sense. In a year defined by scrutiny, that combination proved difficult to argue with.