Colgate India Moves 60% of Its Media to Digital and Stops Apologising for It

Colgate-Palmolive India has shifted the centre of gravity of its media strategy, with roughly 60% of advertising money now going behind digital as television viewership erodes at both ends of the income pyramid.

The spend itself is climbing too. Advertising and promotion has risen from a historic 12–13% of sales to nearly 16% — an unusually blunt statement of intent for a category that normally treats brand investment as the first line to trim when volumes wobble.

The pyramid detail is the interesting part. Digital migration in India has typically been framed as a premium-audience story: affluent, urban, connected. Colgate is describing something broader — TV viewership softening at the top and the bottom simultaneously, which removes the last argument for treating television as the default reach engine.

For a category built on frequency and habit, that is a structural change, not a channel tweak. Oral care sells through repetition; repetition on digital means creator ecosystems, vernacular content and a far more fragmented buy than a handful of GRP-heavy TV slots.

The upside is measurement and precision. The downside is that everyone else in FMCG is arriving at the same conclusion at the same time, which means digital inventory in India is about to get considerably more expensive. Colgate is moving early enough to matter.