As consumer brands firm up plans for Diwali 2026, creator marketing is operating at a scale that looks very different from 2020. Budgets are larger, creator portfolios are broader, and the channel is now expected to shape salience, consideration and commerce. Yet many teams are still making decisions with older logic: follower counts, engagement rates, broad creator categories and familiar names.
Praanesh Bhuvaneswar, cofounder and CEO of creator intelligence platform Qoruz, argues that these signals are not bad, but they are no longer enough. In a new ETBrandEquity analysis, he makes the case for a role-first creator strategy ahead of the festive season.
Stop asking "which creators" first
The familiar question, "Which creators should we work with?" is increasingly the wrong starting point. Bhuvaneswar suggests the sharper question is: "What role do we need creators to play in the business objective?"
"The strategic question is not creator size, but creator role," Bhuvaneswar writes. A celebrity, a category expert, a regional voice and a niche creator can all deliver value, but not for the same purpose. A brand chasing national salience needs a different portfolio from one trying to build specialist credibility or enter a new geography. Creator size should be the outcome of the objective, not the starting philosophy.
Context is the missing layer
The industry has been moving from measuring creators to understanding context. Audience geography, follower authenticity, engagement rates and average views answer a first-order question: is this audience real, and does this creator perform? The harder question is why an audience pays attention to a creator. Legacy metrics were not designed to answer that.
Bhuvaneswar points to creator Madan Gowri as an example. On standard performance measures, Gowri shows scale, healthy engagement and consistent reach. But his connection with viewers sits in a specific context: social issues, local stories, personal observations and community conversations. Place the right idea in that environment, and the creator can be highly effective. Force a hard-sell message outside audience expectations, and the result can be very different. The easy conclusion is that the creator did not perform. The better question, he says, is whether the creator was asked to play the right role.
Festive scale tests decision quality
Festive seasons put manual decision-making under stress. Large consumer businesses may need to evaluate dozens or hundreds of creators across categories, languages and geographies in a matter of weeks. Discovery is no longer the main problem; keeping context while making many decisions is.
Technology cannot predict which piece of content will succeed, and it should not replace human judgement. But there is a difference between creative uncertainty and avoidable uncertainty. Good intelligence does not eliminate experimentation; it makes experimentation more informed.
A practical checklist for the festive planning window looks like this:
- Define the business role before creating a creator shortlist.
- Assess audience trust and content context, not just reach and engagement.
- Review every activation for learning, not just output and spend.
Turn campaign learning into memory
By its fourth serious festive season, a brand should know considerably more than it did during its first. Every activation should strengthen understanding of which creator archetypes work, which audiences respond, which regions behave differently, and which creator-brand combinations produce stronger outcomes. That learning should not disappear once the festive quarter ends; it should become institutional knowledge.
Diwali 2026 does not require brands to discard what worked in 2020. It requires them to build on it.
Source: ETBrandEquity.com
