India’s ₹13,000 Crore Live Events Market Fuels Shift to Experiential Marketing: BookMyShow-EY-Parthenon Report

• 78% of Indian consumers prefer experiences over products, signalling a major shift toward participation-led brand engagement.

National, March 12, 2026: EY-Parthenon and BookMyShow, India’s leading entertainment destination, today launched a report titled ‘Beyond Attention. Into Immersion’ that explores how experiential marketing is evolving from a tactical activation to a strategic growth engine for brands.

The report reveals that 59% of live event attendees recall brands they engage with on-ground, while 55% report higher purchase intent after interacting with brands at events, highlighting the growing business impact of experiential marketing in India. Based on post-event surveys conducted across 7,450 attendees, the report finds that live experiences are emerging as powerful environments for brand engagement, delivering measurable improvements in recall, intent and brand perception.

The findings come as India’s ₹13,000 crore live events market continues to expand, with concerts, festivals, comedy tours and cultural showcases becoming high-intent environments where brands can connect with audiences in immersive, participation-driven ways. According to the report, 63% of attendees felt that brands enhanced their overall event experience, while 29% reported improved brand imagery, with brands increasingly perceived as “a brand for me”.

The report also reflects a broader shift in consumer behaviour. 78% of Indian consumers say they prefer spending on experiences over products, signalling a move toward experience-led consumption that is reshaping how brands build connection, loyalty and cultural relevance.

Speaking on the report, Raghav Anand, Partner and Leader, Media & Entertainment, EY-Parthenon India, said, “As interruption-based advertising loses traction, audience participation is becoming the new currency of relevance. The rising spend, the proven lifts in recall and intent, and the cultural gravitation toward experiences all point to the same conclusion: experiential marketing is now a full‑funnel growth engine, not a tactical add-on.”

“Experiential marketing in India has moved well beyond being a tactical add-on. What we are seeing today is brands investing with far greater intent - looking to build memory, meaning and measurable business outcomes through experiences. Live entertainment offers a uniquely powerful canvas for this, where emotion, attention and participation converge at scale. This report is our attempt to put structure and data behind what the industry is already witnessing on the ground,” said Samradha Tibrewala, Head - Partnerships and Revenue, BookMyShow. 

Live events have emerged as the most powerful expression of this shift. Globally, experiential marketing spends are projected to reach US$130 billion by 2025, growing at 10.5%, with 74% of Fortune 1000 marketers planning to increase experiential budgets. In India, this momentum is playing out across concerts, festivals, comedy tours and cultural showcases that are increasingly becoming high-intent environments for brand engagement.

Insights from the EY-Parthenon-BookMyShow CMO Survey indicate that more than half of brands executed experiential activations in the past year. 88% of spending brands that have invested in experiential marketing over the past 12 months now plan to continue doing so in a more structured manner. Over the past three years, 44% of active brands that increased experiential spending reported up to 30% growth. Budgets are expanding, objectives are becoming full-funnel and brand leaders are looking to experiences to drive brand awareness (67%), sampling and trial (56%), sales growth (56%) and brand storytelling (44%). For brands yet to activate experiential marketing meaningfully, the key barriers remain lack of expertise (71%), budget pressures (57%) and unresolved questions around measurement (43%).

The report introduces the Experiential Impact Pyramid, a framework that helps brands move from audience insight to narrative, participation and long-term cultural ownership, alongside a new measurement approach that shifts focus from impressions to emotion, loyalty and lasting impact. It outlines four priorities for CMOs: reallocating investments toward equity-building experiences, building a portfolio of marquee and hyperlocal formats for sustained relevance, measuring success through emotional and behavioural outcomes, and designing for utility and participation. Brands that invest consistently and design intentionally will move beyond visibility to build enduring cultural relevance. The report argues that India is not merely mirroring global momentum, but shaping its own experience-led model where culture-first engagement drives measurable commercial returns.

The report also highlights how early-moving brands across BFSI, FMCG, beauty, fashion, beverages, mobility and technology are embedding themselves meaningfully into live and cultural environments. Brands such as RuPay and Kotak Mahindra Bank have focused on access and convenience within high-demand live entertainment moments, while H&M, Budweiser 0.0 Non-Alcoholic Beer, Nivea and Vicks have invested in festival ecosystems that enable self-expression, community and trial. Beauty and lifestyle platforms such as Nykaa have turned immersive environments into discovery-led brand playgrounds by curating an IP -Nykaaland along with BookMyShow Live, while Visa, Diageo (Johnnie Walker Refreshing Mixer Non-Alcoholic) and Hyundai have leveraged experiential formats to reinforce premium, progressive and youth-forward positioning.

These brands are not merely sponsoring events, but designing experiences that solve real consumer frictions, enhance comfort and access, and feel native to the moment rather than interruptive. Importantly, this shift is still in its early stages, meaning it is far from too late for others to participate. As the experiential ecosystem continues to evolve, brands that enter with intention and consistency today still have a meaningful opportunity to shape consumer memory, relevance and long-term cultural presence.

Download the #BeyondAttentionIntoImmersion report from BMSforbrands.com. 

About BookMyShow

Launched in 2007, BookMyShow, owned and operated by Big Tree Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. (founded in 1999), is India's leading entertainment destination with global operations and the one-stop shop for every entertainment need. The firm is present in over 700 towns and cities in India and works with partners across the industry to provide unmatched entertainment experiences to millions of customers. Over the years, the company has evolved from a purely online ticketing platform for movies across 7,000 plus screens, to end-to-end management of live entertainment events including music concerts, live performances, theatricals, sports and more, all accomplished at par with global standards. Some of the key properties that BookMyShow Live, the live entertainment experiential division of BookMyShow, has brought to its markets over the past few years include Lollapalooza India, Bandland, Coldplay’s Music Of The Spheres World Tour, Travis Scott’s Circus Maximus Tour, Ed Sheeran: +–=÷x Tour, Maroon 5, Guns N’ Roses, Backstreet Boys’ DNA World Tour, Post Malone’s debut India show at the Feeding India concert, U2’s The Joshua Tree Tour, NBA’s debut games in India, Disney’s Aladdin, Cirque du Soleil BAZZAR as also international artists such as Justin Bieber to name a few. 

BookMyShow is invested in providing the best user experience, whether on-ground or online and to that effect, launched BookMyShow Stream, India’s largest home-grown transactional video-on-demand (TVOD) platform hosting award-winning and critically acclaimed content from around the world, complementing its cinemas business. BookMyShow also houses India’s most extensive organic reviews and ratings engine for movies and has driven technology innovations, such as the m-ticket and Movie Mode, impacting tens of millions of users and the industry at large. With continued support from marquee investors like TPG Growth, Stripes Group, Elevation Capital (formerly SAIF Partners), Accel and Network18, BookMyShow has constantly demonstrated category leadership, growing beyond India with operations in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, UAE and Sri Lanka.  BookMyShow is also committed to society at large, by way of BookAChange, by BookMyShow Foundation, dedicated to enriching lives through the transformative power of music and the performing arts.

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Media Contacts:

BookMyShow: media@bookmyshow.com

About EY-Parthenon

EY-Parthenon teams work with clients to navigate complexity by helping them to reimagine their eco-systems, reshape their portfolios and reinvent themselves for a better future. With global connectivity and scale, EY-Parthenon teams focus on Strategy Realized — helping CEOs design and deliver strategies to better manage challenges while maximizing opportunities as they look to transform their businesses. From idea to implementation, EY-Parthenon teams help organizations to build a better working world by fostering long-term value. EY-Parthenon is a brand under which a number of EY member firms across the globe provide strategy consulting services. For more information, please visit: https://www.ey.com/en_in/strategy/about-ey-parthenon

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