Influencers turn movie launches into always-on distribution engines

When TheSmallBigIdea marketed Son of Sardaar 2, the cultural flashpoint was not a trailer drop or a star interview, but the ‘Pehla-Tu-Duja-Tu’ dance step. The digital marketing agency’s CEO and co-founder, Harikrishnan Pillai, is quick to puncture any illusion of agency authorship.

“Marketing can control distribution, fuel it and then sit with their fingers crossed that the creators’ skill does the rest. So it's these influencers’ brilliance and the agencies control on cost & distribution,” he said.

That admission neatly captures where film marketing in India has landed in 2025: creators no longer amplify campaigns; they are the campaign.

Harikrishnan Pillai, CEO and co-founder, TheSmallBigIdea.

Creator marketing already stopped being an add-on from late 2024 onwards, and it is usually the first layer that activated even before movie posters or trailers are out. According to Rajni Daswani, chief growth officer for people and business at SoCheers, it has cut inefficient large-format TV bursts, with secondary celebrity appearances shrinking first.

“Creators bring language precision and speed that stars can’t deliver at scale anymore. Imagine a meme page in Indore or a Tamil film reviewer; they can push a film into the right feeds much faster than a national TV spot, which creates presence but little engagement. Budgets are distributed differently where creators test the waters first and earn that mass amplification. Star power still matters but follows proof and not faith,” she noted.

Her opinion is underpinned in a Qoruz report which found that close to 60–70% of movies released in 2025 used creator-led promotions in some form, with the industry spending over INR 250 crore on influencer marketing, meme marketing, paid UGC and seeding. Big films like Chhaava, Coolie, Kantara: Chapter 1 and Dhurandhar led engagement, but the structural shift is visible well beyond tentpole titles.

As Praanesh Bhuvaneswar, co-founder and CEO of influencer marketing platform Qoruz, noted, films such as Su From So, Dragon and Lokah generated meaningful buzz once they understood how creators and meme pages function. “For many films, creator buzz has become the new ‘opening weekend.’ If a film doesn’t trend on X, spike on Reels, and hit YouTube reactions within the first 48 hours, the conversation moves on,” he said.

Mautik Tolia, CEO of content production company Bodhitree Multimedia, concurs. He points out that films failing to show creator traction in the first 48 to 72 hours rarely enter wider cultural conversation. “In budget terms, creator spends have compressed mid-tier celebrity endorsements, reduced dependence on regional TV bursts, and shortened traditional PR cycles. Creators now establish the minimum awareness threshold; other media builds on that,” he added.

From trailers to feeds

The tipping point arrived when discovery moved decisively away from trailers and towards feeds. Dhurandhar, the Ranveer Singh-led spy thriller, illustrates this shift. Drawing from the film’s premise, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts began circulating under the hook ‘First day as a spy in Pakistan’. The humour-led format encouraged creators and everyday users alike to publish their own interpretations, collectively amplifying the film’s visibility and recall across social platforms.

 

 

 

 

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Bhushan Kadam, senior vice president for creative and strategic initiatives at White Rivers Media, puts it bluntly: “Creator marketing stopped being an add-on the moment discovery moved away from trailers and towards feeds. Today, it’s baked in from the first announcement, not saved for the final week.”

In practical terms, this has compressed large TV bursts and reduced dependence on star-driven PR appearances. Stars still matter, but creators now deliver volume, cultural translation and repetition—functions that were traditionally handled by expensive mass media.

Pillai traces the shift to post-Covid changes in creator supply. “Frequency replaces impact, culture replaces clout,” he said, pointing to the rise of faceless pages, micro creators and remix culture, all of which increase the opportunity-to-see across timelines. Rather than pushing one tightly controlled message, films now seed creative units that creators reinterpret freely. “Open-source creativity eats controlled messaging for breakfast,” Pillai added, while cautioning that creators amplify strong content but do not rescue weak films.

Modular spends, live decisions

The economics behind this transformation are stark. Qoruz data shows that in 2025, creators and meme makers generated over 610,000 movie-related posts, driving more than 2.0 billion engagements—an average of around 400 creator-led posts per film. Over 51% of posts and engagements were driven by micro pages and creators, signalling a move away from a handful of celebrity accounts towards distributed networks designed to scale repetition.

At the operational level, creator marketing has become increasingly modular. As an industry rule of thumb, INR 1 lakh can secure 10 to 20 meme-page posts, often generating over 500,000 organic views depending on language, region and page size. Agencies benchmark this against high-cost celebrity or TV-led bursts using momentum rather than peak reach.

“Creator marketing now is a frequency game, while celebrity or TV bursts is an impact game,” Pillai said, citing India’s average daily social media usage of over two hours. CPMs dropping into “a few tens” are taken as proof of smarter allocation, even though trailers and marquee assets continue to anchor visibility.

Bodhitree has also shifted its benchmarks. Instead of measuring creators purely on reach, it tracks speed, density and the quality of audience feedback. Even modest creator spends can deliver immediate algorithmic lift and real-time audience signals—feedback that TV or celebrity bursts typically surface much later. “Scale decisions are based on early velocity, engagement quality, repeat mentions, and downstream impact on trailers or songs. If these don’t show up within two days, we recalibrate or pull back,” Tolia explained.

Kadam describes a similar logic at White Rivers Media. “We track how fast content travels, how many creators pick it up organically, and whether conversation sustains beyond 48–72 hours. If momentum builds, we scale; if it plateaus, we stop.” The result is a live editorial approach to spending, where ideas are quickly killed or doubled down on, guided as much by instinct as dashboards.

The invisible market

Behind the visible metrics sits a less transparent layer of the creator economy. A significant share of creator spending flows through distributors, PR teams, meme-page brokers and talent managers, often outside formal invoices. Qoruz co-founder Aditya Gurwara describes two parallel markets: a visible one with contracts and deliverables, and an invisible one driven by seeding and regional drops.

“This invisible market exists because film marketing is time bound. You have a very small window to win attention,” he said. Rather than focusing solely on payments, Gurwara argues that agencies must track distribution—mapping where content is seeded, how it spreads, and which pages trigger secondary amplification.

Aditya Gurwara, co-founder, Qoruz.

Agencies increasingly build ‘seed maps’ to trace the origin and diffusion of formats across regions and languages. Without this, effectiveness and leakage are difficult to judge. Gurwara estimates that a meaningful portion of the INR 250 crore market remains underreported, particularly outside the top 10 cities where local networks operate independently.

Roycin Dsouza, senior vice president at Only Much Louder (OML), highlights the accountability challenge. Creators, he notes, function as independent media outlets rather than networks, complicating macro-level reporting. While OML insists on compliant payments and clear guidelines with brokers, “from a macro data perspective, it is difficult to report accurately as these are individuals operating independent business and are not media networks.”

Micro creators, macro consequences

The growing dominance of micro and mid-tier creators reflects how films are now discovered. Dsouza argues that these creators operate closer to everyday conversation, making recommendations feel organic rather than promotional—an advantage for mid-sized and regional films that rely heavily on word-of-mouth. Language, regional context and posting velocity increasingly matter more than follower count. “These are usually young creators with their ears to the ground,” he said, capable of responding quickly to trailers, festivals and pop culture cues.

In 2025, micro pages and creators accounted for over 51% of all movie-related posts and engagements, underlining how film marketing momentum is being driven by volume-led, culture-native content. Instead of leaning primarily on celebrity tie-ups or a handful of mega meme pages, buzz is now built through dispersed creator networks that replicate formats quickly and push them across feeds at scale.

Roycin Dsouza, senior vice president at Only Much Louder.

“The shift has moved us from message control to narrative framing. You’re not scripting outcomes anymore—you’re seeding ideas and allowing multiple voices and formats to interpret them,” Tolia said. While this reduces predictability, it improves authenticity and cultural relevance. Risk, he added, is managed through volume, early monitoring and rapid course correction rather than tight approvals.

Pillai acknowledges that this approach dilutes agency control, but believes the trade-off is worthwhile. With micro seeding, creative liberty is the point. Low-cost individual units limit downside risk, even though volume can amplify negatives. “If something goes wrong, you need to be ready to fight fire with fire,” he said. Kadam frames the balance more succinctly: “You give up tight control, but you gain cultural credibility.”

Speed as strategy

With films now expected to trend across platforms within the first 48 hours, launch playbooks prioritise speed and repetition over singular viral hits. Gurwara likens launches to product drops: early seeding to spark curiosity, high-volume reactions on release day, followed by regionalisation and repeatable formats built around dialogues or music hooks. “If your film owns the feed in the first 48 hours, you get compounding effects across search, ticket intent, and even offline conversations,” he said.

If a movie fails to trend on Instagram, spike on short-form platforms, or trigger reaction content within that initial window, it is often read as weak intent by exhibitors and platforms alike. As a result, Tolia notes that launch strategies are now engineered around sustained presence rather than chasing a single viral moment. “Creator buzz has become the earliest proxy for opening-weekend momentum,” he emphasised.

Creator buzz, however, does not replace box office; it precedes it. Attention share has become the fastest leading indicator of theatrical performance. As the industry prepares for a crowded 2026 slate of sequels, epics and pan-India releases, the new currency is not one big splash but sustained, distributed noise. Films that turn into formats travel further. Those that do not are quickly forgotten. In today’s creator economy, attention is the opening weekend—and it opens fast.