The long-term growth potential for advertising is very high: Sam Balsara

Indian AdEx grew just 9% in 2024 and it's the slowest since 2017. The global AdEx, on the other hand, is crossing around 1 trillion dollars, states the Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2025, unveiled on Wednesday. So, with digital maturing and traditional media stagnating, will India’s ad market lose its long-held growth advantage? The answer is no, says the Chairman of Madison World, Sam Balsara.

“This is because we have seen from a study of different markets around the world that advertising growth generally comes in phases. The last one and a half years have been a bit slow for India, but it won't always be like that. Also, our budget this year has triggered a signal to tell advertisers that things are looking up,” Balsara explained during an interaction with e4m.

Advertisers are thinking a lot more inputs to spur production and consumption and this will make things change pretty soon. Also, the fundamentals of the Indian economy are reasonably strong and it's very clear that the longterm growth potential for advertising is very high.

Further with traditional advertising growing by just about 6%, and digital experiencing slowed growth as compared to its peak years, Balsara believes this tells a lot about the changing mindset of advertisers. He stressed that over the last one and a half years, advertisers, for possibly the right reasons, have become a lot more cautious. And they're not just cautious about advertising investments, they are cautious about spending their money.

“But, I think this budget has taken a few steps in the right direction and that should overall help the cause of advertising,” he said.

Another key takeaway from the Pitch-Madison Report was that TV AdEx barely grew at 5%, losing further ground to digital. Additionally, the number of advertisers on television also came down from 11,127 to 8,653, making it a dramatic 23% drop in the number.

On this Balsara mentioned, “The fact is that digital is now the dominant media and it has been so for the last three years. Even by our estimates, which are very conservative in the sense that they don't take into account almost 50% of the MSME market. So, it's unlikely to kind of reverse back in favor of television, those days are gone by.”

However, he highlighted the point to note for many advertisers, especially the newer ones, is that the role of performance advertising and branding is very different, be it digital or TV advertising. “The role of performance is actually to push advertising sales to the customer. Whereas, on the other hand, advertising is to create desire for the brand and the two roles are different. When a brand has just launched, they need a little push to help grow their base of sales. But once the sales take off, they need to support it with advertising because that is the long term way of building a brand,” he explained.

Coming to print, which still holds 19% AdEx and has shown great resilience as compared to its counterparts, Balsara is of the opinion that print has a lot going for it with about 1,73,460 advertisers still on the medium. He noted, “Especially in India, there are several diehard print favourites who genuinely believe that print works. Take a large retailer like Titan, who very heavily uses print. Likewise there are many retailers, who believe in the power of print.” Next, on whether CTV and influencer marketing will become the new prime time advertising platforms, Balsara explained, “India is now a reasonably attractive market for many mid-premium to premium consumer products, like hotels, hospitality, premium cars. For those brands, CTV is a godsend medium.”

Advertisers can use CTV intensively, in a focused way, and hope to reach their core target audience wonderfully well. Although in terms of cost per reach, the cost may be high, but in terms of getting the job done, they are exactly what the doctor prescribed. Hence as per him, CTV, influencer marketing, social media are all expected to do reasonably well in the coming years.

The report also shed light on political advertising that contributed Rs 3,300 to 3,500 crore to AdEx in 2024. There are fewer elections in 2025 but this is unlikely to impact the overall ad spend, said Balsara because political advertising doesn’t account for only election ads but overall government advertising.

“Government advertising is the major sector because today, every state government is competing with each other to talk about their achievements and also to attract investments. So, irrespective of where the elections are held, whether they are held or not, government advertising is going to increase,” he mentioned.

Sharing his biggest learning from tracking AdEx so closely, Balsara said, “Amongst the main media of TV, print and digital, I would say television until recently has had a relatively stable run with its market share, having come down from a high of 42.1% in 2010 to 31.9% in 2024. Print, on the other hand, has had the most rocky run, because its share has gone down from 41.9% to 18.8% today in the last 15 years.”

“And finally, digital has of course had a booming run. It grew from as low as 4.4% share to a dramatic 41.9%.”

To download the full Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2025, click here:
https://e4mevents.com/pitch-madison-advertising-report-2025/download-report#downloadReport