How the Best Brands Are Winning on India’s Fastest-Growing Advertising Platforms

Retail media is the fastest-growing ad channel on earth, and India’s quick-commerce apps are becoming advertising giants at a startling pace. Ask a young marketer to name India’s biggest advertising platforms, and you will get the usual suspects: Google, Meta, maybe YouTube. Add a new set of names to that list: Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart. The apps you use to order milk at midnight are quietly becoming some of the most effective advertising businesses in the country, and the money is moving fast enough that ignoring them is no longer an option.

Why the Best Brands Are Investing in Retail Media

This is the leading edge of a local shift. Retail media, where brands buy ads on shopping platforms, is now the fastest-growing channel across all of advertising, worth well over $120 billion and already accounting for around 15% of global digital ad spend, according to eMarketer. Amazon alone generates around $60 billion a year from advertising. Analysts have dubbed it the third wave of digital advertising, after search and social. The reason is simple. These platforms have something that is rare in a world of disappearing tracking cookies: hard, first-party data on what people actually buy.

India’s version is even more intense, as quick commerce has become everyday infrastructure with surprising speed. Blinkit alone now processes about 7.8 million orders a day. While social feeds are full of passive scrollers, someone opening Zepto is already in buying mode, so discovery and conversion happen within the same ten-minute window. For the best brands, that collapses the entire funnel. Your sponsored listing is displayed right at the moment of choice, and every rupee can be measured against a real sale at the product level.

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That’s not subtle growth. Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart together are expected to generate advertising revenues of around Rs 4,900 crore this year, up from around Rs 3,000 crore in 2025, according to Datum Intelligence. Zepto’s own IPO filing shows that ad revenue is projected to jump 151% to Rs 1,636 crore in FY26, now making up more than 7% of its operating revenue, supported by nearly 2,500 brand partners. Blinkit and Zepto both crossed Rs 1,000 crore in annual ad revenue by FY25. India’s digital advertising market is worth around Rs 1 lakh crore, and quick commerce’s share could increase from around 1% in 2023 to nearly 5%.

The best brands are already noticing. Almost 70% of Britannia’s e-commerce business now comes through quick commerce, and the company expects that figure to rise to 85%. “We will be where the consumer is,” said Deepak D’Souza of Tata Consumer. Quick commerce and e-commerce together make up a fifth of Tata Consumer’s domestic business and are growing at 62% a year. For the platforms, it is the high-margin advertising revenue that makes brutal ten-minute delivery economics survivable. “Both quick commerce and FMCG companies need each other at the moment,” said Satish Meena of Datum Intelligence.

For a junior brand manager, this is a channel to learn now, not in two years’ time, but go in with your eyes open. It is a pay-to-play shelf. To secure successful placement, you need real investment, and the platforms are increasingly becoming the gatekeepers between you and the shopper.

Above all, watch the measurement. Some platforms calculate return on ad spend against a product’s printed MRP rather than the discounted price people actually pay, which can flatter your numbers by almost half. And do not confuse activity with strategy. Retail media is excellent at converting demand at the point of purchase, but it is not going to build a brand that people remember. That still needs to happen everywhere else. The shelf is coming to the app. The best brands will learn how to win it, while remembering that this is the last step of the customer journey, not the whole journey.