MarTech budgets in India are no longer rounding errors hidden in digital line items. They are fast becoming boardroom priorities linked directly to revenue, speed, and margin. In conversations with brands across categories, a clear pattern has emerged in 2025. The biggest returns are flowing to companies that connect media with commerce data, compress creative production cycles, and bake experimentation into daily workflows. Those who still treat tools as one-off purchases without process change are discovering that license costs rise while business impact stalls.
The spending backdrop helps explain the urgency. India’s ad market is set to touch new highs in 2025, with digital taking the lead. Multiple trackers show digital’s share has climbed into the forties by FY25, and is expected to push higher as commerce, connected TV, and retail media expand. The debate inside marketing war rooms has shifted from “should we invest in stack upgrades” to “which parts of the stack create return quickly and repeatably.”
For companies that have already crossed the initial adoption hump, the tone is pragmatic. As Manjot Purewal, Executive Director, Maxima Watches, puts it: “Two years ago, barely 12–15% of our spends went into MarTech. Today, it’s close to 28% as we scale up Salesforce, HubSpot, and SEO tools to power our D2C journey.” The stated outcome is not tool coverage for its own sake, but the ability to see and influence a customer from discovery to sale across marketplaces, brand.com, and dealer shelves.
Where ROI is actually showing up
The clearest wins are visible in three zones: attribution that decision-makers trust, automation that reduces leakage in journeys, and creative agility that keeps pace with fast-moving demand.
On attribution, brands are consolidating analytics and campaign data to answer a simple question: which sequence of exposures and actions leads to profitable orders. “For us, the real game changers have been Google Analytics 4 for attribution, HubSpot for nurturing D2C customers, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud for campaign automation,” Purewal says. This triad turns clicks into cohorts and cohorts into revenue narratives that the CFO can audit.
Retail media is the other major driver of measurable return. India’s retail media share already accounts for a sizable slice of digital budgets, and the networks are scaling quickly as shoppers spend more time on marketplaces and quick commerce apps. The attraction is simple. Retail media carries shopping intent and SKU-level signals that make incrementality tests easier to run than in broad awareness channels.
Creative agility is an equally important, if less glamorous, ROI vector. A steady stream of small, contextually tuned creatives often beats one hero film that takes months to produce. In Purewal’s words, the team tracks whether lightweight tools can speed throughput without sacrificing brand guardrails. That lens extends to offline as well. “Our biggest hurdle was bridging offline dealer sales with online dashboards. By integrating Salesforce and Zoho with GA4, and adopting agile creative tools like Canva and Quickreel.io, we built a unified view that finally made ROI measurement seamless,” he says.
Speed, cost, and quality: a fintech case study
Fintech marketers have been early adopters of AI-assisted workflows because their funnels are selection-driven and measurement rich. Shashwat Vatsa, AVP – Brand at Olyv, describes the pivot succinctly: “Our most impactful investment has been in AI-led asset identification and replication across a wide variety of customer use cases.” Behind that line is a shift from manual asset production to a pipeline that detects winning patterns, generates variants, and feeds them to channels quickly.
Olyv’s internal metrics frame ROI as a triangle of efficiency, effectiveness, and agility. On efficiency, the company focuses on nodal improvements across the funnel rather than a single vanity metric. On effectiveness, systematic conversion rates from install to sign-up are the yardstick. On agility, time to launch and learn is a first-class KPI. The discipline is familiar to performance marketers, but the novelty lies in how AI compresses cycles while keeping compliance tight for a regulated category.
The team’s emphasis on adoption mechanics is notable too. AI rollouts often stall when they are handed to one function and asked to “figure it out.” Olyv created pods that combine tech, marketing, and analytics so that prompts, models, and measurement evolve together. The payoff, Vatsa says, came once teams saw AI as a helper, not a threat. “Once adoption was seen as an enabler rather than a disruption, we were able to achieve 3–5X growth in efficiency and output quality metrics.” For ROI, that mindset is as important as the model.
The data picture: five signals marketers should keep on the dashboard
1) Digital’s rising share of Indian ad spends. The mix has tilted decisively toward digital by FY25. Independent trackers place digital at about 46 percent of the total ad market, reflecting the shift of attention to mobile, commerce, and connected TV. This mix matters because MarTech returns are easiest to prove in digital and commerce-adjacent environments where exposures and purchases can be tied without guesswork.
2) The retail media flywheel. Retail media accounted for roughly one-fifth of digital ad spend last year, and e-commerce platforms collectively reported more than ₹15,000 crore in ad revenues in FY25. For brands, retail media is not just an advertising channel. It is a measurement sandbox where SKU, shelf position, couponing, and ad exposure data sit in one place, making test-and-learn loops straightforward.
3) India’s MarTech market trajectory. Estimates suggest India’s MarTech revenues were around USD 19 billion in 2023, with forecasts pointing to roughly USD 94 billion by 2030. Even if you haircut forecasts, the direction of travel is unambiguous. More money is flowing into tooling across social, automation, analytics, and retail media, which raises the bar for proving return and avoiding shelfware.
4) The global context. Worldwide, marketing technology is projected to be a multi-hundred-billion-dollar category in 2025. That scale is a reminder that the competitive baseline for Indian brands is not domestic alone. Many of the models and platforms teams deploy are being tuned using global data, which is why rigorous local experimentation and governance are essential to convert features into outcomes.
5) Connected screens and the premium inventory shift. India’s OTT universe has swelled to an estimated 600 million viewers, and connected TV audiences on the big screen have surged past 100 million. As more households stream on television sets, marketers are using identity-safe approaches and mixed-media models to link CTV to commerce. The implication for ROI is that creative and audience plans must be designed for both the living room and the phone, with measurement strategies that can handle cross-device journeys.
What the front-runners are doing differently
They start with a crisp problem statement. Purewal’s progression from low double-digit to high-twenties MarTech allocation is anchored in a clear objective: connect D2C growth with attribution and automation. The stack choices flow from the job to be done, not the other way around.
They apply a “speed premium” to ROI. Many teams still report cost per lead and cost per acquisition as the headline. Mature marketers add speed metrics such as time to creative, time to launch, and time to statistically confident learnings. The reason is practical. If two channels deliver the same CPA but one allows three tests a week and the other allows one, the faster loop will out-learn competitors and compound returns.
They treat retail media as an experimentation lab. Brands that win on retail media tend to run clean, pre-registered tests with control groups. They rotate between incrementality tests, category share lifts, and long-term holdout panels. Given retail media’s rich signals, laziness is the only real barrier to credible measurement.
They wire offline to online with intent. The Maxima example shows why the hard integration work matters. Dealer sales and distributor ledgers often sit outside the marketing cloud. When those ledgers link to GA4 events and CRM journeys, the halo of online campaigns on offline outcomes becomes visible. That unlocks budget because finance leaders can now see cause and effect rather than a slide with arrows.
They fix adoption, not just architecture. Olyv’s cross-functional pods solve a common failure mode. Tools without team change do not move numbers. But when prompt libraries, guardrails, and analytics definitions are co-owned, models stop being pilots and become production systems that create return week after week.
Guardrails that protect ROI
Data discipline and consent. With third-party cookie timelines in flux and privacy expectations rising, the only safe long-term route is durable first-party data collected with clear consent and value exchange. That means audience design that respects platform policies, consent strings that legal can stand behind, and measurement approaches that do not rely on brittle identifiers. Even as browser policies evolve, first-party relationships remain the most defensible foundation for ROI.
Measurement that a CFO can audit. Replace fuzzy attribution slides with documented methodologies. Treat MMM, geo-experiments, and platform clean rooms as complementary tools. Pre-register success criteria before campaigns, include at least one control in every quarter, and publish the false positive rate. These habits turn marketing from a cost center into a compounding asset.
An operating model for AI. AI’s ROI is less about the model and more about the workflow. Standardize prompts, codify brand voice and compliance rules, and rank models by task fit rather than hype. Track three numbers for creative: unit cost, cycle time, and win rate in experiments. Use those to decide when to scale a new AI feature and when to shut it down.
The road ahead: where the next rupee should go
Purewal says the focus now is on tightening personalisation across clouds, scaling retail media on Flipkart and Amazon, and building an SEO engine that compounds. Those priorities echo what we hear across categories. Retail media will keep rising because it sits close to the shelf. Owned content and SEO will keep paying back because they build defensible intent capture. And AI in orchestration and creative will keep shrinking the time between insight and action.
Vatsa frames the destination as bigger than quarterly CPL targets. “We view ROI not just as cost savings or CAC reduction, but also as enhanced customer lifetime value (CLTV) created through better targeting and retention.” That definition matches what the best teams practice. ROI is not a single metric. It is a system of faster learning, cleaner data, and tighter linkages between exposure and commerce.
The implication for 2026 is straightforward. Invest where data and decisions collide. Favour tools that shorten feedback loops. Treat retail media and connected screens as testbeds for incrementality. Wire offline sales to online journeys so you can argue for budget with evidence. And above all, set up the teams and processes that turn technology into habit. The brands that do this are already showing that MarTech ROI in India is not a promise. It is a repeatable discipline that compounds.
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