India’s live events market crossed Rs 13,000 crore in 2025, according to a joint report by BookMyShow and EY-Parthenon. As audiences increasingly seek participation over passive consumption, brands are moving beyond sponsorships to create cultural platforms of their own.
Myntra’s Glamfest Tour, executed with youth experience agency Spectal, reflects this shift. Spanning 35+ cities over 90 days, the platform engaged more than one million students through fashion, music, creator culture and campus experiences—turning brand engagement into a large-scale cultural property.
This move is part of a broader shift across categories. Havells India’s ‘mYOUsic’ with WPP Media, H&M India’s partnership with HYBE India for ‘Icons in the Making’, and Kia India’s collaboration with HYBE India to launch a nationwide music audition aimed at discovering and developing a global girl group reflect how brands are moving from campaign-led visibility to building long-term cultural ecosystems.
What’s driving the shift
India is the second-largest music streaming market in the world by volume, with over 471 billion streams projected by December 2025 as per the 2025 Luminate Music Report. Audiences are spending time with music in ways and volumes that television advertising simply cannot access, and brands are following that attention.
But the more interesting driver is structural. As Rajni Daswani, Chief Growth Officer at SoCheers, puts it, the shift is about a fundamental realignment of trust. Traditional campaigns interrupted audiences with messages. Cultural platforms offer something audiences choose to seek out. “A 30-second spot gets forgotten, but a music collaboration or festival experience stays with audiences for years,” she says. Streaming has made this economically viable by removing the gatekeeping that TV networks once held over distribution.
Rohit Bhasin, President - Head of Affluent, NRI, and Business Banking and Chief Marketing Officer, Kotak Mahindra Bank, sees the shift as a response to changing consumer expectations. “Today’s consumers are looking for seamless, value-driven experiences that integrate into their daily lives, rather than one-way brand monologues,” he says, arguing that long-term cultural platforms help brands build “lasting relevance by fostering ongoing conversations.”
The EY survey of over 7,450 event attendees found that 78 per cent of consumers prefer experiential interactions with brands over conventional advertising, and 55 per cent reported higher purchase intent after engaging with a brand at a live event. What’s changing isn’t just consumer preferences but the mechanisms through which brands can act on them.
Owning the stage
HYBE India’s partnerships reflect a broader focus on building infrastructure rather than simply promoting artists. The company’s approach centres on artist development, distribution, and community-building. Dahae Lee, COO of HYBE India, shares, “Through the H&M partnership, we are building a bridge between music, fashion, and self-expression, providing a platform for artists to grow, connect, and step confidently toward a global stage.”
A comparable long-term approach can be seen with NEXA Music, launched by Maruti Suzuki in 2019 as a platform for independent music. By its third season, the initiative had expanded into regional languages and placed artists at festivals such as Sunburn Goa and Lollapalooza India, while also helping artists gain visibility on streaming platforms.
Similarly, OPPO India’s #SuperFestivalMoment uses hyperlocal creators to document regional celebrations across the country, from Lathmar Holi to Bihu and Puthandu. “Traditional advertising builds scale, but culture today is far more participative and community-driven. Our role is not to dictate the narrative, but to enable creators to tell stories that feel authentic to their communities,” says Goldee Patnaik, Head of Communications, OPPO India.
The same thinking extends beyond entertainment-led brands. Shweta Dalal - Marketing Director, NIVEA India, believes brands need to become “culturally fluent” rather than simply advertise around cultural moments. “Brands shouldn’t chase culture. They should contribute to it in a way that’s authentic to who they are. A campaign can build awareness for a few weeks, but consistently showing up in the right cultural moments builds familiarity, trust and relevance over time,” she says.
Does it pay off?
Kshitij Kulkarni, a marketing and revenue strategist, draws a clear line between what performance marketing delivers and what cultural platforms build over time. “For brands like Standard Chartered, sponsoring an event like the Mumbai Marathon for 14 consecutive years isn’t a short-term sales decision. There’s a longer game at play and brands that don’t play it eventually fade, no matter how tight their funnel is,” shares Kulkarni.
Sanjay Trehan, Digital Media Advisor, believes the long-term value of cultural platforms lies in the communities they create around brands. “Consumers are the real custodians of the brand, and engaged and empowered consumers add to the brand’s intrinsic value. Evaluate by the quality of conversations, how engaged is the community, how invested are they in the brand’s success,” he says, adding that sustained community engagement eventually creates long-term ROI and a virtuous cycle for the brand.
However, poorly executed cultural IPs become expensive vanity projects, sometimes consuming a significant chunk of annual marketing budgets with no guarantee of proportionate return. Shehbaz Memon, Head of Digital Marketing and PR at Eleganz Interiors, identifies consistency and authenticity as the two most common failure points. “Audiences today are highly perceptive. They can immediately sense whether an initiative is genuinely value-driven or simply a marketing exercise.” Sustaining relevance over time also requires continuous evolution, he argues, because culture itself never stays still.
What it’s doing to agencies
The agency model was built for campaigns, and campaigns have beginnings and ends. Cultural platforms don’t. Daswani notes, “Brands now ask agencies to build properties that sustain themselves over years, pushing them toward functioning like production houses.” The brief extends well beyond creative ideation into artist management, community operations, and platform strategy, disciplines that most traditional agencies aren’t built for.
Masuma Siddique, Founder of InkCraft Communications, sees this as a broader evolution in how communication strategy is conceived. “Agencies are increasingly looking at how brands can go beyond press visibility and create deeper narrative ecosystems through thought leadership, creator collaborations, experiences, events, partnerships, and community-led storytelling,” she says. But she adds a note of caution, “The decision to build a cultural IP depends on the brand’s stage, audience, budget, category, and long-term ambition.” A brand that isn’t prepared to sustain a platform over the years is better off not starting one. Inconsistency, she argues, does more damage to brand perception than a well-executed campaign-only strategy.
Building for the long term
Traditional campaigns are not going away, but the brands making the most noise right now are the ones that have stopped treating culture as a backdrop for advertising and started treating it as something they are genuinely responsible for building. The shift is visible across categories such as music, live events, creator ecosystems, and regional storytelling. What ties them together is not format but intent.
Attention is easy to buy. Belonging is not. The brands that understand the difference, and are willing to invest accordingly, season after season, without the promise of an immediate return, are the ones slowly building something that a campaign alone never could: a place in culture that audiences didn’t just notice but kept coming back to.
