Are brands finally taking regional creativity seriously?

For years, the Indian advertising playbook for reaching Bharat was fairly predictable. Crack one big national idea in a Mumbai or Delhi boardroom, shoot it in Hindi or English, and hand it over to regional teams for dubbing and subtitling. The mother campaign did the thinking, and the regions did the adapting. That template is now being questioned openly in agency pitch rooms. Brands are asking for ideas that feel native to Kolkata, Kochi, or Ludhiana, rather than ones that have merely been translated for them. Regional India, it seems, is slowly graduating from being a media market to becoming a creative one.

The shift is not happening in isolation. It is the result of audiences, platforms and budgets moving in the same direction at the same time. As the country's internet base deepens, the centre of gravity has moved away from the metros, and the creative conversation is being forced to follow. The question agencies are now asking is whether this is a genuine change in how ideas get made, or just a more sophisticated version of the old localisation exercise.

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The audience has moved, and so has the money

The numbers explain the urgency. India's active internet user base has reached 958 million, with rural regions now accounting for 57% of users, according to the IAMAI-Kantar Internet in India 2025 report. An earlier edition of the same study found that 98% of internet users engage with content in Indic languages, and that more than half of urban users prefer consuming content in a regional language. In other words, vernacular is no longer a rural phenomenon or a secondary layer. It is how a majority of India actually lives online.

The money is following that audience. The Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2026 pegs India's ad market at ₹1,55,105 crore in 2025, up 12% over the previous year, with digital now accounting for 60% of the total. Within that, MSME digital advertising stood at ₹35,814 crore, up 21%, and is expected to grow about 20% to roughly ₹42,976 crore this year. That is a large pool of locally rooted advertisers speaking to local customers in local languages, which raises the bar for what national brands need to sound like if they want to share the same screen.

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Translation is not localisation

For agencies that have operated in regional markets for decades, none of this is a revelation. Rashi Ray, Director, Response India, a legacy agency headquartered in Bengal, says the industry has finally caught up with something her agency has lived by. "Being from Bengal, and running a legacy agency here, we have learnt over 41 years that there is no one idea. There isn't even one Bengal," she says. For her, the diversity of the country makes the old approach structurally weak, because India is "too layered, too diverse, too wonderfully contradictory for a national campaign to simply be translated and expected to feel local."

That does not mean national thinking is dead. Ray is careful to point out that the answer is not always a fresh idea for every state. The real opportunity, she says, is to understand the local truth, which is what people value and what they recognise. "Sometimes that means adapting the campaign. Sometimes, the better idea is born locally," she says. What is changing is who gets to decide which route to take, and at what stage of the process that decision is made.

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On the creative side, Shyam Nair, Executive Creative Director, 22feet, part of Omnicom Advertising India, believes brands are increasingly giving that room to agencies. "I do think brands are increasingly making room for that," he says. The intent behind it, in his reading, is a conscious acknowledgement that consumers do not all think, speak, or behave alike. A cultural nuance that rings true in one place might mean very little in another, and a brand that ignores that risks being heard but not felt.

This is where the idea of connection comes in. Nair describes the ambition as a simple one: whatever a brand is selling, it wants the viewer to feel understood. "That sense of being understood goes a long way, and it takes more than getting the language right," he says. It is a point that quietly dismantles the old dubbing model, where language was treated as the only variable that needed to change between markets.

The commercial logic has tightened as well. Sumit Handa, Assistant Vice President, Media Strategy, YAAP, an integrated marketing and communications agency, says the shift is being driven as much by performance as by sentiment. "The shift is real," he says, pointing to how better understanding of regional content consumption on digital is feeding into planning decisions. Once the numbers start to favour the regions, the argument stops being a creative indulgence. "When a brand sees that its Tier-2 and regional audiences now deliver better cost-per-acquisition than a saturated metro, the business case for a region-first idea writes itself," he adds.

What changes when the idea starts in the region

If the business case is settled, the more interesting debate is about craft. What actually changes on the creative table when the brief begins with a region's culture rather than a national film? For one, the starting point itself comes under scrutiny. Nair says the first creative challenge, whether you are a writer or a designer, is to question what you think you know. Many creatives carry a borrowed picture of states like Kerala or Punjab, shaped largely by cinema, which has often flattened entire communities into a handful of stereotypes. "When you start there, you're working with someone else's shorthand," he says.

The fix, he argues, is unglamorous research and genuine curiosity. Creatives need to dig into the culture and find the details that people from a region actually recognise in themselves. The payoff can come with an uncomfortable trade-off for the brand, since the sharpest regional work may be almost invisible to a national audience. "I feel quite strongly that some of the best regional work might mean very little to someone outside that culture. But to someone within it, every detail lands. We should be comfortable with that," Nair says. For marketers used to measuring an idea by how widely it travels, that is a significant mindset shift.

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Ray describes the same phenomenon through the lens of belonging. According to her, insider-ness changes the creative at a very fundamental level, because there is a clear difference between speaking to a market and speaking like an insider. The work draws on the little references, the humour, the expressions and even the last joke everyone remembers, which an outsider would never notice. "It can say something in three words because people already know the other seven," she says. The output tends to be more instinctive and more nuanced, and sometimes more irreverent than a nationally cleared script would ever allow.

The change is not limited to the script. It runs through the entire chain of how a campaign is conceived, planned, and released. Handa says that when a campaign is built from a region's culture, "the idea changes before the language does." A dubbed film, in his view, speaks at an audience, while a region-first idea speaks from within it. It understands the festival that matters, the creators people actually trust, and the buying occasion that is unique to that market. The practical consequence is that creative and media stop being sequential steps. "You're not booking regional media to carry a national idea; you're building the idea around how that audience actually consumes media in the first place," he explains.

From media market to idea factory

The larger question is whether regional India can become a source of creative innovation for national brands, rather than just a place where their ideas get adapted. Agencies say some of this is already happening, and not always inside advertising. Ray points out that some of the most interesting creativity is happening outside the industry, among people who are not creative professionals. They make content around food, friends, festivals and neighbourhoods, and the language, humour and visual codes all come from lived experience. "I think every regional market is a brilliant source of creative innovation," she says, adding that brands have a lot to learn from that kind of instinctive output. "Regional markets aren't just audiences. They can be idea generators."

There is also a generational pride at work. Nair says today's young Indians take real pride in where they come from, and that a brand which understands and taps into that sentiment gives both itself and its work room to stand out. He points to Nike's "Nothing Beats a Londoner", which built its idea around the neighbourhoods, sporting lives and competitive spirit of young Londoners, as a template for what hyper-local thinking can do for a global brand. India, he feels, offers far more scope for the same approach, given the sheer number of distinct cultures sitting inside one market. "We must let regional markets shape ideas from the beginning," he says.

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Handa argues that the upward flow of ideas has been underway for some time. Sharp formats are already travelling from the regions to the national stage, whether it is a hook that works with a regional creator, a vernacular insight or a market-specific storytelling device that later gets adopted nationally. "They already are. We're just slow to credit it," he says, which is a reminder that the industry's habit of looking at regions as downstream markets may be the very thing holding back its own creative pipeline.

What it means for creative strategy

For creative strategy, the implications are considerable. Agencies will need to staff and structure themselves differently, with regional creative leadership involved at the briefing stage and not brought in at the adaptation stage. Brands will need to get comfortable with approving work that does not travel, and with measuring success by depth of resonance rather than breadth of reach. And planners will need to treat language, creators and cultural calendars as inputs to the idea itself, not as channels for distributing it.

There are risks, of course. Regional work done badly can slip into tokenism, a festival tie-in here and a local actor there, without any real understanding of the audience. The agencies in this story are essentially making the same point from different angles. The shortcut of borrowed shorthand will be found out quickly by audiences who know their own culture better than any brief ever will.

If the industry gets it right, the old formula of "one idea for India" will give way to something messier but far richer. As Handa puts it, "The brands that win the next decade in India won't have one idea for India — they'll have a system for turning many Indias into ideas."