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There is a moment in the growth trajectory of almost every serious Indian e-commerce brand when the numbers start telling an uncomfortable story. Customer acquisition costs are rising. Return on ad spend from Meta and Google is declining. The brand is spending more to acquire customers who look increasingly similar to the ones it already has. The performance marketing playbook — the one that built the business to this point — is starting to lose its reliability.
Most brands respond to this in predictable ways. They test new digital channels. They refine their audience targeting. They experiment with creative. They hire a better performance agency. Some of these things help, for a while. But the underlying problem does not go away, because the underlying problem is not a tactics problem. It is a brand problem.
Performance marketing is extraordinarily good at capturing demand that already exists. It is poor at creating new demand. And at some point in the growth of any e-commerce brand, the pool of people who are already aware of the brand and predisposed to consider it becomes a constraint on how much further performance marketing can take the business. To grow beyond that constraint, the brand needs to reach people who do not yet know it exists — and persuade them, over time, that it is worth considering.
That is what brand advertising does. And in India, the most powerful brand advertising channel available to any marketer — by reach, by trust, by cultural impact — is still television.
This post is not an argument for abandoning digital. It is an argument for understanding what television does that digital cannot, why that matters specifically for Indian e-commerce brands, and how to think about integrating television into a media strategy that has been built almost entirely around performance channels.
The Performance Marketing Ceiling — And Why Every E-Commerce Brand Hits It
Performance marketing — paid search, paid social, affiliate, retargeting — is built on a fundamentally acquisitive logic. You find people who are already in the market for what you sell, or who have already shown some signal of interest, and you convert them. The efficiency of this approach is real and measurable, which is why e-commerce brands have built their marketing operations almost entirely around it.
But there is a structural limitation baked into this approach that becomes more apparent as a brand scales. Performance marketing fishes from a pool of existing demand. The size of that pool is determined by how many people already know the brand exists and already have some positive disposition toward it. If the brand has not invested in building awareness and preference beyond the audience that performance channels can already reach, the pool of convertible consumers stays roughly constant — meaning that as competition for that pool intensifies, acquisition costs rise and returns fall.
The rising cost of performance marketing in India
This is not a theoretical concern. It is playing out in the data of almost every mature Indian e-commerce brand right now. Meta CPMs in major consumer categories have risen substantially over the last three years as more brands compete for the same inventory. Google CPC benchmarks in competitive categories — consumer electronics, fashion, FMCG, financial services — have followed the same trajectory. The cost of acquiring a customer through performance channels alone is higher than it was, and the trend is not reversing.
Brands that have invested in brand building — creating genuine awareness and positive perception among consumers who were not yet active buyers — consistently report lower performance marketing costs over time. The explanation is straightforward: when more people know and trust the brand, a higher proportion of the population is receptive to performance advertising at any given moment. The performance channels still do the converting, but they are converting from a larger and warmer pool.
The new customer acquisition problem
Performance marketing is also, by its nature, better at retaining and re-engaging existing customers and brand-aware prospects than it is at genuinely acquiring new ones. The consumer who sees a retargeting ad for a brand they have visited before is not the same as the consumer who encounters the brand for the first time. Retargeting converts consideration into action. Brand advertising creates the consideration in the first place.
E-commerce brands that rely entirely on performance channels are, in many cases, spending significant budget re-engaging people who would have converted anyway — at the expense of investment in reaching the much larger population of consumers who have never encountered the brand and are not addressable through any performance channel at any price.
Performance marketing captures demand. Television creates it. E-commerce brands that only do the former eventually run out of the latter.
What Television Actually Does That Digital Cannot
The case for television is not nostalgia. It is a clear-eyed assessment of what the medium does that no digital channel replicates at comparable scale, cost, or emotional impact.
Reach that no digital channel matches
India has approximately 210 million television households. BARC data consistently shows that television reaches well over 800 million individuals weekly — across age groups, income levels, regions, and languages. No single digital platform comes close to this reach in the Indian market. Even combining Meta, YouTube, and Google Search does not reach the breadth of population that television addresses, particularly outside the major metros and among consumers over 35.
For an e-commerce brand trying to grow beyond the urban, digitally-active consumer base that performance channels naturally address, television is the only medium that can cost-effectively build awareness at genuine national scale. The cost-per-reach of a well-planned television campaign, when calculated across the full population reached, is typically lower than the equivalent digital reach at comparable demographic breadth.
Passive reach — finding consumers before they know they need you
Digital advertising is predominantly interruptive — it finds consumers while they are doing something else, and competes for attention with the content they actually came to consume. Television viewing, by contrast, involves a degree of passive receptivity that is genuinely different. A consumer watching television in the evening is in a state of relaxed attention that is more conducive to brand impression formation than the task-oriented mindset of someone scrolling through Instagram or searching on Google.
This passive reach is what allows television to plant brand seeds in the minds of consumers who are not yet in-market — who have no immediate purchase intention and would never engage with a performance ad because they are not looking for anything right now. When that same consumer enters the market weeks or months later, the brand that has established a prior impression has a significant advantage over the one that relies entirely on in-market targeting to introduce itself.
Emotional resonance at scale
A 30-second television commercial, viewed on a large screen with audio, in a relaxed environment, has the capacity to deliver emotional impact that no digital format consistently matches. The combination of sight, sound, movement, and narrative — in a context where the consumer is giving their attention to the screen — creates conditions for genuine brand emotion building that short-form digital video, mobile-viewed and sound-off by default, rarely replicates.
Brand emotion matters commercially. Consumers who have a positive emotional association with a brand are more likely to choose it at the point of purchase, more likely to pay a slight price premium for it, and more likely to return to it after a negative experience. Building that emotional connection requires creative work and media placement that can deliver the full quality of the brand’s communication — and television, at its best, does that better than any other mass medium.
The credibility signal
There is a less discussed but commercially significant dimension to television advertising: the trust signal it sends. In the Indian consumer’s mental model, brands that advertise on television are real brands. They have invested seriously. They are here for the long term. The implicit credibility that television advertising confers on a brand — particularly among consumers in tier-2 and tier-3 cities, and among older demographics — is a genuine commercial asset that is very difficult to build through digital channels alone.
For e-commerce brands in categories where consumer trust is a purchasing barrier — financial services, healthcare products, high-value durables, food and nutrition — this credibility signal can be the difference between a consumer who considers the brand and one who does not, regardless of how efficiently the performance marketing is run.
The Trust Problem in Indian E-Commerce
Trust is not an abstract brand value in the context of Indian e-commerce. It is a concrete commercial barrier that affects conversion rates, repeat purchase rates, and the willingness of new consumers to transact with brands they have not encountered before.
The Indian consumer’s relationship with e-commerce has matured significantly over the last decade, but trust remains a meaningful purchase barrier — particularly for first-time buyers in a category, for consumers in smaller cities and towns with less e-commerce experience, and for higher-value purchases where the perceived risk of a bad transaction is significant. Reviews help. Easy returns help. But nothing establishes trust at population scale as efficiently as sustained, quality advertising on a trusted medium.
The D2C trust gap
Direct-to-consumer e-commerce brands face a specific version of this challenge. Unlike brands distributed through established retailers — whose credibility is borrowed from the retail environment — D2C brands must establish their own credibility from scratch with every new consumer they try to acquire. The performance marketing channel can be efficient at finding and converting consumers who are already willing to trust a new brand. But it reaches a ceiling with the much larger population of consumers who need more evidence of legitimacy before they are willing to transact.
Television advertising, consistently sustained over time, provides that evidence. A brand that has been on television for two or three seasons has, in the Indian consumer’s perception, demonstrated that it is serious, established, and trustworthy — even if the consumer has never personally purchased from it. That prior trust makes the performance marketing conversion significantly easier when the consumer eventually encounters the brand through a digital channel.
Category trust in high-consideration purchases
In categories where the purchase decision is high-consideration — consumer electronics, furniture, jewellery, insurance, health supplements, financial products — the trust barrier is higher and the role of brand advertising correspondingly more important. Consumers making a significant financial commitment, or trusting a brand with their health or financial security, rely on brand signals to reduce perceived risk. Television advertising is one of the strongest such signals available.
E-commerce brands in these categories that rely exclusively on performance marketing consistently find that their conversion rates are limited by trust rather than by awareness or intent. Addressing that trust barrier with brand advertising — and television specifically — typically produces a measurable improvement in conversion rates from digital channels, because the consumer arriving at the landing page is already positively disposed rather than encountering the brand with no prior context.
How Television Changes the Economics of Digital Spend
One of the most common objections to television investment from e-commerce brands is that the impact is hard to attribute — unlike a Google click or a Meta conversion, a television spot does not produce a direct, trackable response. This is true. But it misunderstands how television actually affects performance marketing economics.
The brand search uplift effect
One of the most consistent and measurable effects of television advertising on e-commerce performance is the uplift in branded search queries. When a television commercial airs in significant weight, brand searches on Google — people searching for the brand by name — increase. Sometimes dramatically, during and immediately after a flight. This uplift is directly measurable in Google Search Console and in Search Impression Share data.
This branded search traffic converts at dramatically higher rates than generic category traffic — because consumers searching for a brand by name are already aware of and interested in it. The cost of acquiring these consumers through performance marketing is low, because branded keyword CPCs are typically a fraction of competitive category CPCs. Television effectively pre-qualifies a large population of consumers and then delivers them, self-selected, to the brand’s performance marketing funnel at high conversion potential and low marginal cost.
Lower CPAs across performance channels
Brands running integrated television and digital campaigns consistently report lower cost-per-acquisition across performance channels compared to periods when television is not running. The mechanism is intuitive: a consumer who has seen a television commercial for a brand and then encounters a retargeting ad, a paid search result, or a social post from that brand is significantly more likely to click and convert than a consumer encountering the brand for the first time through a performance channel.
The television advertising has done the introductory work — establishing awareness, creating a positive first impression, building a baseline of familiarity — that the performance channel would otherwise have to do, at a higher cost per interaction, through repeated exposures. When television handles the awareness phase, performance channels can focus entirely on conversion, where they are most efficient.
The halo effect on organic acquisition
Beyond paid digital channels, television advertising consistently drives uplift in direct traffic — consumers who type the brand’s URL directly into a browser — and in word-of-mouth referrals. When a brand’s television commercial breaks through into cultural visibility, the organic acquisition effect can be substantial. Consumers tell family and friends. The commercial gets discussed. Social sharing of brand content increases. These effects do not appear in a performance marketing attribution model, but they are real, and they contribute to acquisition that has zero marginal cost.
The India Television Landscape: What E-Commerce Brands Need to Understand
Planning television effectively for an e-commerce brand requires understanding the specific structure of Indian television — which channels reach which audiences, how viewing patterns vary across regions and demographics, and where the genuine reach opportunities are versus where the cost is highest relative to the audience delivered.
The reach that national channels provide — and their limitations
The major national Hindi general entertainment channels — Star Plus, Sony Entertainment, Colors, Zee TV — deliver the largest single-channel audiences in Indian television and are the default starting point for most brand advertising campaigns. For e-commerce brands targeting a broad urban and semi-urban Hindi-speaking audience, these channels offer genuine scale and are a reasonable anchor for a national television plan.
Their limitation is cost relative to reach. National GEC inventory is expensive, particularly in prime-time bands. For e-commerce brands with finite budgets, spending the majority of a television allocation on national GEC prime time may deliver impressive headline reach numbers while leaving significant audience segments in regional markets, news channels, and non-prime dayparts under-reached.
Regional television: the e-commerce opportunity most brands miss
India’s regional television landscape — Tamil channels for Tamil Nadu, Telugu channels for Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Marathi channels for Maharashtra, Bengali channels for West Bengal, Kannada channels for Karnataka, and so on — reaches audiences that are often the next frontier for e-commerce growth but are systematically under-addressed by national television plans.
For an e-commerce brand with meaningful or growing sales in South India, Maharashtra, or Bengal, the cost-efficiency of regional television can be dramatically better than national. Regional channel rates are lower. The audience composition is highly relevant to specific geographic markets. And the trust signal of advertising in a consumer’s regional language on a channel they identify with as part of their cultural identity is qualitatively different from seeing an ad on a national Hindi channel.
E-commerce brands whose performance marketing data shows meaningful regional concentration — which is most of them, because Indian e-commerce adoption patterns are not uniformly distributed — should be matching their television investment to the regional distribution of their genuine business opportunity, not simply buying national because it is the default.
News channels and their specific audience
News channels in India — Republic TV, Aaj Tak, NDTV, ABP News, and their regional equivalents — reach a specific audience profile that is commercially important to many e-commerce categories. News viewers in India tend to be more urban, more economically active, and more decision-making-oriented than the general television audience. For e-commerce brands in financial services, business products, premium consumer goods, and technology categories, news channel advertising delivers a demographically precise audience at relatively competitive rates.
News advertising also benefits from heightened viewer engagement — people watching news are typically paying closer attention than passive entertainment viewers — which can improve the impact per exposure of well-crafted brand communications.
Viewing time and daypart strategy
The conventional wisdom in television buying is that prime time — 8pm to 11pm — is the only daypart worth buying for consumer brand advertising. This is partly true in terms of absolute reach, and partly a habit of the industry that does not always reflect the best use of an e-commerce brand’s budget.
For e-commerce brands specifically, daypart strategy deserves more thought. Morning bands, when consumers are getting ready for work and forming the day’s mental agenda, are often relevant for quick-purchase categories. Afternoon bands reach a different audience — homemakers, retired consumers, students — who may be significant in specific categories. And for brands whose purchase trigger is linked to leisure time and evening browsing behaviour, evening non-prime slots that run adjacent to high-reach programmes can deliver audience proximity at materially lower cost than direct prime-time slots.
When E-Commerce Brands Should Be on Television
Not every e-commerce brand is ready for television at every stage of its development. The medium works best when certain conditions are in place, and investing before those conditions exist is unlikely to deliver the returns that justify the cost.
When the performance marketing ceiling is visible in the data
The most reliable signal that television investment is justified is when the performance marketing data shows rising acquisition costs, declining incremental returns from increased spend, and stagnating new customer growth despite consistent digital investment. These are the indicators that the performance-only strategy is approaching its natural ceiling and that brand advertising is needed to widen the addressable funnel.
When the business has the scale to sustain a television presence
Television advertising requires a minimum investment level to be effective. A single burst of spots that runs for two weeks and then disappears may generate short-term brand search uplift, but it will not build the durable brand impression that compounds over time. Effective television brand building requires sustained presence — ideally multiple flights across a calendar year, with enough GRP weight in each flight to build frequency among the target audience.
The investment level required for this varies by channel mix, daypart strategy, and competitive context — but as a general guide, e-commerce brands that cannot sustain a television presence of meaningful weight across at least two or three flights per year are unlikely to build the kind of brand impression that justifies the investment. Getting to that scale is a prerequisite, not an aspiration.
When the product and customer experience can sustain the awareness being built
Television advertising that drives large numbers of new consumers to an e-commerce platform that delivers a poor experience — slow website, difficult navigation, poor delivery experience, weak customer service — will accelerate negative word-of-mouth rather than build brand equity. The awareness created by television will convert to disappointment rather than loyalty.
This is not a reason to delay television indefinitely while pursuing product perfection. But it is a reason to ensure that the fundamental consumer experience is sound before investing significantly in mass reach advertising that will drive large volumes of first-time visitors to the brand.
Seasonal and launch moments
Even for brands that are not yet ready for sustained year-round television presence, there are specific moments where the return on television investment is particularly strong for e-commerce: major sale events, new category or product launches, and festive season campaigns. These are moments when purchase intent across the category is elevated, competitive media investment is high, and the incremental reach of television can meaningfully differentiate a brand’s visibility from competitors who are not present in the medium.
How to Plan a Television Campaign That Works for E-Commerce
Planning television for an e-commerce brand is different from planning it for a traditional FMCG or consumer durables brand. The objectives, the measurement approach, and the integration with digital channels all require specific thinking.
Define the objective clearly before choosing channels
Television can serve multiple objectives — broad awareness, category consideration, brand preference, trust building — and the right channel mix, daypart strategy, and creative approach depend entirely on which objective is primary. A brand trying to reach first-time e-commerce users in tier-2 cities for a category with low current penetration should be planning very differently from one trying to strengthen preference among consumers who already know the category well and are choosing between established competitors.
The clarity of the objective also determines how television investment should be measured — which is the question e-commerce brands find most challenging about the medium.
Integrate the digital plan from the start, not as an afterthought
The most common planning error made by e-commerce brands new to television is treating the television campaign and the digital campaign as separate workstreams that run simultaneously without genuine integration. The television team plans the TV buy. The digital team continues running performance campaigns as they always have. The two plans never speak to each other, and the combined opportunity is lost.
Integrated planning means designing the television and digital components of a campaign as parts of a single system. The television creative seeds the brand message that the digital retargeting reinforces. The digital search campaign is prepared to capture the brand search uplift that television generates. The social media content is aligned with the television narrative. Audience segments in the digital plan are updated to account for the geographic distribution of the television reach.
When this integration happens properly, the combined performance of the campaign is measurably stronger than either channel would deliver alone. The television builds the awareness and trust. The digital channels convert it.
Match creative to the medium — and to the integration
Television creative for an e-commerce brand does not need to look like a DRTV infomercial, with a URL repeated six times and a price point flashing on screen. That approach may generate short-term direct response, but it does very little for brand building and often actively damages brand perception.
The most effective e-commerce television advertising takes the medium seriously as a brand-building platform — telling a story, creating an emotional connection, establishing a brand personality — while ensuring that the brand identity is strongly enough communicated that consumers who later encounter the brand through digital channels make the connection. The goal is not to replace the digital call-to-action with a television one. It is to use television to build the brand equity that makes the digital call-to-action more effective.
The Festive Season: Where Television Becomes Non-Negotiable
If there is one period in the Indian marketing calendar where the case for television investment from e-commerce brands is most compelling, it is the Diwali festive season — the October-November window that drives the highest single concentration of e-commerce purchases in the year for almost every consumer category.
During the festive season, Indian consumers are actively in a purchasing mindset across a range of categories simultaneously. Television viewership increases as families gather. Purchase decisions that have been deferred throughout the year are made. Gift purchases are planned and executed. And the competitive intensity in every digital channel spikes dramatically — CPMs on Meta and Google reach their annual peaks as every brand in every category competes for the same digital inventory.
In this environment, e-commerce brands that are only present in digital channels are competing at maximum cost for audiences who are simultaneously being reached by every other digital advertiser. Brands that have sustained a television presence through the year enter the festive season with existing brand awareness and positive brand associations among a much broader population — and their digital spend in the festive window converts at higher rates because the audience they are reaching already knows and trusts the brand.
The brands that consistently win the festive e-commerce season in India are not the ones that spend the most on digital during the sale period. They are the ones that have spent intelligently on brand building throughout the year — through television and other brand channels — and then activate their digital investment during the sale period from a position of established brand strength.
The festive season is not won in October. It is won in the seven months of brand building that precede it.
Common Objections — and Honest Responses
“Television is too expensive for us”
The absolute cost of a national television campaign is high. But cost-per-reach, when calculated across the genuine audience delivered by a well-planned television buy, is often lower than the equivalent reach cost through digital channels — particularly for broad consumer audiences that extend beyond the digital-active urban segment. The relevant question is not whether television is expensive in absolute terms but whether the cost-per-outcome, when the full funnel effect is accounted for, is competitive with digital alternatives.
Regional television, specifically, is significantly more accessible for mid-sized e-commerce brands than national network prime time. A concentrated regional television buy in a brand’s most important markets can deliver meaningful brand-building impact at budgets that are far below national campaign levels.
“We cannot measure the impact”
Direct attribution of television to e-commerce conversions is genuinely difficult. But this does not mean television impact is unmeasurable — it means it requires different measurement approaches than digital. Brand search uplift during and after television flights is directly measurable. Baseline uplift in website direct traffic is measurable. Brand health metric changes across waves of tracking research are measurable. Marketing Mix Modelling, which estimates the contribution of each channel to overall sales, can quantify television’s impact retrospectively with reasonable reliability.
The expectation that every media channel should produce the same kind of direct, last-click attribution that Google Ads provides is a product of over-reliance on digital measurement frameworks. It is not a reasonable standard to apply to brand advertising — and applying it means systematically under-investing in the channels that build the brand equity that makes all other marketing more effective.
“Our audience is not on television”
This objection is heard most often from brands targeting urban millennials and Gen Z — demographics that are perceived as screen-free or television-averse. The perception is not entirely wrong — younger urban consumers do watch significantly less linear television than older demographics. But the conclusion drawn from it frequently is wrong.
BARC data consistently shows that even among urban consumers aged 18–35, television reaches a significantly broader population than any single digital platform. The reach may be lower than among older demographics, and the viewing occasions fewer — but the population reached is meaningfully larger than the brand’s existing performance marketing audience. For e-commerce brands whose growth requires reaching beyond the already-converted digital audience, even a partial-coverage television strategy can make a material difference.
For brands targeting audiences outside the major metros — where television penetration is higher and digital platform competition less intense — the “our audience isn’t on TV” objection becomes even harder to sustain.
“We tried TV once and it didn’t work”
A single television campaign, run for a short period without integration into the broader media strategy, without sufficient weight to build frequency among the target audience, and without a measurement framework designed to capture television’s actual effects, is unlikely to produce results that are clearly attributable to the investment. This does not mean television does not work. It means that a one-off trial is not an adequate test of a sustained television strategy.
Television’s brand-building effects are cumulative and delayed. A brand that runs a serious, sustained television strategy for twelve to eighteen months — with consistent creative, meaningful weight, and integrated digital planning — and then measures the combined impact on brand metrics, performance marketing efficiency, and total customer acquisition cost will almost always see a different result than a brand that ran a single six-week flight and found it inconclusive.
What Integrated TV and Digital Planning Looks Like in Practice
Describing integration is one thing. Making it concrete is more useful. Here is what a properly integrated television and digital campaign looks like at the planning and execution level.
Before the campaign: The media team plans television reach and frequency targets in the same planning cycle as digital audience targets — not separately. Digital audience segments are updated to create a “TV-exposed” segment based on geographic overlap with the television buy, so that retargeting and performance campaigns can prioritise or adjust bids for consumers in high-TV-weight markets. The creative brief is written to produce television and digital assets that are visually and narratively consistent, so consumers who see both experience reinforcement rather than disconnection.
During the campaign: Brand search campaigns are fully prepared before the television flight begins — with adequate budget to capture the search uplift that television generates and with keyword coverage for the brand terms that television is likely to activate. Social content is scheduled to align with television air dates — reinforcing the brand message in the social environments where television-exposed consumers are also active. Performance campaigns monitor conversion rate changes in television-heavy geographies versus non-television geographies, providing a live measure of television’s halo effect.
After the campaign: A structured post-campaign analysis measures brand search uplift versus baseline, direct traffic uplift, CPA changes in performance channels during and after the television period, and any available brand health metric shifts. These findings are fed into the next planning cycle — not to prove that television worked or did not work, but to understand which elements of the integration produced the strongest combined effects and how to improve the next plan accordingly.
How to Measure Television’s Contribution to E-Commerce Performance
Measurement is where most e-commerce brands give up on television — not because the impact is not real, but because the measurement frameworks they are familiar with from digital marketing do not apply. Here is a practical measurement approach that produces actionable data without requiring a sophisticated marketing science infrastructure.
- Brand search volume tracking Monitor weekly Google Search Console data for branded queries throughout and after a television flight. A meaningful television campaign should produce a visible uplift in brand searches during the flight period. The magnitude of that uplift, multiplied by the average conversion rate of branded search traffic, provides a floor estimate of television’s direct revenue contribution.
- Direct traffic baseline monitoring Track direct website traffic weekly before, during, and after television flights. Sustained uplift in direct traffic during a television period — controlling for other campaign activity — is a reliable signal of brand awareness impact.
- Geographic test-and-control analysis If the television buy is concentrated in specific geographies, compare performance marketing metrics — conversion rates, CPA, ROAS — in high-TV-weight markets versus matched control markets with similar digital spend but no television. The delta represents television’s causal contribution to digital performance.
- Marketing Mix Modelling For e-commerce brands spending above ₹15–20 crore annually on total media, a formal Marketing Mix Model — which uses statistical analysis to attribute sales across all media channels, controlling for price, distribution, and seasonality — provides the most rigorous measure of television’s contribution. The investment in MMM typically pays for itself within one planning cycle through the budget allocation improvements it enables.
- Brand health tracking Biannual or quarterly brand health surveys measuring awareness, consideration, preference, and trust metrics provide the longitudinal data to assess whether sustained television investment is building the brand equity that justifies the spend. Changes in these metrics, correlated with television investment levels, provide evidence of cumulative brand building that attribution models cannot capture.
What a Case Story Looks Like
A mid-sized direct-to-consumer health and wellness brand had built its business entirely on performance marketing — paid search, Meta, influencer partnerships, and affiliate channels. Over three years, the brand had grown significantly. Then the numbers changed. Meta CPMs rose. Google CPCs in the health and wellness category became increasingly competitive as the category grew. New customer acquisition costs increased by over 40% in eighteen months. The performance marketing team was executing well, but the economics of customer acquisition were deteriorating.
The brand’s first-party data told a revealing story. Their actual customers were more geographically distributed than their performance marketing suggested — with significant sales volume from tier-2 cities that the digital campaigns were reaching only accidentally, through broad targeting. And post-purchase surveys indicated that a meaningful proportion of their new customers had heard about the brand from a family member or seen it discussed on social — not through any paid channel.
We recommended a television strategy focused on three regional markets where sales concentration was highest and where the target audience was demonstrably heavy television viewers: two Hindi-speaking tier-2 markets and one South Indian market where regional language television reach was significantly stronger than any digital platform. The television creative was brand-led — not promotional, not price-driven — focused on the health philosophy and the trust that genuine health products deserve.
The performance marketing campaigns ran in parallel, structured to capture the uplift that television would generate rather than operating independently of it. Brand search campaigns were expanded and funded to absorb projected search volume growth. Social content was aligned with the television narrative.
Within six months: brand searches in the three target markets up 65% versus the same period in the previous year. CPA from Meta in those markets down 28%, as the television-exposed audience converted at higher rates. Direct traffic from the target geographies up measurably. And by the end of the year, customer acquisition cost — across all channels, blended — was lower than it had been before the television investment began, despite the television spend being an entirely new cost in the budget.
The television had not replaced the performance marketing. It had made it work better.
Conclusion
The e-commerce brands that are winning in India over the medium and long term are not the ones that have found a more efficient performance marketing formula. They are the ones that have understood that performance marketing and brand advertising are not alternatives — they are sequential stages of the same system. Performance marketing converts the demand that brand advertising creates. Without the brand advertising, the demand pool is limited, acquisition costs rise, and growth stalls.
Television is not the only brand-building channel available to e-commerce brands. But in the Indian market, it is the most powerful one — by reach, by emotional impact, by trust signalling, and by the specific, measurable ways it improves the economics of every digital channel running alongside it.
The objection that television cannot be measured like digital is real but answerable. The objection that it is too expensive is often based on national prime-time rates rather than the full range of television buying options available in India. The objection that the audience is not on television is contradicted by the data in most categories for most brands.
What is required is the willingness to think about marketing investment on a longer time horizon than a performance marketing dashboard naturally encourages — and to build the measurement framework that captures television’s full contribution rather than applying a digital attribution standard to a brand-building medium.
At Alliance, we have been integrating television and digital media strategies for Indian brands for over 30 years — long before the question of how they work together became urgent for e-commerce. We understand both the buying discipline required to get the most out of television investment and the planning sophistication required to make it work in concert with performance marketing. If you are at the point where your performance marketing data is telling you that the ceiling is approaching, that conversation starts here.