Digital Is About to Be 70% of All Indian Advertising — What That Means If You Are Still Not Advertising

The numbers

From the Dentsu digital advertising report published in February 2026:

• Total Indian ad spend: ₹1,30,416 crore projected for end-2026, up from ₹1,21,339 crore in 2025 — 8.3% growth
• Projected ₹1,40,001 crore by 2027
• Digital was 59% of total spend in 2025 and is projected to reach 70% by 2027
• Digital spend: ₹71,621 crore in 2025, rising to ₹98,034 crore by 2027
• Digital grew 19% in 2025 while the overall market grew 8.3%

Television's share: 21% to 18% to 15%. Print: 14% to 12% to 10%.

Those are not predictions of decline. They are decline, already measured.

The split inside digital, and the surprise

• Social — ₹21,057 crore, 29%
• Online video — ₹20,004 crore, 28%, the fastest-growing format
• Paid search — ₹16,581 crore
• Display — ₹11,581 crore

Online video overtakes social by 2027.

That is the line worth sitting with. More money is about to go into video than into the feed, and Dentsu links that growth partly to regional-language content.

E-retail advertising grew 55.86% to ₹17,601 crore — by far the sharpest rise in the report.

What this actually means for a business in Tamil Nadu

It is not evidence that you should advertise. Plenty of businesses here grow on referral and repeat custom without buying a single impression, and that is a legitimate way to run a company.

What it is evidence of: attention has moved, and it is not coming back. If your buyers are not reading the paper and not watching the ad breaks, the question is no longer whether digital works. It is whether you are present where people now decide.

Two specific implications:

• If you are spending on print or local television out of habit, check what it returns. Not whether it feels respectable — what it returns.
• If you have no video at all, you are absent from the fastest-growing format in the country at the moment it overtakes social.

Dentsu also attributes a broadening advertiser base to small-business digitalisation — though the report gives no separate figures for SMB or regional-language spend, so treat that as direction rather than measurement.

Why video, and what kind

Video is winning because it does the one thing a feed post cannot: it demonstrates.

A photograph of a finished interior tells someone it looks nice. A sixty-second film of the site before, the work happening, and the family walking in tells them what it is like to hire you.

What that does not mean is that you need a film crew every month.

• One proper shoot day, run properly, produces a hero film plus dozens of cuts across ratios, hooks and languages
• Phone-shot footage from actual jobs, cut well, often outperforms polished material because it is believable
• Customer testimonials, filmed on site, cost almost nothing and carry more weight than any claim you make yourself
• Vertical first — your audience is holding the phone upright

What to do with this information

If you are not advertising at all, the sequence that wastes least money:

• Get your Google Business Profile right and collect reviews. Free. Do this before spending anything.
• Make sure enquiries reach a human fast. Advertising into a slow response is lighting money on fire.
• Start small on one channel — usually Google for people already searching for what you sell, because the intent is already there.
• Add video once you know which message works.
• Then scale what returns and stop what does not.

The market growing to ₹1.4 lakh crore is not a reason to spend. It is a description of where your customers now are. What you do about that is a separate decision, and it should be based on your numbers, not Dentsu's.

Related reading

• What an ad film actually costs
• What digital marketing should cost
• Reels that actually sell