Brought To You By... ‘Reality TV’

For years, the rhythm of Indian advertising followed a predictable cycle: launch a campaign, push it through digital, amplify using television, sustain with influencers. But now, the relationship between brands and reality shows has moved far beyond commercial breaks and logo placements, and what is unfolding now is far more immersive. Brands are not interrupting the storyline, they are joining it and sometimes shaping it.

While earlier brands settled for logos on walls or airing commercials during breaks, they now enter the story, shape the conflict, turn tasks into metaphors, convert luxury into aspiration and plant themselves in conversations that already relate to the audience. And that is why it is no surprise that ‘Bigg Boss’ and ‘Kaun Banega Crorepati’, two of India’s highest-recall reality properties, have become playgrounds where marketing strategies, content integration and culture intersect. But why are campaigns launching inside reality shows working better than multimillion digital plans and high-frequency media buys?

The answer seems to lie in the tension between attention and emotion. When viewers invest in contestants, in victories and conflicts, the brands connected to those feelings earn recall in a way no standalone ad can. This season of Bigg Boss showed that shift in real time. Citroën crafted an entire moment - a task - around emotions associated with the brand, where contestants had to express themes like thrill, identity and individuality. It wasn’t an ad shouting at the viewer, it was a moment the audience already was waiting for.

Kumar Priyesh, Business Head & Director - Automotive Brands, Stellantis India, believes this shift is not accidental but strategic, “Reality television offers a unique opportunity to move beyond passive advertising and create immersive brand experiences, instead of a conventional ad slot, the product becomes part of the storyline, woven into tasks, challenges, and moments that audiences are emotionally invested in. For Citroën Aircross X, the integration on Bigg Boss 19 allowed us to position the SUV as aspirational and celebratory.” And if the moment stays relevant even after the episode ends, the brand continues to travel through reels, edits and fan compilations without any incremental media spend. Priyesh also notes that he acknowledges that reach is a consideration, but he explains that Bigg Boss goes far beyond a television audience because it functions as a national conversation starter.

While Citroën leaned into narrative and emotion, other brands used presence differently. In Bigg Boss 19, Flipkart stocked a full cupboard inside the Bigg Boss house during Big Billion Days When contestants wore outfits taken from the wardrobe, discussed looks, bonded or argued over clothing, and even won ‘Best dressed titles’ by audience votings, Flipkart became shorthand for audience votes. The audience saw the clothes, searched for them on Flipkart, and in some cases even made the purchase—Mission accomplished: discovery achieved, attention captured, and increased potential for positive commercial impact.

On the other hand, Danube Properties went even bigger, building an entire Danube room inside the Bigg Boss house, becoming the physical location associated with relaxation and luxury, especially on days when emotions ran high. These placements didn’t scream for attention, they blended into the ecosystem. Viewers weren’t told what to think, brands became a part of the already existing thought.

But are brands choosing reality integrations only for scale or is there a deeper motive? Vineet Mittal, Chairman, Avaada Group, suggests the answer is nuance and credibility. Avaada’s clean energy campaign was launched on ‘Kaun Banega Crorepati’ not because of eyeballs alone but because of the trust embedded in the format. He explains, “When we are communicating about clean energy, future technologies, AI’s energy consumption, and India’s transition to a sustainable future, credibility matters. KBC provides both reach and trust, making it a platform where our message is more likely to be absorbed, retained, and discussed. What further convinced us was the trust and credibility the show enjoys, driven largely by Mr. Amitabh Bachchan’s association.” Mittal also notes that they evaluated the reach carefully and found that while no platform captures all of India, KBC comes unusually close, cutting across metros, Tier-II and Tier-III cities and even rural pockets, making it the right choice as Avaada shifted from targeted communication to wider national awareness.

The strategy community reinforces this direction. Harikrishnan Pillai, CEO and Co-Founder, TheSmallBigIdea, says that he has repeatedly observed that the biggest advantage for brands is not just the celebrity halo, but the story value. A brand moment inside a show can turn into news, debate, cultural chatter and even memes, if executed well. He puts it clearly, “If the stunt for the brand inside the programme is interesting, it becomes news. An ad for a brand launch in isolation might never become news, it is just an ad. But when it is part of a reality show moment, it becomes part of the ecosystem within that space. It gets talked about. It gets coverage beyond just the paid media.”

Ambika Sharma, Founder and Chief Strategist, Pulp Strategy, while echoing this thought explains, “Impact becomes multifold when you add the ripple effect and integrate the campaign naturally across digital and the reality format. What happens on the show immediately travels to social platforms, creator commentary, fan communities, and owned brand channels. You are essentially engineering a cultural moment that performs across ecosystems instead of buying isolated slots.”

Pillai also points out a very interesting factor that brands rarely say aloud, reality shows place products beside celebrities the audience already cares about, giving brands the benefit of association without paying for a full celebrity endorsement, making integrations more premium than regular airtime but still far more economical than signing the actor separately. It explains why Prime Video promoted ‘The Family Man’ during a KBC episode using subtle in-show conversations that naturally referenced its world, creating an unexpected yet contextually relevant discovery moment for a mass audience.

And if emotional integration is the qualitative draw of reality shows, the quantitative push is coming from viewing behaviour. Anmol Dang, VP– Media West, FCB Kinnect argues that OTT and connected TV attention is fundamentally stronger than most digital formats, and the numbers he points to are hard to ignore. He elaborates, “All major national reality shows now live on OTT platforms, and OTT’s ‘no-appointment-viewing’ behaviour commands significantly higher attention than any traditional or digital medium. While YouTube’s non-skippable formats come close, OTT attention levels are still 30–35% higher, and compared with Instagram or other top-tier social platforms, the gap jumps to 70–80%. This makes the OTT + CTV combination the default choice for many brands.”

Dang explains that the surge in reality integrations has inevitably created ad clutter on OTT too, yet the attention dynamic still remains unmatched because viewers almost never second-screen on mobile OTT and the figure drops only to about 10–15 % on CTV, which is precisely what is pushing marketers toward inside-the-show integrations instead of standalone ads. According to Dang, “Integrations cut through the clutter, stay embedded in the content, and continue to remain visible to viewers who watch, rewatch, or discover the show later, making the investment more future proof and efficient.” And since most reality-show partnerships include digital rights today, brands can clip, repurpose and amplify the moment across social channels, compounding its value beyond the initial airing.

If fragmentation of audiences was once the biggest concern for marketers, the success of these integrations suggests the conversation has flipped. Not every brand needs the whole country, and not every campaign requires a universal demographic. The question is no longer how many people were reached, but how meaningfully the right people were reached. Sharma elaborates, “Every platform today has a skew, including digital. The objective is not to chase a theoretical mass audience. It is to insert the brand into a high energy environment where attention, conversation, and emotion peak together. Reality shows deliver that. The concern earlier was that the audience profile might limit scale. What we now see is the opposite. These shows build communities, and communities amplify. You might enter through a niche, but the conversation does not remain niche.”

If this new reality is so effective, does it mean every brand should launch on a reality show? The industry says no. Pillai stresses that brands only take this route if the alignment is right, the environment is credible and the creative concept is strong enough to become a moment, not just a placement. Dang reinforces it by saying, “That said, the real success of any integration depends on contextualisation. If a brand cannot blend meaningfully into the narrative or moment, it’s better to avoid the integration altogether. Context is not just an enhancer — it is the difference between relevance and noise.” Thus, a Citroën challenge, a Flipkart wardrobe reveal, a Danube rest room, an Avaada clean energy callout or a Prime Video cultural callback do not work because they are inside high-reach shows, they work because they are inside high-emotional shows.

The next shift may not be about how brands enter reality shows, but about how reality shows begin to evolve because brands are inside them. As more marketers design moments meant to trigger emotion, virality and cultural reaction, the line between entertainment and brand narrative will inevitably blur further. We might soon see integrations that go beyond presence and begin to influence pacing and plot energy of the show, not as forced inserts but as collaborative design. If the industry continues in this direction, brand launches will no longer chase attention, they will become co-authors of it.