Attention economy in India isn’t centralised. It is regionalised, localised, fiercely defended

New Delhi: India has never been a monolith; it has always been a mosaic of accents, appetites, cultures, rituals, passions and allegiances colliding in contested space. 

But for years, Indian advertising has been guilty of a lazy shorthand. The ‘pan-India’ brief. The ‘Hindi heartland.’ The one-size-fits-all visual of a cricket-loving, masala-doused, middle-class consumer that allegedly represents India.

The phrase “Hindi heartland” is itself a marketer’s crutch - a comforting fiction of scale. But social media exposes how hollow it is. Uttar Pradesh doesn’t scroll as one bloc; Awadhi humour accounts, Bhojpuri song reels, Braj devotional content, and Bundelkhandi satire each dominate their own micro-feeds. Bhojpuri satirist Neha Singh Rathore has built an audience of over 1.2 million subscribers, with folk-political songs crossing hundreds of millions of views, while playback star Ritesh Pandey’s Hello Kaun shattered records with 900 million views, even topping the Global YouTube Music Videos chart. In Bundelkhand, meme pages in the local dialect thrive on rustic political parody that makes little sense outside the region but is viral within it. Bihar is no different: Bhojpuri TikTok stars, Maithili folk musicians, Magahi stand-up comics - each speaks to an audience as distinct as sub-markets in Europe. Madhya Pradesh shows the same fault-lines.

What this reveals is simple: India is not one attention market but dozens of attention economies coexisting, colliding, and competing. Social media doesn’t aggregate them into sameness; it amplifies their differences, giving each language, dialect, and culture its own algorithmic stage. 

To call all of this one heartland is like calling the entire continent of Europe ‘the Latin bloc’. It may simplify a media plan, but it blinds you to where attention is actually captured—in the sharp edges of subcultures, not in the fiction of a national or regional whole.

And this matters even more when brands claim they want to speak to Bharat and not just India. Going beyond the metros isn’t about cheaper packs or wider distribution—it’s about cultural precision. Many FMCG giants have tried to ‘crack Bharat’ with generic Hindi campaigns, simply translated into local languages, only to watch them fall flat in places where aspirations, cultural nuances and even humour codes were different. They reached households, yes, but they didn’t reach hearts. Without understanding the micro-textures of ritual and cultural pride, what brands build is distribution, not intimacy—and intimacy is where loyalty and attention truly live.

So, here’s the truth: India is a boardroom idea. Bharat is the battleground. And attention -the most finite currency of our age—is being captured not by national clichés, but by hyper-regional codes.

Scroll through Instagram at 11 pm. What do you see? Not slick Hindi campaigns with Bollywood stars. You see a Tamil meme page roasting local politicians. A Marathi reel using Lavani beats for Gen Z jokes. A Bengali creator weaving nostalgia with Rabindra Sangeet and street food. Each of these posts racks up more engagement in its geography than a pan-India FMCG spot could dream of.

Local stars are local Gods

The new “celebrity economy” is brutally local. Dhanush in Tamil Nadu, Nani in Andhra, or Dev in Bengal are not just actors - they’re cultural nodes. Even micro-influencers - like a Coimbatore bike vlogger, or a Nagpur Marathi comic - have parasocial intimacy that national stars can’t replicate. Their followers don’t just “like” content; they internalise it as cultural currency.

Brands that fail to see this will keep wondering why their multimillion-dollar Bollywood tie-ups are met with polite shrugs outside metros.

India’s popular delivery apps learned the Language of Love

It didn’t just localise communication; it built cultural intimacy. Its Tamil posts weren’t Hindi lines clumsily translated - they joked about filter coffee habits, mess lunches, and idli sambar portion sizes. In Kolkata, it tapped into the adda culture and fish nostalgia. In Hyderabad, it slipped biryani references with the precision of an insider.

This wasn’t brand voice - this was brand belonging. And in doing so, they cracked the code of brand love in a regional world: consumers must feel the brand speaks their cultural tongue, not a generic national accent. That intimacy is sticky. It builds not just attention but affection, the kind people defend in group chats and push into their WhatsApp forwards.

The tides have turned

For decades, the flow was top-down: national campaigns would be translated into Tamil, Telugu, or Bengali. That model is dead. The tide has reversed. Today, regional is what goes national. Regional is what goes global.

The proof? South Indian cinema. Once dismissed as ‘regional’, it now dominates the national box office and global charts. Baahubali made Bollywood look small. Pushpa memes crossed state borders before the film even left theatres. RRR stormed not just Indian feeds but global stages, culminating in an Oscar and a Golden Globe. That’s not translation. That’s cultural takeover, cashing in on the attention economy.

Or take music. Once dismissed as local, regional is now the new cool - and Aditya Gadhvi is its global proof point. His Coke Studio Bharat track Khalasi sparked over 1.6 million UGC creations and went on to hit #1 on Shazam India while peaking at #8 on Global Viral Songs. A tune once rooted in local folk now travels the world on its own terms - with artists like Aditya Gadhvi and Mame Khan now even finding Grammy consideration for their regional sounds.

What this means for brands

For brands, the shift demands a new playbook. 

First, language-market fit now supersedes product-market fit; if your brand cannot speak the room, it cannot sell to the room, and language must be treated as core experience design, not an afterthought in post-production. What this means is cultural nuance itself must become the brief, inscribed at inception rather than retrofitted at execution. 

Second, this means building truly multi-cultural teams - planners, copywriters, art directors, meme-smiths, people who revel in a Thalaiva punchline as easily as a Lavani beat or a Punjabi proverb. And marketers, on their side, need more ears to the ground and more eyes on the feed, not relying on sanitised decks from metros, but absorbing the dialects, rituals, and culture codes that drive attention at the margins.

Third, brands must adopt reverse dubbing: launching in the vernacular first, then allowing the strongest ideas to travel upward into Hindi or English, thereby inverting the old hierarchy of communication. 

Finally, intimacy is love, but sensitivity is crucial; honouring taboos, celebrating micro-rituals, and invoking nostalgia is not perfunctory box-ticking but the essential mechanism through which enduring brand belonging is forged.

The Indian attention economy isn’t one dish plated for all; it is a charcuterie board - eclectic, uneven, fiercely local. Brands that learn to savour the spread, not just pick the easiest slice, will be the ones who truly belong.