With 80% internet penetration, Urban India today has more digital users than Linear TV viewers but at the same time Linear TV still boasts of 75% Urban India reach (Kantar Media Compass Report 2025). This puts India in a unique position where legacy TV broadcast media co-exists with digital mobile media.
Digital media is a misnomer as it encompasses a varied mix that offers distinct content and unique consumer experiences that serve very diverse consumer needs. While they are bucketed together as Digital Media, each digital media has its own definition of an ad impression, ad formats, creative requirements and ad targeting options all of which make cross-channel digital planning and reporting difficult. Even the enduring Television today does not equate to broadcast media given the accelerating growth of Connected TV among urban Indian households.
A recent Kantar Connect touchpoint study revealed that an average Indian consumer engages with a CPG category across 14 different touchpoints and it takes 1.3X more touchpoints for an Indian CPG brand to drive the same impact as their counterpart in other APAC markets. The legacy approach of planning at an individual media channel level no longer works as there are far too many media channels and a brand cannot be present across all of them.
Even reach-based media planning approaches seems to have run aground as today there are multiple digital media channels that boast of reach comparable to TV and yet brands are struggling to reach their target audience with frequency sufficiency. The lack of a single source cross - media audience measurement metric is a gap recognised by all advertisers, but that expectation itself is misplaced. There cannot be a single utopian measure that can truly represent the varied ad delivery mechanisms, ad impression definitions and ever evolving ad formats in the digital landscape while also being true to the legacy TV ad.
Secondly, monthly media channel penetration is being misrepresented as media channel reach, but they are not the same. A media channel’s ability of delivering reach among a consumer group is a function of not just the media channel’s penetration but also the frequency of usage, time spent / session, ad monetization algorithms and ad-buying options. Repeated consumption by majority users allows a media channel to regulate the number of ad exposures / per user and build reliable reach and frequency delivery of campaigns. 2025 Kantar India Media Reaction report highlights declining ad receptivity among young Indian consumers due to poor online ad experiences due to repetitive ad exposures without reasonable reach and frequency controls.
With legacy media planning approaches rendered ineffective and with little consistency in ad delivery across media channels to formulate a new common audience measurement metric, the onus is now upon advertisers to formulate an approach that works for their brands and their target audience. During the mass marketing era enabled by TV, media buying decisions were made based on cost of impression and reach while Ad Creative evaluation was done with consumers. Today, media strategy and media planning also needs to be consumer centric along with Creative as there is no one single media that reaches everyone efficiently and effectively.
Kantar Cross Media learnings suggests that while Indian consumers are across multiple media platforms their intensity of usage differs leading to varying reach probabilities by platform. A brand needs to understand the media consumption behaviour of its target audience at a sub-segment level to tease out differences between media channels and estimate media reach probabilities by combining media channel penetration with media usage intensity. This understanding will help brands build reach at a consumer sub-segment level efficiently while maximising total campaign reach.
Informed Media Reach planning to reach your intended Target Audience is only a part of the equation and it does not guarantee media impact. Consumer Attention is the new variable in the media effectiveness equation. Alongside a fragmented media landscape, advertisers also need to contend with fleeting & dispersed consumer attention spans as consumers shift and stack screens seamlessly and scroll content mindlessly. Average ad view duration or Average View Through Rates can be misleading proxies of ad effectiveness as we have observed divergent trends between ad playback and consumer attention
Kantar Context Lab learnings suggest distinct consumer attention characteristics for different ad platforms and for different ad formats within the same ad platforms. While an ad creative still bears the responsibility of capturing consumer attention, a good Ad Creative must honour the attention characteristics of the platform. Understanding the attention characteristics of different ad platforms will not only help in crafting better creatives but it will also guide brand messaging on different platforms.
To cope with low and distracted attention spans, brands can consider a connected marketing communication strategy. A connected marketing communication strategy delivers the full brand message by using different messages on different ad platforms that are seemingly connected. So instead of trying to squeeze the content of a 30 second TVC in a 6 second digital video ad, the brand message is broken into distinct components which are then amplified on ad platforms that are best suited to render that particular message aspect. E.g. The emotional hook of the brand communication should be delivered via media platforms that natively engage consumer emotionally.
So, in today’s fragmented and attention deficit media world an advertiser should curate their media mix based on sound consumer insights distilled from a thorough understanding of their media consumption behaviour as well as their ad response across different ad platforms. Each media touch point plays a distinct role in media delivery and fulfils a specific brand communication objective.
Reach out to your local Kantar representative or ebu.isaac@kantar.com to learn more.
Author: Ebu Isaac, Vice President, Analytics Practice, Kantar
