There was a time when brands didn’t need to think too hard about influence. A celebrity face supported by a high-decibel campaign with enough media weight behind it could deliver what mattered—visibility, recall, and a certain kind of cultural legitimacy. A popular face carrying a brand message across formats and geographies did the trick. And this linear path, for decades, held the entire advertising ecosystem.
What has changed is not the presence of celebrities, but the environment around them. Today, brands are not operating in a space where attention is scarce. If anything, it is oversupplied and conditional. Consumers today don’t just absorb communication; they evaluate it, cross-check it, and more importantly, seek validation before acting on it. In that environment, visibility can initiate interest, but it rarely completes the journey. Something else is required to sustain it.
That ‘something else’ is where the current shift begins to take shape. Even as celebrity-led campaigns continue to dominate high-impact moments, the rise of influencer marketing has been impossible to ignore. What began as an experimental, digital-first tactic has now evolved into a structured and significant part of media planning. Over the past few years, influencer spends have steadily increased, not just in volume but in strategic importance, moving from campaign-specific bursts to always-on engagement layers.
Industry estimates suggest that India’s influencer marketing ecosystem has grown into a multi-thousand-crore market. This growth sits at the centre of the current debate, forcing brands to re-evaluate whether the scale and recall of celebrity campaigns can match the efficiency and action-driven impact of influencer-led communication.
Vedansh Kumar, Chief Marketing Officer, boAt says, “We’ve moved from a largely celebrity-led playbook to a more creator-first ecosystem, because influence is no longer top-down; it’s shaped within communities.” For boAt, which positions itself as a culture-first brand, this transition reflects the way culture is now built—less through high-visibility moments and more through community-driven interactions. Celebrities continue to play a role, but in a more defined capacity, primarily driving salience and creating sharp cultural spikes. However, as Kumar suggests, salience without depth is no longer enough to sustain consumer interest.
That depth is increasingly built through creators who go beyond amplification to interpretation. This is especially critical in categories such as consumer electronics, where consumers actively evaluate products before purchase. Tech and fitness creators translate features into real-world-use cases, influencing consideration rather than just awareness. As a result, the allocation between celebrities and influencers is not fixed but works as a strategic lever. During launches, this balance becomes most visible, with celebrities helping the brand stay memorable and creators making it credible.
The layered strategic approach is visible across categories. Hyundai Motor India Limited’s marketing strategy reflects a similar balance. “Celebrities and influencers play complementary roles and the usage of both totally depend on the objective of the campaign. Celebrities help us build scale, trust and salience, while influencers drive relevance, authenticity and engagement, especially with younger and regional audiences,” says Virat Khullar, Head of Marketing at Hyundai Motor India Limited.
The brand’s use of carefully selected ambassadors, from Shah Rukh Khan, who’s had a long association with Hyundai, to faces like Deepika Padukone, Pankaj Tripathi, and athletes such as Smriti Mandhana and Jemimah Rodrigues, has built trust and mass appeal across generations. At the same time, this top-down visibility is being complemented by creator-led initiatives like the ‘Test Driven by 100’ campaign, where multiple influencers drove the Hyundai Creta Electric, sharing real-world experiences and addressing concerns around electric mobility.
What begins to emerge is a redistribution of responsibility. Celebrities continue to operate at the level of mass visibility and cultural signalling, while influencers are increasingly embedded deeper in the decision-making process, where context and frequency play a more critical role.
This redistribution becomes even more apparent when viewed through category behaviour. In FMCG, where scale and recall remain critical, celebrity-led campaigns still dominate top-of-funnel communication. Their ability to build memory structures quickly makes them difficult to replace. At the same time, brands are adding influencer ecosystems on top to drive contextual storytelling and extend engagement beyond the initial burst.
In high-consideration categories such as jewellery and automotive, the split becomes more functional. “Both celebrities and influencers are important in today’s day and time. One is for brand-building and aspiration and the other is for local connect and frequency,” says Suvankar Sen, Managing Director and CEO at Senco Gold Ltd. That distinction reflects a deeper reality—while aspiration can be created quickly, trust often requires repeated exposure within familiar contexts.
For brands with strong retail presence, this local layer becomes critical. At Kisna Diamond and Gold Jewellery, which is a relatively newer brand but has efficiently expanded its footprint to over 150 EBOs across the country, influencer-led campaigns are closely tied to driving store-level outcomes rather than just digital engagement. “Influencers enable hyper-local engagement, contextual storytelling, and immediate consumer action. They are especially effective in driving store footfalls and strengthening consideration at a local level,” says Prashant Awasthi, Chief Marketing Officer, Kisna. Creators for them have not just built awareness, but actively bridged the gap between online discovery and offline purchase.
At the same time, this hyperlocal, performance-driven layer is built on top of a more traditional celebrity-led foundation. Kisna has also invested in building national visibility through its association with Shahid Kapoor and Mira Rajput Kapoor, who front the brand’s ‘Khushi Ke Har Pal’ campaign as brand ambassadors.
This dual approach by most brands, whether new or legacy, across categories highlights a clear division of roles. It is only after these layers are understood that the question of ROI begins to take shape. Because what is being measured is not uniform; the value delivered by each depends on its role in the funnel. While celebrity campaigns command larger, high-impact investments and influencers operate as always-on layers driving engagement and action, how are brands really comparing returns across these two very different systems?
To understand the ROI, it helps to first decode how investments themselves have shifted. Over the last few years, brands have moved from heavy celebrity-skewed spends to a more balanced allocation. “Over the last three to five years, this has led to a clear redistribution of budgets rather than a replacement.Where brands earlier leaned 70–80% towards celebrities, today, the mix is closer to 50–60% celebrity and 40–50% influencer, with influencer investments becoming more always-on and closely tied to business outcomes,” says Simantini Ghosh, SVP – Sports & Entertainment, Branded Entertainment & Influencer Marketing at dentsu India. The shift, however, is not simply about moving budgets, but about redistributing roles across the funnel.
The budget allocation depends on four key factors—the campaign objective, platform dynamics, audience type, and whether the brand is solving for scale or depth, states Ghosh. For high-impact moments like the IPL or major launches, brands such as My11Circle and Thums Up lean on celebrities like Shah Rukh Khan and Allu Arjun for scale, before shifting to influencer ecosystems to sustain engagement and drive action.
Sayak Mukherjee, Founder and Director, Creatorcult points out, “Over the last few years, influencer marketing has moved from an experimental line item to a structured part of media planning. India’s influencer marketing industry was estimated at `3,600 crore in 2024 and was projected to grow 25% in 2025. At the same time, celebrity-endorsed TV ad volumes fell 22% in 2025 according to TAM AdEx, which clearly signals a rebalancing rather than a complete replacement.”
And honestly, why not? From a performance lens, influencers outperform celebrities on cost efficiency, engagement depth, and conversion intent, especially in digital-first categories. Mukherjee notes that nano and micro creators deliver 2% to 6% engagement, while macro creators and celebrity accounts see lower engagement due to broader, less intent-driven audiences. He adds that influencer-led campaigns perform better across CPV, CPC, and assisted conversions, driven by stronger audience-brand fit and more native formats. Celebrities still lead on instant scale, fame transfer, and mass recall, but influencers dominate on measurability and efficiency per rupee spent.
Nazneen Joshi, Senior Vice President – Business & Strategy (West), RepIndia enhances the point with her perspective, “From a performance lens, the comparison between influencers and celebrities is no longer binary, it’s about role clarity within the funnel. Influencers, especially micro and mid-tier creators, consistently outperform celebrities on engagement, while also delivering stronger efficiency across cost and conversion metrics.”
What that performance advantage looks like in practice is sharply visible in the data. Influencers, particularly nano and micro creators, deliver engagement rates in the range of 3% to 8%, compared to just 0.2% to 1% for celebrity accounts, translating into nearly 5–10x higher engagement per impression. This gap extends into cost efficiency as well, where influencer campaigns operate at a cost per engagement of `0.50 to `3, which is significantly lower than the `5 to `25 range typically associated with celebrity-led efforts.
The divergence becomes even more pronounced at the conversion stage. Influencer-led campaigns tend to see conversion rates of 1% to 5%, alongside customer acquisition costs that are 20–40% lower, driven by tighter audience alignment and more contextual, platform-native storytelling. In contrast, celebrity campaigns rarely cross sub-1% conversion when measured directly, relying instead on broader indicators such as search lift, recall, and top-of-funnel demand.
A strong example comes from a campaign highlighted by Mukherjee, where a single macro creator collaboration for a Tira Beauty launch, with an investment of around `2.8 lakh, drove over `18 lakh in weekend sales for a newly introduced imported skincare brand. Similarly, when Nykaa launches a new line, its micro-beauty creators deliver higher conversion lift and longer content lifespan—sometimes up to 14 days—compared to a celebrity-led post that peaks within 48 hours. What stands out is not scale of views, but precision of audience fit and timing, showing how influencer marketing can outperform celebrity-led campaigns when relevance and context align tightly.
Taken together, the data builds a strong case for influencer-led ecosystems as performance drivers, offering not just higher engagement, but clearer attribution, stronger efficiency, and more direct impact on business outcomes. And yet, as the story unfolds, this is only one side of the equation.
At Plum BodyLovin’, a D2C brand that has largely built itself on influencer-led growth, the role of celebrities begins to emerge in a very different way. “When we work with highly recognisable celebrities, there is often a spillover effect where early interest begins to emerge from international markets, even without active distribution,” says Stuti Sethi, Brand Lead, Plum BodyLovin’. She adds that once a product has built baseline awareness, celebrities become powerful drivers of scale, particularly when they are culturally relevant or in high-visibility phases, helping put the brand on the map in ways that go beyond immediate, trackable metrics.
At the same time, she does not discount the role of influencers. For Sethi, the impact of creator-led campaigns depends heavily on who the influencer is and what role they are playing. Rather than treating influencers as a single, uniform channel, she points to a spectrum, where some drive awareness and cultural relevance, others deepen trust and consideration, and a few are directly linked to conversion outcomes.
“From a media planning standpoint, celebrities are not interchangeable with influencers. Their value lies in building scale, salience, trust transfer, and brand stature—often creating impact that goes beyond immediately attributable metrics,” says Prachi Narayan, Managing Partner at Havas Play. What she points to is a fundamentally different kind of return, one that is less linear, but often more enduring, shaping long-term memory structures and brand familiarity. She adds that a well-chosen celebrity can significantly compress time for a brand, accelerating familiarity in ways few other assets can match.
This is reflected in how larger and legacy brands continue to structure their spends, often leaning on celebrities when the objective is mass awareness, fame, and trust at scale. Celebrity-led campaigns remain central to high-impact moments, particularly across television and large-format media where the need is not just visibility, but rapid, widespread brand imprint.
When viewed across categories, that distinction becomes sharper. “The landscape is split by the consideration threshold. Digital-first and D2C players are almost entirely influencer-led because they rely on social proof and quick-commerce triggers, while legacy brands continue to lean on celebrities to signal institutional trust and scale,” says Ruchira More, Vice President – Media & Analytics–Hypothesis, Only Much Louder.
At Kora, a premium apparel brand, celebrity associations have historically been organic rather than transactional, “For 15 years, celebrities came to us first as clients for film wardrobes, milestone moments, and private celebrations that never made it to press releases. That organic credibility came first,” say Nilesh Chhadva and Mitesh Sumbad, Founders of Kora. Over the past few years, the brand has deepened these associations with a select set of faces, using celebrities not for scale alone but to reinforce stature and cultural relevance, which is critical in a category where aspiration drives decisions.
The distinction between celebrities and influencers is reflected in how value is measured. Campaigns like the Carnival collection drove omnichannel engagement, and the brand’s 15-year anniversary initiative reached over 15 million accounts, largely beyond its 153K Instagram base. Going forward, while celebrities continue to anchor cultural relevance, the brand is placing greater emphasis on authentic, patron-led storytelling through influencers. “After 15 years, KORA doesn’t need to shout. It needs to resonate,” the founders add.
When Celebrities Behave Like Creators, And Creators Like Celebrities
If the story so far has treated celebrities and influencers as operating in distinct roles, that separation is already beginning to blur. “The roles were earlier very clearly defined—celebrities for awareness and influencers for engagement and conversion. But what we are now seeing is convergence happening in both directions,” says Shivangi Kothari, Head of Paid Media, Agency09. She points out that celebrities are no longer confined to traditional formats and are increasingly adapting to content-native platforms, while creators are evolving into long-term brand storytellers rather than one-off amplifiers.
This trend is already visible in how creators are crossing into mainstream cultural spaces. Digital-first voices like Prajakta Koli have successfully transitioned into Bollywood, taking on roles traditionally occupied by celebrities. At the same time, celebrities such as Farah Khan, Shraddha Kapoor and Kriti Sanon are increasingly showing up in digital-first formats like reels, collaborations, and creator-style content to stay relevant within platform ecosystems.
Hence, the term ‘creator’ itself now spans a broad spectrum. While names like Prajakta Koli, Bhuvan Bam and Aashish Chanchlani are creators by origin, they have evolved into macro creators with mass reach, often placing them in a similar consideration set as celebrities for brands. This is where nano and micro creators stand apart.
Joshi highlights that nano and micro creators often deliver 3–5x better CPE than macro creators. Macro creators may still be efficient on CPM (reach) but not on conversion. Ruchira states that while nano influencers achieve a 7% conversion-to-sale metric, more than doubling the 3% benchmark set by macro influencers, an engaged follower of a smaller creator is quantifiably more likely to actually buy. Similarly, Mukherjee notes that macro creators and celebrity accounts often record lower engagement because their audiences are much broader and less intent-driven.
Therefore, as the ecosystem evolves, the question is no longer about choosing between celebrities and influencers, but about how both are integrated within a full-funnel system. Ghosh points out that the shift is less about replacement and more about redistribution of roles, where celebrities create high-impact entry points, and influencer ecosystems sustain engagement and drive action over time. In this model, ROI is not measured in isolation, but across the system as a whole.
What is emerging, then, is a more structured approach. Influencer ecosystems operate as always-on layers, while celebrity investments are deployed more selectively around high-impact moments. As marketing budgets come under greater scrutiny, brands are under increasing pressure to justify every rupee spent, making ROI a far more critical metric than reach alone. Celebrity endorsements continue to command premium investments, while influencer marketing demands sustained spending over time. So, when the goal is maximum return on investment, are brands paying for fame, or paying for outcomes?
