The practice
Creator programmes designed as media buys rather than as favours. India's creator market is large, cheap relative to its reach, and full of inflated metrics. The work is separating real audience from purchased audience and pricing accordingly.
Follower count is the least reliable number in the market. Watch time, saves, comment quality and the ratio of engagement to reach tell you whether an audience is real and whether it acts.
A single burst of creator posts produces a spike and nothing else. A retained cohort refreshed quarterly, with rate cards and consistent briefs, produces compounding recall at lower unit cost.
Every engagement complies with the ASCI influencer guidelines and the Consumer Protection Act. Non-disclosure is a regulatory risk to the brand, not to the creator.
Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali and Punjabi creators frequently deliver better cost per genuine reach than English language equivalents, and the market has not corrected yet.
How the work runs
Tier mix, category fit and audience verification.
Benchmarked rates, usage rights, exclusivity and disclosure terms.
Briefs that leave room for creator voice, with the non-negotiables fixed.
Performance read, cohort rotation and rate renegotiation.
Services
Retained creator cohorts with rate cards and refresh cycles.
Creator PartnershipsDistribution across page networks, priced per verified reach.
Creator PartnershipsCommission models, tracked links and marketplace integration.
Creator PartnershipsPerformance creative produced by creators at platform speed.
Creator PartnershipsFrequently asked
Usually a mix. Macro for reach and credibility, micro for cost efficient frequency and comment quality.
Engagement pattern analysis, audience geography, growth curve inspection and comment quality review. It is checkable and it is routinely skipped.
Whatever the contract says, which is why the contract specifies usage duration, channels and whitelisting rights explicitly.
Start here