With competition for eyeballs getting increasingly fierce on social media, digital influencers are testing out physical events to increase their chances of getting noticed and take in valuable feedback. Such events also provide brands a new opportunity to propagate their messages and improve returns on their investment on such influencers.
To be sure, it is but a nascent journey that not many have been brave enough to embark on, simply because the costs of physical events often lead to financial losses.
Take Ghelani, 31, a Mumbai-based creator of comedy and lifestyle content. Ghelani, who has more than 1.3 million followers on Instagram, spent most of the past five years curating digital content. Now, for the past eight months, he has given about 12 performances of his standup comedy show in cities like Ahmedabad, Mumbai, even London.
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“Taking my comedy from the screen to the stage is a dream come true,” Ghelani said in an emailed reply to Mint’s queries. “When you are performing live, there are no retakes, no edits or backup shots. Every room is a different energy and a different performance.”
Influencer shows are mostly not able to make money due to the high costs involved in booking venues and production. Ticketing platforms like BookMyShow and Zomato District (which has acquired Insider.in), where their tickets are listed, also charge a commission. Queries sent by Mint to BookMyShow and Zomato District on Friday did not receive a response.
Nonetheless, audience are responding well to these experience opportunities.
For his final show in Mumbai on 11 May, Ghelani plans to scale up by performing in front of a larger audience of 2,000 compared to a few hundred in the other cities so far. The tickets were sold out in a just over a day despite being priced at ₹1,000-5,000. Typically, tickets for comedy shows range between ₹500 and ₹2,000.
“We did not do any marketing for the show besides Viraj posting about it on his Instagram story, and within a couple of hours, 95% seats got booked,” Vinay Pillai, chief business officer at Pocket aces, the agency that represents Ghelani, told Mint.
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Over the past couple of years, India has hosted large concerts for big names like Coldplay, Diljit Dosanjh and Ed Sheeran, who have performed for packed rafters. Despite the scale being much smaller, digital influencers are also seeing demand for their performances grow.
Larissa D’sa, 33, a travel content creator also based in Mumbai with close to 600,000 YouTube subscribers, created a half-hour-long travel film about her experience at Kolkata during Durga Puja. Instead of just uploading it on YouTube, she screened it at a live event at the Veda Kunba theatre in Mumbai in September 2024.
About 250 people bought tickets priced at ₹500-600 to experience the culture of Kolkata through her film at the event called ‘beyond borders and banter’. Besides the film, there was folk music performance, Bengali delicacies such as rosogolla and jhalmuri, and mementos from the city, all symbolic of her Kolkata visit.
“The event gave me a chance to stimulate all the senses of my viewers beyond just the audio-visual that social media restricts me to and give them a very unique experience of my travel content,” said D’sa.
It was an expensive affair, and D’sa said she could not recoup the ₹5-6 lakh expenses that were incurred. But it did have its positives.
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“What is truly remarkable is that even months later, people still recall the experience and how it brought our community closer together – that, to me, is the real measure of success,” she said. D’sa plans to do similar events again, to give her followers more opportunities to interact with her in person.
The brand angle
These events represent a new opportunity for brands as well. By drawing in a large, targeted audience through social media buzz around influencers, marketers unlock offline marketing opportunities both for their brand and their products.
“On social media, there is so much content that it is hard to get visibility even through influencer marketing, and there is practically no guarantee that the customer has fully understood what your product is even if they watch reels about it on Instagram,” said Ruchi Nagrecha, founder of non-alcoholic beverage startup Sobriety Sips, which had set up a pop-up stall at D’sa’s film screening.
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Nagrecha sees this as a great opportunity as a startup to gain more visibility and increase their customer base. “We get to explain to consumers about our product and make them try it,” she said, adding that this becomes a good networking opportunity where they can also shoot social media content with influencers.
Industry analysts believe that while going offline helps influencers stand out, it also improves return on investment (RoI) for brands.
“The influencer industry is getting overcrowded and has reached a point of saturation where almost 90% of them are struggling to get noticed,” said Prateek Sinha, partner at consulting firm PwC India. “Anything unique they do, like these offline events, creates a buzz and helps them cut the clutter and catch the eye.”
For brands, these events are a more assured way to get the best out of their marketing monies. “This can give them 10-15 times better RoI than digital influencer activities,” Sinha added.
He emphasized that even if marketers and influencers don’t immediately profit from these events, they should view them as investments in customer acquisition costs, rather than losses, given the nascent stage of this concept.
