Is digital tightening its grip on auto ad budgets as share hits 44% in 2025?

India’s automotive advertising industry crossed a psychological threshold in 2025. Digital advertising, long regarded as an important but supporting channel, moved decisively closer to the core, with its share of auto ad budgets rising from 37 percent in 2024 to 44 percent in 2025, according to the dentsu–e4m Digital Advertising Report. The shift is more than numerical: it reflects a deeper reordering of how consumers discover, evaluate and decide on vehicles, and how brands are reorganising their marketing operations to keep pace.

Between 2024 and 2025, the category expanded sharply. Automotive advertising grew from ₹5,223 crore to ₹7,821 crore, increasing its share of the overall advertising market from 6 percent to 7 percent and emerging as the third-largest advertising vertical after FMCG and e‑commerce. Yet the real story lies less in the scale of growth and more in where incremental budgets were allocated, and why.

Mohan Wilson, Director - Marketing & Corporate Strategy of Nissan India, points to the consistency of the movement rather than its suddenness. “The trend is steadily increasing, indicating consistent growth and positive momentum over time,” he says, framing the digital shift as an accumulation of behavioural changes rather than a one-off correction.

From discovery to decision, on screen

At the heart of this reallocation is a buyer journey that has become decisively screen-led before it becomes showroom-led. Varun Mohan, Chief Commercial Officer of MiQ, says the inflection between 2024 and 2025 made digital unavoidable. “The biggest change is that the buyer journey has become more screen-led before it becomes showroom-led. Even if the final transaction still happens offline, discovery, comparison and shortlisting are now happening earlier and more intensely on digital,” he explains. The rise in digital allocation, from 37 percent to 44 percent, reflects this behavioural reality rather than a mere budgeting preference.

The nature of screens themselves has also evolved. Connected TV has reintroduced big-screen, household viewing into the digital ecosystem, widening reach across age groups. As Indian audiences increasingly adopt digital-only viewing habits, both CTV and online video have become central to brand discovery and trust-building, prompting auto marketers to follow consumers rather than force old media habits onto new behaviours.

Amyn Ghadiali, Country Head – India at Gozoop Creative, a marketing agency, argues that the journey has not just evolved but collapsed inward. “Earlier, discovery, consideration, validation and intent were spread across time, touch points and physical spaces. In 2025, all of that happens on one device, often in one sitting,” he says. Control, he adds, has shifted away from OEMs to algorithms, with consumers forming strong brand opinions well before they consciously decide to buy.

Smita Khanna Kithania, Chief Operating Officer of Newton Consulting India, describes this as the transition from discovery to decisioning. By 2025, automotive digital spends had nearly doubled to ₹3,425 crore. “With 92 percent of buyers now spending nearly seven hours researching online, the showroom is no longer the first touchpoint, it becomes the final one,” she says, noting that buyers often arrive with most of their decisions already made.

The battle for moments, not just models

As digital approaches half of automotive ad budgets, competition is shifting away from pure product differentiation towards moment ownership. MiQ’s Mohan believes the critical question for brands is no longer presence but relevance. “When digital becomes nearly half the spend, the question stops being ‘are we present online’ and becomes ‘are we present in the moments that shape preference?’,” he says. Mobile screens capture high-frequency intent and research, while CTV increasingly plays a role in household-level trust and recall, a crucial factor in a category where family influence remains strong.

Ghadiali takes the idea further, arguing that the fight has moved from top-of-mind to top-of-feed. “Feeds are emotional spaces, not rational ones. The battle has shifted from the showroom floor to the six inches of glass in your hand,” he says, emphasising the importance of context over campaign-scale spectacle.

Anindya Ghosh, Founding Partner at Sam & Andy, brand and marketing strategy solutions firm sees YouTube and OTT platforms becoming functional extensions of the showroom. Consumers now encounter reviews, explainers and creator-led content across weeks or months, rather than through a single festive burst. “The brand that wins is the one that shows up consistently across the consumer’s consideration window, not just on launch day,” he says.

Khanna highlights an additional layer of complexity. While screens matter, trust has become a decisive filter. With rising zero-click searches and voice-led queries, brands must deliver clarity instantly. “The brand that wins isn’t the one on the brightest screen; it’s the one that uses AI and first-party data transparently to offer a frictionless, secure experience,” she says, pointing to reputation management and review responses as emerging trust signals.

Structural reset, not a spike

Despite the sharp year-on-year rise, industry leaders agree that the 44 percent digital allocation is not a temporary spike. Mohan notes that digital now accounts for roughly 46 percent of India’s overall ad market, placing automotive in line with broader structural trends. The sustained growth of CTV audiences and digital-only viewing suggests that consumption habits have stabilised at a new baseline, making reversals unlikely.

Ghadiali frames the permanence more bluntly. “Once a CFO or CEO sees that digital can compress decision cycles, influence intent before footfall and attribute outcomes instead of impressions, traditional allocations lose moral authority,” he says. Consumers, he adds, cannot be un-taught how to research and decide online.

Khanna reinforces this view by pointing to the 48 percent year-on-year growth in automotive digital spends, placing it among the fastest-growing digital categories in India. Programmatic buying, now handling a large majority of impressions, has accelerated the shift towards outcome-driven marketing, where TV and print increasingly play supportive, high-impact roles rather than forming the core.

Ghosh underlines the generational dimension of this reset. The 20 to 35 age group, now central to growth across EVs and entry-to-mid segments, is digitally native and research-heavy. Reaching them meaningfully requires channels that allow personalisation, retargeting and journey-based storytelling, making the digital shift both permanent and necessary.

Rewriting the marketing playbook

As digital budgets rise, the question confronting auto marketers is what must be left behind to fund what comes next. Ghadiali argues that brands must stop confusing visibility with effectiveness. High-decibel launches that say little, media-first planning that ignores behavioural insight, and one-size-fits-all storytelling are becoming increasingly inefficient. “The future auto marketer won’t be judged by how loudly the brand launched, but by how quietly and convincingly it entered the consumer’s life,” he says.

Khanna echoes this call for accountability, pointing to missed follow-ups, vanity outreach and underfunded retention ecosystems as areas where value leaks occur. With digital conversion rates climbing, every rupee, she says, must justify itself across the funnel.

Ghosh adds that legacy habits around mass visibility are giving way to persona-led, platform-specific communication. Funding the future means reallocating spends away from generic exposure towards precision, relevance and measurable impact.

Gaurav Kaushik, Founder and CEO of digital marketing and technology agency called Nians, sums up the shift succinctly. The seven-point rise in digital allocation, he says, reflects new buyer behaviour patterns where research and first impressions are formed on screens long before a dealership visit. For automotive brands, digital is no longer an add-on but the operational foundation of marketing.

The data from 2025 points to an industry that has not abandoned balance but redefined it. Television and print continue to play stabilising roles in a high-consideration category, but digital has emerged as the primary engine of discovery, influence and intent. The shift from 37 percent to 44 percent is less about chasing trends and more about acknowledging where the journey now begins. In the process, automotive marketing is entering a phase where growth is driven not by louder launches, but by sharper understanding of screens, moments and the business outcomes they enable.