Inside FMCG’s digital reset: What’s taking India’s biggest advertisers online

India’s FMCG sector, long seen as the last stronghold of television-led advertising, appears to have crossed a decisive threshold. Between 2024 and 2025, the country’s largest advertising category moved firmly into a digital-first era, signalling not just a media mix adjustment but a deeper recalibration of how brands are built, scaled and sustained in a mobile-first market.

According to the dentsu-e4m Digital Advertising Report, FMCG advertisers accelerated their digital push during this period, turning a gradual transition into a structural shift. Digital allocation rose from 53% in 2024 to 64% in 2025, decisively overtaking television. The scale of the pivot is significant given FMCG’s outsized role in India’s advertising economy. In 2024, the category was the largest contributor to digital advertising, with spends of Rs 16,606 crore, accounting for 34% of the market, even as media plans remained hybrid. By 2025, FMCG digital spends surged to Rs 23,243 crore, while its market share eased to 32% amid faster growth elsewhere, signalling that the real change lay in internal priorities, with nearly two-thirds of FMCG advertising budgets now anchored on digital platforms.

Read: FMCG raises digital ad spends to 64%: dentsu-e4m report

Digital ad spends climb across sectors in 2025, led by FMCG & eCommerce: dentsu-e4m report

Brand leaders say this shift is rooted in irreversible changes in consumer behaviour. Ankit Agrawal, Director at Mysore Deep Perfumery House and Zed Black, who said the shift marks a structural reset for FMCG. He noted that a digital-first consumer base will only deepen with the next generation, making digital central not just to media planning but to how brands build relevance and connection over time.

“Between 2024 and 2025, our focus stayed brand-first rather than budget-led. We concentrated on building a strong digital direction and understanding what works for our audience. From 2025, the roadmap for digital has been planned, while actual budget shifts are expected to come into play more clearly in the 2026–27 phase,” Agrawal noted.

This long-term view was echoed by Pawan Jagnik, Head of Marketing–India at pladis Global, said the transition reflects a long-term structural change. “Audiences are now decisively digital and mobile-first, with short-form content and creator ecosystems accelerating the transition. At the same time, the precision and accountability of targeted digital media far outweigh traditional channels, while the rapid growth of quick commerce is further reinforcing digital’s central role in FMCG marketing,” he said.

Jagnik added that as a largely urban-focused brand, pladis follows a digital-first approach and plans to continue increasing its investments in digital going forward.

This shift is already visible in how individual brands are reallocating budgets. Raja Chakraborty, CMO at Continental Coffee, said the brand’s digital spends, including performance advertising on e-commerce, have expanded from around 15–20% to 30–40% of total ad budgets. Akash Agrawalla, Co-founder at Zoff Foods, added that its digital investments saw a meaningful uptick between 2024 and 2025, driven by changing consumer behaviour and digital’s growing role in discovery and purchase, with higher allocations backed by clearer ROI visibility and improved efficiency across video and performance-led formats.

Agency leaders say these shifts were inevitable. Kartik Mehta, CBO and Head of Asia at Channel Factory, said the reallocation is fundamentally driven by where consumers are spending their time. “Ad dollars follow eyeballs, and digital has reshaped how consumers engage with FMCG brands, especially with the rise of quick commerce and short-form video,” he said.

Mehta added that rising media costs have pushed agencies to optimise efficiency, accelerating the adoption of AI-led automation, though the fundamental driver continues to be where consumers are spending their time and attention.

Offering a structural explanation, Vishal Shrivastava, Head of Business Strategy at AnyMind Group India, argued that the shift was not simply consumer behaviour changing and media following. From a platform lens, he said media fragmentation reached a tipping point where television’s mass-reach model could no longer approximate real consumption patterns with acceptable margins of error. By 2024–25, digital revenues grew 17% and overtook television for the first time, while TV declined 4.5%, making traditional planning models statistically inefficient and forcing FMCG advertisers to rewire media strategies around digital.

This structural shift is also reflected in the declining role of traditional media. Television’s share of FMCG media spends fell from 40% in 2024 to 29% in 2025, while print slipped from 4% to 3% and OOH from 3% to 2%, underscoring the move away from appointment-based channels towards always-on, digitally led planning with sharper targeting and measurability.

Digital formats

The internal composition of FMCG’s digital spends further reinforces this evolution. In 2024, online video accounted for 44% of digital budgets and social media 30%, with display at 16% and paid search at 8%. By 2025, advertisers doubled down on high-impact formats, with online video rising to 45% and social media holding steady at 30%. Together, the two formats made up nearly three-fourths of digital spends, while display dipped to 15% and paid search remained unchanged, highlighting their supporting, performance-led role.

“In my view online video is generally more effective than social media. For social media to be effective the brand story needs to be more attention grabbing so that consumers stop scrolling and take notice. Influencer content certainly helps but nothing works in isolation. Influencer communication unless crafted well in an organic manner, won't help either as consumers would find it less credible as a paid video,” said Chakraborty of Continental Coffee.

Agrawalla added that Zoff Foods is seeing the strongest business impact from a combination of short-form video and performance-led social and short-form video is driving high engagement. “Performance-led social is driving measurable outcomes like clicks, product discovery, and conversions. Influencer content also plays an important role, especially when creators are aligned with the brand and the content feels authentic, but we treat it as a high-impact layer rather than the core driver.”

Shrivastava pointed to the India Digital Landscape Report by AnyMind Group, which shows influencer-led short-form video as the strongest driver of awareness and recall, with shoppable and sponsored ads now table stakes. He added that in 2025, brands moved away from siloed campaigns towards integrated systems where influencer storytelling, video and performance optimisation are built together from the outset to drive sales.

“The jump from 53% to 64% digital is not about spending more on video or hiring more influencers. It's finally understanding that these formats are worthless in isolation. You need influencers for credibility. You need video for storytelling. You need performance optimization to actually close sales. And if you string them together properly and you've got something that compounds with maximum outcome,” he added.

Mehta added that while reach and frequency remain important for CPG brands, there is growing awareness of media wastage, with advertisers increasingly prioritising business outcomes over standalone digital metrics.

For pladis Global, Jagnik said effectiveness depends on both content and channel, with short-form driving reach amid shrinking attention spans and long-form building deeper context around the brand’s purpose. In contrast, Mysore Deep Perfumery House and Zed Black take a more holistic, platform-agnostic approach, focusing on meaningful storytelling rooted in brand essence, with impact maximised when content, creators and distribution operate as a unified ecosystem.

Together, the data and industry voices point to FMCG’s digital shift as a structural reset rather than a cyclical reallocation. As media fragmentation, commerce-led platforms and outcome-driven planning redefine effectiveness, digital is no longer just a channel but the operating system for how FMCG brands will be built, measured and scaled in the years ahead.