Nine days of Navratri are not one Diwali spot
Festive creator marketing is not failing because of reach. It is failing because brands compress nine days of Navratri into a single Diwali-style spot buy and invite regional creators only at the final step. That leaves campaigns feeling translated rather than made for the market.
Shivashish Tarkas of The InterMentalist puts the opportunity in numbers: “A multi-day festival like Navratri offers brands a much wider window of opportunity to promote themselves.” Every day can carry a new creative angle, he argues.
Tushnik Thakur of AnyMind Group India and Venkat Mallik of J7 make the same point from different ends. Thakur warns that not every festival should be treated as Diwali. Mallik says local creators inside a Garba community or a Pune Ganesh pandal lend authenticity that a national celebrity cannot easily copy.
Diwali falls on November 8 this year, about three weeks later than last year. That creates a longer runway and also a temptation to start too early and burn out before conversion.
GRWM works because the routine is already happening
Get Ready With Me is the one format all three experts bet on. It works because it meets shoppers at the moment they are deciding what to wear, how to look and what to buy. Mallik frames the buyer question as: “What do I wear tonight and where can I get it from and how fast?”
For brands, the strength of GRWM is that the product becomes part of the creator’s story. A skincare, fashion or jewellery brand can buy a slot in a routine and make it shoppable through a link, code or quick-commerce button.
Proof beyond views: codes, saves and cluster lifts
Small creators do not automatically drive more sales. Views alone show a piece was seen, not trusted. Thakur notes that tracked links, creator-specific codes, affiliate models and commerce integrations can now attribute clicks and conversions.
Mallik adds two practical filters. Use unique codes to track sales, and treat saves and shares as stronger intent signals than likes. The sharper method is geo-cluster sales lift, which captures buyers who discover through a creator but purchase later through another channel.
- Brief regional creators at the ideation stage, not as translators.
- Phase festive content: mood early, gifting in the middle, conversion in the final ten days.
- Use codes, saves, shares and cluster-level lifts instead of vanity views.
- Treat nano creators as amplification, not the lead, and cost the ops honestly.
TV, quick commerce and the last mile
The discussion is not about moving money from TV and OOH to quick commerce. Mallik says TV remains a mass awareness generator, while quick commerce plays a complementary lower-funnel role in snacks, personal products and festive gifting. For longer purchase journeys such as cars or durables, quick commerce matters less.
Real quick-commerce checkouts happen when three things line up: availability city by city, a simple offer, and a direct path from content to the listing. Swiggy’s presence on JioHotstar during live cricket collapses the gap between “I saw it” and “I bought it,” particularly for FMCG brands.
What to do before the rush
The repeated failure is starting late. Booking, briefing and approving hundreds of small creators takes time, and Mallik warns that planning ahead is critical to buying media smartly. Tarkas cautions against overdoing promotions, and Thakur says exclusivity belongs in the contract, not the comments.
The real test is whether a festive plan carries a local insight and a business outcome before the brief goes out. If it does not, brands are just buying more content to cover a weak offer that wakes up late.
Source: MediaNews4U
