Creators are the new media plan
Young India spends its attention on creator content — reels, shorts, memes — not on traditional media. For brands targeting under-35 consumers, creator channels are where reach actually lives. Media plans that treat creators as an add-on are planning for an India that no longer exists.
What's working in 2026, based on our campaign work
- Micro over macro: engagement economics favour credible mid-size creators in tight niches.
- Meme distribution: culture-first reach at a fraction of paid media cost, as our Lenskart and Unstop campaigns showed.
- Creator content as ad creative: partnership ads from creator handles consistently outperform brand-handle creative.
- Always-on over one-off: sustained creator programs compound; campaign spikes fade.
How brand budgets are shifting
D2C brands are moving budget from pure performance media into creator-led systems — not because performance stopped working, but because creative is now the biggest performance lever. The brands winning auctions are the ones with a pipeline of fresh, trusted, creator-made creative.
What D2C brands should do about it
- Build an always-on creator engine instead of booking one-off posts
- Negotiate content usage rights upfront so creator posts become ad creative
- Blend tiers: nano and micro for economics, macro for moments
- Measure creator activity against business metrics — CAC, ROAS, share of voice
A note on our data
BrandHype works with a network of 10,000+ creators across 100+ niches in India, and our observations come from active campaign work with D2C brands and startups. Figures we publish about our own campaigns are BrandHype-reported; we distinguish them from independently verified data.