As the festive season heats up, influencer marketing is emerging as a key battleground for brands. With short-form and niche creators commanding higher fees, the landscape is shifting, forcing marketers to rethink strategies, campaign planning, and partnerships. We spoke to leaders from the advertising, marketing, and media sectors to get their take on how rising influencer rates are shaping brand approaches and engagement this season.
Sayak Mukherjee, Co-founder, Creatorcult
Festive-season inflation in influencer rates is making brands more strategic. Instead of one-off splurges, we’re seeing sharper planning, diversified creator mixes, and longer-term partnerships that balance cost with authenticity. Nano and niche creators are becoming critical, as they deliver trust and engagement at scale, ensuring festive budgets stretch without losing cultural relevance.
Ashok Shinde, Managing Partner – Strategy, Pivotroots
Given influencers are becoming an essential component of key campaigns, brands are exploring reallocating budgets from other channels, increasingly evaluating a combination of micro and macro influencers over mega ones, which can potentially deliver similar or higher value with savings, while leveraging influencer intelligence tools to decode which influencers truly represent the target group they wish to reach and enable driving relevant reach and genuine engagement.
Tushnik Thakur – Deputy Head, Content & Creator Business, IN, AnyMind Group
With more advanced analytics and attribution, we’re seeing a movement towards performance-based engagements, where an influencer’s ability to drive sales and influence consumer behavior becomes increasingly valued. Marketers that are winning merge data-driven influencer selection with deep campaign analytics and attribution, layered with AI and greater extensibility to deliver more efficient and effective outcomes through ecosystems.
Samyukta Ganesh Iyer, Former CMO (Sephora, Baskin Robbins, Kaya) | Executive & Team Coach | CEO & Founder, The Simple Thing
As a former CMO, I directed campaigns; as an Executive Coach, I now distill their meaning. CMOs, here’s a reframe : see creators not as cost but as carriers of trust. Allocate them 10–20% as trust capital, for you are not buying impressions, you are investing in borrowed credibility. The ROI is not likes, but belief. The true metric therefore is not reach, but resonance.
