Indian marketers are positioning live events, sports sponsorships and creator partnerships as their fastest-growing budget lines. Nielsen’s 2026 Annual Marketing Report finds that 94% of Indian marketers plan to raise sponsorship and event media spending over the next 12 to 24 months — the highest share across the six markets surveyed.
The report, Top 10 Signals Shaping Marketing Budgets in 2026, draws on a survey of 1,200 marketers across six markets and tracks budget intentions, creator partnerships, sports sponsorships and AI adoption.
India leads the live-events spending race
India’s 94% intention figure is well ahead of the US at 75% and Italy at 67%. That gap matters because live events are no longer a standalone PR line; they are becoming a primary channel for audience building around sports, entertainment and cultural moments.
Sports and creators are doing the heavy lifting
Sports sponsorships are increasingly treated as a market-entry tool. Around 61% of Indian marketers describe them as a testing ground for reaching new audiences and markets, compared with 54% in the US and 32% in Germany.
Creator-led marketing is even more pronounced. Around 81% of Indian marketers rate influencer and creator content as very or extremely effective — 27 percentage points above the 54% recorded among US marketers, the widest gap across the channels measured.
The gap: ROI measurement is behind
For all the spending intent, measurement has not caught up. Only 42% of Indian marketers measure ROI holistically across traditional and digital media, the lowest among the markets discussed in the report. The US is at 48% and Italy at 53%.
This creates a practical risk: budgets are moving faster than the frameworks needed to defend them.
What marketing teams should do
- Define unified metrics before the next live-event or sponsorship cycle, not after.
- Track creator and event performance alongside traditional and digital media in one view.
- Make measurement accuracy a buying criterion for any martech or analytics tool.
Why this matters for Indian marketers
India’s over-indexing on creators and live events gives brands a growth lever, but only if returns can be shown. The report points to unified measurement across linear TV, streaming, sponsorships, creator partnerships and live events as the critical capability for evaluating performance and making sharper investment decisions.
Elsewhere in the report, AI is becoming a default layer in measurement and analytics. In the US, 75% of marketers already use AI for this job, though only 34% fully trust AI recommendations and act on them independently. That confidence gap should shape how Indian teams adopt AI in measurement — as a supporting layer, not a replacement for accountability.
Across the report, the broader theme is accountability. Search was the channel with the largest jump in perceived effectiveness among US marketers, rising from 65% to 73%. Accuracy is the top requirement for measurement technology for 44% of US marketers, while 8% of US marketers do not measure ROI at all on sponsorship, influencer and creator spending. For Indian teams, those signals reinforce the same conclusion: spend can move fast, but credibility comes from proof.
Source: MediaNews4U
