Digital media offers granular targeting and attribution, letting a brand link a specific rupee of spend to a specific consumer action, whether that is a video view, an app download or a purchase on a quick commerce platform. Television, for all its reach, has historically struggled to offer that same causal clarity.
Fifty per cent used to be a rounding error in FMCG media plans. Television took the lion’s share, digital picked up whatever was left over. That equation has now inverted at two of India’s most recognisable consumer goods companies, and neither treated it as news worth burying.
At Emami’s 43rd Annual General Meeting on August 25, chairman Harsha Vardhan Agarwal told shareholders that digital media now accounts for more than half the company’s total advertising and promotion spend. Nestlé India got there too, with digital platforms consuming 55 per cent of an advertising budget that itself grew 74 per cent between 2022 and FY26, from Rs 700 crore to Rs 1,220 crore. For years, the FMCG media brief followed a fixed order, build the campaign, buy the television slots, let digital mop up whatever budget remained. That order of operations is now being rewritten inside some of India’s oldest consumer goods boardrooms.
These are not challenger brands with nothing to lose. They are companies whose entire brand equity was built jingle by jingle, on national television, over generations. The question worth asking is no longer how much budget television deserves by default. It is what specific job television can still do better than anything else, and increasingly, FMCG companies are answering that question with a much shorter list than before.
From default medium to selective instrument
The shift is best understood as a change in status rather than a change in spend alone. Television has not disappeared from FMCG media plans, but it has stopped being the automatic first line item. Instead, brands are increasingly using it in a targeted way, for cohorts and moments where mass, simultaneous reach genuinely cannot be replicated elsewhere, such as festive launches, sporting events or category defining campaigns.
Sumeet Bhojani, Head of Brand and Strategic Insights at Godrej Enterprises Group, frames this as a change in planning philosophy rather than a straightforward transfer of money. “It is not so much about moving money from one medium to another but just deploying it more effectively where we believe it will get the highest quality of consumer attention, at scale,” he says. Godrej, he explains, treats linear television and connected television as parts of a single integrated video bucket, planned alongside social media rather than in isolation from it. The brief to media planners, in his words, is simply to build the right mix that drives measurable impact and growth, not to pick a favourite screen.
That distinction between linear and connected television matters more than it might appear. Connected TV, or CTV, refers to television content delivered over the internet through smart TVs and streaming apps, and it behaves statistically much closer to digital advertising than to traditional broadcast. It can be targeted, measured and attributed to outcomes in ways linear broadcast simply cannot. As more Indian households stream rather than tune in, the line between “TV” and “digital” is blurring from the inside, which helps explain why companies increasingly describe their media mix in terms of objectives rather than mediums.
Measurability is rewriting the brief
The pull toward digital is not only about where audiences are, it is about what advertisers can prove once they get there. Digital media offers granular targeting and attribution, letting a brand link a specific rupee of spend to a specific consumer action, whether that is a video view, an app download or a purchase on a quick commerce platform. Television, for all its reach, has historically struggled to offer that same causal clarity.
This is visible in how companies are now describing return on marketing investment, not as an act of faith in brand building but as a measurable input into the business. Nestlé has articulated what it calls a virtuous cycle, in which higher marketing investment strengthens brands, which drives sales, profitability and cash generation, which in turn funds further marketing. The company’s premium portfolio, including products such as Nescafe Gold and KitKat Dessert Delight, has grown from 11 per cent of overall sales in 2021 to 14 per cent today, a shift its leadership credits significantly to digital first campaigns capable of building new consumption habits among specific, addressable audiences rather than the population at large.
New growth engines outside the television frame
Perhaps the clearest sign of how far this shift has travelled is that some of India’s oldest FMCG names are now building entirely new businesses around digital behaviour, rather than simply advertising existing ones on digital platforms. Dabur has launched Dabur Ventures, a Rs 500 crore investment platform aimed at backing digital first, new age brands, alongside a Rs 60 crore minority stake in luxury skincare label RAS Beauty. Marico’s digital first portfolio exited FY26 with an annualised revenue run rate exceeding Rs 1,100 crore, a business its management now describes not as an experiment but as a genuine growth engine, with foods and premium personal care expected to rise from roughly 23 per cent of India revenue in FY26 to around 33 per cent by FY30.
What connects these moves is a shared recognition that digital is no longer simply a cheaper or more efficient version of television. It has become the terrain on which entirely new categories, brands and consumption habits are being built from scratch, often years before a television campaign would ever be considered.
None of this suggests television is heading toward irrelevance. Its ability to build shared cultural moments and near universal awareness in a single burst remains unmatched, which is precisely why companies continue to use it for select, high stakes windows. What has changed is the presumption of primacy. Television has moved from being the medium a brand starts with to being the medium a brand chooses, deliberately, for specific reasons, in specific moments. For an industry built on habit, that is a genuinely significant reversal, and one that is likely to define how Indian brands are built for the rest of this decade.
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First Published onSeptember 1, 2026, 09:11:33 IST
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