A quick glance through the PMAR 2026 and one understands how the AdEx has delivered some googlies for the marketers in the past year. Here’s a deep dive into the report and its findings by Ajit Varghese, Partner and Group CEO, Madison Media, OOH & HiveMinds, who tells Neeta Nair, Editor, IMPACT, which mediums surprised him, those that showed resilience and others that hit a boundary.
Q] Most of the growth in 2025 came from Digital. Within Digital, where is the most aggressive growth expected from in the coming years?
If you look inside Digital, the centre of gravity has already shifted from ‘generic online advertising’ to performance ecosystems and commerce.
Between 2024 and 2025, core Digital grew 18%, but Q Comm grew 202% (Rs 1,325 to Rs 4,000 Crores) and MSME Digital grew 21% (Rs 29,644 to Rs 35,814 Crores). In 2026, we expect Q-comm to grow by another 50% to about Rs 6,000 Crores, and MSME Digital to grow by 20% to about Rs 42,976 Crores, adding over Rs 9,000 Crores of incremental Digital AdEx just from these two engines.
Within core Digital, E commerce and Video together contributed 59% of incremental Digital growth in 2025. E commerce advertising reached Rs 10,257 Crores (27% growth) and Video Rs 14,785 Crores (21% growth). Performance oriented formats—Search, Social, E commerce—now account for 59% of Digital; including performance video takes that to about 70%.
So, the most aggressive growth will not come from ‘Digital’ as a monolith; it will come from Retail Media (Ecommerce + Quick Commerce), MSME and performance ecosystems that compress the path from impression to transaction. That is where the next Rs10,000 Crores is sitting.
Q] You say TV should be seen as part of a Large Screen ecosystem (Linear + CTV). Does that mean traditional TV is no longer a magnet for growth, or is it just a convenient way to measure?
It is not a measurement trick; it is recognising how people actually watch video and how money actually moves.
On the legacy view, Linear TV alone declined 5% in value in 2025, volumes fell 10%, and share dropped from 32% to 28%. That is not a growth magnet by any standard. But CTV doubled from around Rs 3,000 Crores to Rs 6,000 Crores. When you add the two, Large Screen AdEx grew by 4% from Rs 37,453 Crores to Rs 38,855 Crores.
So, if you ask, ’Is traditional TV a magnet for growth?’ the honest answer is: no, not by itself. The growth is in the Large Screen system—linear plus CTV, premium sports plus OTT plus YouTube CTV—planned together.
The industry’s lazy habit is to ask, ‘Should I cut TV and move to Digital?’ PMAR 2026 is saying: stop thinking in binaries. Treat Large Screen as one strategic bucket. Inside that, Linear TV is the declining but still powerful mass pipe, and CTV is the fast growing, high attention, high income pipe.
Q] Traditional AdEx fell 1%, yet OOH grew 4%. Why are people waking up to OOH suddenly?
OOH is not ‘resurgent’ because of nostalgia. It is growing because, in a majority Digital world, brands need a few high impact offline levers. OOH is proving that it can be one of those levers, while some other Traditional channels are still arguing about past glory.
OOH grew from Rs 4,650 Crores to Rs 4,835 Crores in 2025, a 4% increase, while overall Traditional fell. Its share stayed roughly stable, which means it actually gained ground relative to other offline media. The main driver was Real Estate, which increased OOH spends by 20% and now accounts for about a quarter of the medium. BFSI also leaned in.
The wake up call is three fold – (1) Urban mobility is back, so OOH inventory is genuinely visible again; (2) DOOH and data are finally making location, time band and audience planning more scientific; and (3) OOH works beautifully as a bridge between online intent and offline action—store visits, site visits, local launches.
Q] Among big advertisers, who dominated, who lost, and who surprised?
Categories tell a more honest story than individual names, so let me answer at that level.
FMCG ‘lost’ in a visible way on Traditional—cutting Rs 779 Crores from TV+Print+Radio—but that was a conscious reallocation, not a disappearance. Underneath that cut, FMCG money moved into Sports, Retail Media, and performance Digital. So, FMCG looks like a loser on a legacy table, but in reality, it is rewriting its playbook.
Auto quietly ‘won’. It added about Rs 281 Crores across Traditional media and used a multi medium system—Large Screen, Print, OOH, Digital—to manage high involvement EV era journeys. In a year of caution, auto behaved like a system builder.
MSMEs are the real surprise ‘winners’. This segment of advertisers jumped to Rs 35,814 Crores on digital alone. That is 38% of Digital ADEX. MSMEs do not show up in the top advertisers list, but they are shaping auction prices, platform features, and consumer journeys every day.
If there is one uncomfortable takeaway: the brands that dominated 2025 were not necessarily the ones with the biggest TV plans; they were the ones that treated media as a system, not a channel menu.
Q] Does Q Comm have the potential to become a category of its own, given it is already on par or bigger than Radio, Cinema and OOH?
In terms of spend, it is already there. The question is whether we recognise it as such.
Q Comm advertising jumped from Rs 300 Crores in 2023 to Rs 1,325 Crores in 2024 to Rs 4,000 Crores in 2025, and we forecast around Rs 6,000 Crores in 2026. That puts it in the same ballpark as Radio (Rs 2,515 Crores), Cinema (Rs 877 Crores) and OOH (Rs 4,835 Crores).
But Q Comm is not just ‘another medium’. It is media, shelf and checkout rolled into one. Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart and their peers are simultaneously (1) performance media channels, (2) merchandising environments, and (3) last mile fulfilment pipes.
So yes, Q Comm already behaves like a category in its own right: it has unique inventory, unique data, and a unique place in the funnel. The bigger risk for marketers is not whether Q Comm will become a category; it is whether they will continue to treat it as an afterthought inside ‘Digital’ and miss the structural shift it represents.
Q] What big trends in the coming year could change the course of advertising?
PMAR 2026 surfaces three trends that I would call non negotiable.
First, Digital majority as a structural breakpoint. On the expanded definition, India is at 60% Digital and moving toward 64% in 2026. That forces hard choices on organisation design, talent, content ecosystems, measurement and AI to drive full funnel solutions that drive brand growth. Depending only on scale, quick fix solutions, mergers or incremental changes is over. Hard reset is the only option to build new agency model.
Second, the rise of systems over channels. Categories with similar budgets behaved very differently in 2025—FMCG, Auto, BFSI, Real Estate, MSME, Q Comm. The winners designed systems: Attention–Memory–Response roles, Large Screen + Retail Media + Content Creators + OOH working together. The others bought disconnected channels and then asked why their share didn’t move.
Third, AI native planning. Platforms are automating bids, budgets and creatives; execution is being commoditised. Value is moving upstream into diagnosis and system design. Madison 3.0 with the GPS (Growth Planning System) MbrAIn is our answer to that shift, but the larger point is industry wide: brands will have to choose between sovereign intelligence and borrowed/derived systems. In a 60% Digital market, that choice will define who compounds advantage over the next 3–5 years.
These are not cosmetic trends; they are fault lines. How our industry responds will decide whether we are engineering growth—or just reporting it.
