Influencer Marketing Feels Like It's Eating Ad Budgets. In India, It's Still Just 2-10%

Scroll through any brand's Instagram this week and you'd think creators had swallowed the entire marketing budget. Influencers flew to the FIFA World Cup on brand dime, IPL sponsors flew creators in for stadium trips, and Unilever's CEO stood up earlier this year and said the company now puts roughly ₹42,750 crore annually into creators and social media marketing, almost half of its digital ad and media spend, with plans to scale creator partnerships twenty-fold (Exchange4Media).

So it would be reasonable to assume Indian marketing budgets have tilted the same way. They haven't. In a set of conversations with CMOs published July 2, 2026, the picture that emerges is a lot more conservative: for most Indian brands, influencer marketing is still just 2% to 10% of the overall marketing spend, not the centerpiece. That's a sharp contrast to how most D2C teams build their influencer budgets from the ground up.

What CMOs Are Actually Allocating

Shekhar Saurabh, Head of Marketing at TATA AIG General Insurance, put a number on it: "Influencer marketing is a relatively small part of our overall marketing mix, accounting for around 3% to 5% of the budget. We invest far more in long-term brand building through digital, television and other mass media." The philosophy behind the low number is deliberate, not just budget-constrained: "If someone speaks about our brand, it should come from genuine product experience, not because they're being paid to say it," he said.

IKEA India lands a little higher, at 5% to 10% of digital marketing spend, according to Hazefa Chhitwala, the company's Marketing and Communication manager. But the brand is explicit that it isn't buying scripted endorsements. During a recent e-commerce launch, IKEA used creators who were already genuine users of the brand rather than briefing them on talking points. "We don't script what they should say. We look for an organic fit," Chhitwala said, adding that anything promotional gets disclosed as advertising while organic mentions are left alone, in line with ASCI's 2026 disclosure rules.

Skincare brand Fixderma runs the leanest number in the group: just 2% of digital spend, according to CMO Chirag Jagwani. The company ties spend directly to sales generated through creator affiliate links, and any increase is conditional on proof, not hype. "We'd like to take it to 10%, but only if we can scale with measurable impact," Jagwani said.

Why the India Numbers Look So Different From Unilever's

Part of the gap is category. Unilever runs mass FMCG brands where reach and frequency at global scale are the whole game, and creators have become a cost-efficient way to buy both. Insurance, home furnishings, and dermatology brands operate on a different logic: trust, credibility, and a longer consideration cycle, where a single miscast influencer partnership can do more damage than a missed reach target.

Part of it is also measurement discipline. Every marketer quoted tied their number to a specific accountability mechanism, whether that's affiliate-link sales tracking at Fixderma or a hard rule against paid scripting at TATA AIG and IKEA, the same kind of rigor we've laid out in our ROI measurement guide for influencer campaigns. None of them talk about influencer spend as a brand-awareness bet the way Unilever's twenty-fold scale-up plan implies. They talk about it as a channel that has to earn its line item every quarter.

Not All Influencer Budgets Are Built the Same Way

The category-by-category split gets even more granular once you look at how brands sequence different creator types. Milind Shah, Head of MG Select at JSW MG Motor India, described a tiered approach for the brand's luxury vehicle line: lifestyle creators get top priority because they sit inside consumers' everyday content feed and keep the brand top-of-mind; finance creators and category experts come next, mainly to educate buyers on ownership costs and considerations; travel creators, despite being an obvious fit for a mobility brand, get the smallest share because travel content "tends to inspire future purchases rather than immediate consideration."

That's a meaningfully different way of thinking about influencer budgets than a flat percentage. It treats creators as a funnel-stage tool, deployed differently depending on where a buyer sits in their decision journey rather than a single undifferentiated spend line, echoing the broader case for choosing the right macro-micro-nano mix instead of chasing one influencer tier by default.

What This Means for Brands Planning 2026-27 Budgets

The takeaway for marketers isn't that influencer marketing is overhyped. Indian consumers still turn to creators heavily in the path to purchase: research from The Goat Agency and Kantar found 69% of Indian consumers use influencers for product information and 63% for product discovery, while Ogilvy's global Social Trends data shows 86% of consumers made an influencer-inspired purchase in the past year. The channel clearly works.

The takeaway is that "how much are you spending on influencers" is the wrong first question. The CMOs getting real returns are the ones who decided what the channel is for first, brand credibility, funnel-stage education, or measurable affiliate sales, and then sized the budget to match, rather than chasing a percentage because a global FMCG giant made headlines with one. For brands building out their creator strategy this year, that's a far more useful benchmark than any single spend number.