Influencer ROI: Can India close the gap with global markets?

As we begin 2026, influencer marketing has moved decisively beyond experimentation but the questions around return on investment (ROI) continue to dominate brand conversations. While India has shown steady growth, global comparisons reveal a widening gap in scale, maturity and measurement infrastructure.

According to an EY 2024 report in collaboration with Big Bang Social, India's influencer marketing sector is slated to reach ₹3,375 crore by 2026, growing at an 18% CAGR, driven by brands integrating it into strategies, and 86% of influencers expecting income growth and a shift towards long-term relationships for better ROI. 

Aditya Gurwara, Co-Founder and Head of Brand Alliance at Qoruz, an Influencer intelligence marketing platform, said the shift towards ROI was often misunderstood. “ROI became dominant not because brands stopped believing in awareness, but because the ecosystem did not have a clean, universal way to measure trust-led outcomes at scale,” he said. 

Brands have pushed investments beyond 2 per cent of total marketing budgets and increasingly deployed a mix of macro and micro influencers for targeted outcomes. However, despite the momentum, India’s market size has remained significantly smaller compared to global peers.

Global markets scaled faster

The United States has witnessed aggressive expansion. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, creator economy ad spend in the US grew nearly four times faster than the overall media industry, reaching close to $37 billion, or ₹3.07 lakh crore, in 2025.

China operated at an even larger scale. Influencer marketing in China was projected to approach ¥7 trillion, exceeding $1 trillion by 2025, driven by social commerce, short video platforms and live streaming. The market also saw influencer costs rise by 15 to 25 percent year-on-year, alongside a clear shift towards KOCs and micro influencers to improve authenticity and engagement.

Meanwhile, the UK creator economy made a measurable economic contribution. According to Oxford Economics, YouTube creators alone added over £2.2 billion to the UK GDP in 2024 and supported approximately 45,000 full-time equivalent jobs. Brazil’s influencer advertising market was forecast to reach $605.31 million in 2025.

Across markets, creator marketing is no longer treated as a niche channel. Nearly half of advertisers globally consider it a must-buy medium, ranking just behind paid search and social media.

As Kantar data shows influencer marketing often outperforms traditional ads, especially in capturing attention and driving mid-funnel actions like purchase intent, with influencer content holding attention 2.2x longer (17.8s vs 7.9s) and boosting brand attributes more effectively

Growth outpaces infrastructure

As influencer marketing budgets expand, operational challenges become more visible with brands struggling with identifying the right creators, measuring performance, scaling campaigns and ensuring brand safety. While some advertisers have invested in direct partnerships, paid amplification and adjacency placements, tools and reporting standards remain fragmented.

This fragmentation surfaces most clearly in measurement. While creator campaigns are often designed to drive awareness, trust and discovery, ROI has emerged as the dominant success metric, creating tension between intent and evaluation.

Gurwara notes that creator campaigns influence brand search, conversion rates on other channels and even offline purchases, effects that were real but under-measured. “The focus on ROI reflects the industry’s move towards accountability rather than pressure on creators,” he added.

Kalyan Kumar, Co-Founder & CEO, KlugKlug, values India's influencer-led content marketing industry at ₹10,000 crore, with about 25% managed through organised agencies. "Several brands now spend ₹20+ crore annually, and D2C brands are investing ₹6 crore or more, matching previous FMCG digital spend levels. More than 14,000 brands on Amazon have leveraged influencer-driven content to quietly shift market share."

According to Kumar, strong impact influencers deliver: beauty categories show 2x–5x EMV multipliers, home and kitchen categories show 5x–7x, and influencers significantly boost purchase intent through increased search volumes. 

Yet, operational challenges persist; brands often achieve only 50–60% of the audience they assume they’re reaching. For example, only 14% of female beauty influencers have more than 50% female followers, resulting in audience misalignment. Additionally, when multiple intermediaries are involved, only 30–50% of budgets reach creators, prompting many D2C brands to work directly with influencers.

Kumar stresses the need to move beyond traditional attribution methods like swipe-ups and link-in-bio, which capture just 8–12% of true influence. “Agile brands are already using smarter influencer deployments to outperform larger competitors on platforms like Amazon. With 43% of India’s internet users being Gen Z (and 67% when combined with millennials), traditional media holds little relevance for these consumers, who show 7x higher brand recall for social-first content.”

Creators Yet to Win Brand Confidence?

As the creator demand scaled, industry leaders pointed out that the core challenge was not attribution models but confidence in reported performance.

Aryan Anurag, Co-founder of Binge Labs, said attribution and marketing mix models have been designed to function within complex systems. “The real pressure emerged when reports failed to clearly explain impact,” he said. According to him, when brands could not confidently justify continued spend, scrutiny increased regardless of topline metrics.

Ambika Sharma, Founder and Chief Strategist at Pulp Strategy, describes the issue as one of language. “ROI became dominant not because creator marketing suddenly turned into performance media, but because it lacked a common language of accountability,” she said. In the absence of standardised trust and awareness metrics, brands defaulted to what could be counted, even if it reflected only part of the value.

According to industry experts, inconsistency poses a greater risk than fraud. Gurwara observed that fraud existed across all media channels, whereas inconsistency eroded confidence. “When brands could not compare creators fairly, or when reporting lacked structure, budgets became cautious even if creators were delivering,” he said.

Advertisers have identified measurement, operational tools and standardisation as the largest gaps. 

Ramya Ramachandran, Founder and CEO of Whoppl, describes the phase as a maturity moment. “As creators evolved into core brand channels, the absence of standardised controls increased execution risk at scale,” she said. According to her, stronger verification mechanisms, clearer guardrails and platform-level accountability would ultimately strengthen the ecosystem.

AI entered with both promise and pressure

Alongside these shifts, AI adoption has accelerated. Nearly three in four brands were already using or planning to use AI for creator-related tasks such as briefing, editing and optimisation. Smaller brands, in particular, turned to AI to scale efficiently.

However, concerns around authenticity persisted. Sharma observed that governance frameworks had not evolved at the same pace as adoption. Without clearer disclosure norms and controls, AI-led scale risked amplifying inefficiencies. However, she noted that responsible AI use could also help standardise workflows, improve creator selection and enable more consistent measurement.

Liran Liberman, CEO of Humanz, the AI-Platform for the creator economy, observed that the next phase of the creator economy would focus on addressing systemic inefficiencies rather than chasing explosive growth. According to him, consolidation, unified platforms, clearer creator rights and long-term sustainability would determine whether creator marketing matured into a stable media channel or stalled under operational complexity.

In conclusion, systems matter more than scale

Looking ahead to 2026, industry leaders agree that success would be defined less by budget size and more by structure.

Gurwara says brands that build consistent creator ecosystems, invest in intelligence and treat creator marketing like a formal media channel will scale more effectively. 

Anurag added that clarity of purpose would be decisive, with brands selecting creators based on alignment rather than vanity metrics.