Festive marketing’s ROI test: 40% creator-led sales at Theater

The new festive question: what happens after the ad?

Festive marketing is being run less like a billboard and more like a purchase pipeline. Brands are asking what buyers do after an ad, a creator video or a marketing message, and whether that interaction turns into a sale.

The shift shows up in where money is moving. Footwear brand Theater has increased festive marketing spend by about 70%, directing more budget towards storytelling and creators who genuinely wear its products, while cutting discount-led performance marketing. It expects around 40% of its festive sales to come from consumers who first discovered the brand through creators or social media.

FNP has raised festive spends 15–20%, allocating budgets across e-commerce, retail, social media and other digital touchpoints based on where consumers discover, engage with and buy from the brand. Fabindia is increasing its relative emphasis on digital and regional communication, working with micro and mid-scale creators, and avoiding discount-led influencer campaigns so it does not weaken its craft and handiwork positioning.

Messaging platforms are moving from afterthought to acquisition channel. Mohammad Imran, CEO of TrustSignal, estimates that brands already active on WhatsApp and RCS are increasing festive budgets for messaging-led engagement by around 25–30%, planning these channels alongside paid media and marketplaces.

Some early results are giving marketers a reason to keep pushing. RENÉE Cosmetics reports that a quick-commerce campaign on Blinkit delivered 11.5% incremental sales and 48% lower cost per acquisition. INALSA estimates that influencer and social media activity shapes about 10% of its overall sales, though it treats that as indicative rather than directly attributed revenue.

Why reach no longer tells the whole story

The underlying problem is attribution. A consumer may watch a creator, search the brand later, chat with a WhatsApp bot, abandon a cart and return through quick commerce. If you give all credit to the final click, you punish the discovery channels that started the journey.

Sarthak Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO of Theater, puts it simply: influencer marketing “does not fit neatly into customer acquisition cost calculations.” Discovery and purchase are rarely the same session.

This is the familiar attention-action gap. Attention decays quickly unless a brand builds a bridge to action, whether that bridge is a regionally relevant creator, a WhatsApp conversation, a quick-commerce search or a checkout survey that asks how the customer found you.

What to do about it

Smart brand teams are building a multi-touch scoreboard rather than a last-click dashboard. They are tracking branded search lift, direct traffic, checkout feedback and post-purchase behaviour, and matching creator compensation to the job the campaign is meant to do.

• For performance tasks, judge creators and channels on conversions, customer acquisition cost and incremental sales.
• For brand-building tasks, judge creators on relevance, repeat collaborations, shares and comments, not likes alone.
• For craft-led or premium brands, keep discount-led influencer blasts out of the centre; protect the positioning.

The brands winning this festive season are not ignoring reach. They are just refusing to call reach a result. The more closely money follows the customer journey from first impression to purchase, the harder each festive rupee works.

Source: ETRetail.com