Festive 2025: Are e-commerce and quick-commerce now India’s hottest ad platforms?

India’s festive e-commerce season in 2025 wasn’t just a record-setting retail event, but was a revelation for advertising. Industry trackers, including RedSeer, estimate that online festive sales grew around 27 percent year-on-year, crossing ₹1.2 lakh crore in total value. But behind the headline numbers was a subtler story: how e-commerce and quick-commerce platforms became the most dynamic ad environments in India, delivering measurable ROI and closing the gap between brand storytelling and immediate conversion.

The shift has been years in the making but came into sharp focus this festive period. With consumer intent at its annual peak and India’s digital audience now spanning over 750 million users, the line between marketplaces and media platforms has blurred beyond recognition. Retail media, once an afterthought, has quietly become the third major pillar of the festive advertising mix alongside social and video.

For beauty and wellness brand Nat Habit, that convergence was clear in both data and outcome. “E-commerce and quick-commerce ad platforms proved to be strong performance drivers for Nat Habit, especially in lower-funnel conversions,” said Swagatika Das, CEO and Co-founder. “Our presence on Amazon, Flipkart, Instamart, Nykaa, Blinkit, and Zepto allowed us to connect with intent-driven shoppers in real time, and we saw clear ROI uplift when paired with sharp targeting and contextual placements.” She added that while storytelling and emotional resonance on social built top-funnel demand, commerce ads helped capture that demand instantly.

That sentiment reflects a broader market trend. Retail media spends on e-commerce platforms were pegged at roughly ₹11,300 crore last year (around a quarter of India’s total digital ad expenditure) and the figure is expected to rise sharply in FY26. Combined ad revenues for the country’s top three marketplaces will cross ₹15,500 crore in FY25 according to industry reports, up 26 percent from the previous year, while quick-commerce networks such as Blinkit, Zepto, and Instamart together are estimated to have driven ₹3,000–3,500 crore in advertising revenue. For platforms that built their value proposition on convenience, advertising has become their fastest-growing business line.

Agencies confirm that brands now treat retail media as a fixed cost of festive marketing rather than a test budget. “During the festive season, e-commerce and quick-commerce played a far more decisive role in the realm of performance-driven ad ecosystems,” said Shradha Agarwal, Co-founder and Global CEO of Grapes Worldwide. “Riding the bandwagon of high consumer intent, the platforms acted as a perfect funnel for bridging the gap between discovery and purchase, enabling enhanced ROI and measurable conversions for the brands.”

She added that advertisers no longer look at these platforms as isolated touchpoints. “They now perceive them as key connectors between intent, convenience, and conversion. The convergence of media and commerce facilitates a closed-loop ecosystem where impact can be directly tied to sales outcomes. Undeniably, India is at an inflection point with the consumer journey becoming omnichannel.”

That omnichannel reality is what brands are now budgeting for. According to the Dentsu e4m Digital Advertising Report 2025, India’s ad market grew seven percent this year to ₹1.37 lakh crore, while digital advertising rose 11.4 percent to ₹67,991 crore, driven by performance-heavy categories such as FMCG, e-commerce, and D2C.

For traditional consumer companies, the challenge is no longer whether retail media works but how to integrate it intelligently across screens. Akshaali Shah, Executive Director at Parag Milk Foods, said the brand’s strategy this season was built on balance. “This festive season reinforced that no single platform can deliver the entire consumer journey because discovery, engagement, and conversion each have their own strengths. For us, e-commerce and quick-commerce played a decisive role in driving last-mile impact,” she said.

“At the same time, Connected TV and social platforms continued to be powerful for storytelling and building emotional connect at the top of the funnel. Our strategy has been about synergy rather than separation—using CTV and social to seed aspiration, and e-commerce or Q-commerce to capture that intent instantly through contextual placements and shoppable formats,” she said.

That seamless connection between awareness and action is what’s redefining festive ROI. “We are definitely at an inflection point, but it is less about replacing traditional channels and more about rebalancing the overall media mix,” Shah added.

“Retail media and quick-commerce are no longer experimental; they have become essential touchpoints in an increasingly fluid consumer journey. India’s media ecosystem is evolving from a linear funnel to an interconnected loop, and festive strategies today are about orchestrating that loop intelligently to ensure that every rupee spent builds both brand love and business impact.”

That “loop” is being powered by technology and television in equal measure. Connected-TV advertising now reaches more than 50 million monthly active devices, according to EY-FICCI estimates, and Kantar’s 2025 Media Compass study shows that nearly a quarter of Indian consumers are digital-only viewers. For Abhijeet Rajpurohit, COO and Co-founder of CloudTV, CTV’s role is to shape intent before the purchase journey begins.

“CTV plays a strong role in brand building before the consumer is ready to make a purchase decision. It’s where desire and intent are created and where brands become memorable. Retail media, on the other hand, steps in after that decision is almost made—it reinforces the choice and drives conversion,” he said.

Rajpurohit added that festive peaks amplify that synergy. “Seasonal peaks like the festive period or major sporting events drive massive Smart TV engagement. That’s where CTV exposure primes audiences to explore and act when those moments of purchase arise. We’ve understood that when brands advertise on CTV, they face far less clutter and competition for attention compared to retail media platforms, where multiple brands fight for the same moment of visibility.”

Nitin Kumar Kosari, AVP-Ecommerce & Marketplaces, LS Digital, agrees that marketplaces and quick-commerce platforms have become the most efficient performance channels of this festive season, hands down. The combination of high purchase intent and closed-loop attribution delivered measurable, scalable ROI for our clients.

"Across categories like beauty, personal care, and daily essentials, we saw 2–3x stronger conversion rates than comparable spends on traditional digital channels such as CTV or social. Quick commerce, in particular, emerged as the breakout performer. Ad spends on q-commerce grew by over 25% YoY, driven by immediacy, high consumer intent and direct SKU-level visibility," he says.

With Redseer reporting nearly 150 percent growth in quick-commerce GMV this festive season and Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities contributing almost half of total orders, the story of India’s advertising economy is now the story of its logistics and delivery grids. Marketers are spending where consumers are acting, not just watching. And the new holy grail isn’t awareness, it’s accountability.

The festive rush of 2025 proved that performance doesn’t have to come at the expense of presence. The old funnel has given way to a constantly spinning wheel; one that starts on the living-room TV, moves through a social feed, and ends at checkout, often within the same hour. Marketplaces are no longer just storefronts, and quick-commerce isn’t just delivery. It is discovery. In India’s biggest shopping season, commerce became the campaign.