Hire Indian creators from anywhere.

Who this page is for

You sell to Indian consumers, or to the Indian diaspora, and you are not based in India. Maybe you are a D2C brand shipping into the market, a SaaS company hiring here, a tourism board, a university recruiting students, or a global brand whose India distributor wants creator support.

The strategic question — which creators, which angle, which budget — is the same one Indian brands ask us. What is different is the operational layer around it, and that layer is where first-time overseas campaigns usually lose time. This page is the honest version of that layer.

What overseas brands get wrong first

TikTok is not a channel here. India banned TikTok in June 2020 and it has not come back. A media plan built on TikTok creators has to be rebuilt around Instagram Reels and YouTube — including YouTube Shorts, which behaves quite differently from Reels in both discovery and shelf life. This is the single most common brief we have to correct.

"India" is not one audience. A campaign in English out of Mumbai and a campaign in Tamil out of Coimbatore are different products with different costs and different creators — see the city markets for what actually varies. Briefs that say "target India" get priced as the widest possible option, which is rarely what the brand wanted.

Follower count converts badly across borders. Reach is cheap in India relative to most Western markets, which tempts overseas brands into buying large accounts because the price looks like a bargain. It is usually the worst value on the table — the same budget spread across vetted micro creators buys more genuine attention and far more usable content.

Exchange-rate thinking distorts the brief. A budget that looks small in USD can be a serious campaign in INR, and brands routinely under-brief because they assume it will not buy much. Tell us the number and we will tell you what it actually buys.

Disclosure: the rules are real and they are enforced

• India's advertising regulator, ASCI, publishes Guidelines for Influencer Advertising in Digital Media. Paid partnerships must carry a clear label.
• The disclosure has to be upfront and hard to miss — visible without expanding the caption, and not buried in a wall of hashtags.
• It must be in a language the audience understands. An English #ad on a Tamil or Bhojpuri video is not a defence.
• It applies to video and stories too, not just captions — a label that only appears in a description nobody opens does not count.
• Platform tools alone are not sufficient on their own. We put the label in the content as well as in the platform's paid-partnership tag.
• Responsibility does not stop at the creator. The advertiser is on the hook, which is precisely why we contract disclosure rather than hope for it.

Paying Indian creators from abroad

This is the part that stalls campaigns. Indian creators invoice and expect to be paid in rupees, into Indian bank accounts. A foreign entity paying forty individual creators directly means forty cross-border remittances, forty sets of paperwork, bank charges on each, and a finance team learning Indian documentation requirements in the middle of a campaign.

The practical answer is that we contract and pay the creators in INR, and your finance team deals with one supplier and one invoice instead of forty. You still see every individual creator rate we negotiate — the transparency does not change just because the money moves once.

We are not your tax advisers and this page is not tax advice. Withholding, GST treatment and remittance documentation depend on where you are incorporated, whether you have an Indian entity, and what the treaty position is. Any agency that gives you a confident one-line answer to that without asking where you are registered is guessing. Bring your accountant in early; we will give them the campaign structure and the invoices they need.

Language, and why it decides the budget

English and Hindi together reach the widest Indian audience and are the default for national campaigns. They are also the most competitive, which means the most advertiser demand chasing the same creators.

Regional-language creators — Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi — typically hold much closer relationships with their audiences, and for a brand with real regional distribution they are often where the campaign works hardest. The trade-off is that you need someone who can actually review the content, which is a service we provide rather than a box you tick.

Diaspora campaigns invert all of this. If you are selling to Indians in the US, UK, Canada, UAE or Australia, the creators worth hiring are frequently based in those countries rather than in India, and the cultural register is different again. Say which of the two you mean in the brief; they are not interchangeable and the shortlists share almost no names.

Working across time zones

India runs on IST, which is UTC+5:30 — five and a half hours ahead of London in winter, roughly nine and a half to twelve and a half ahead of the US, and an hour and a half ahead of Dubai. The awkward gap is the US; the useful consequence is that work briefed at the end of a US day is often waiting when that day starts again.

We run approvals asynchronously by default — written briefs, content review in a shared thread, and a scheduled call only where one is genuinely needed. The overlap with Europe, the UK, the Gulf, Singapore and Australia is comfortable enough that this rarely comes up outside the Americas.

What we will tell you not to do

If your campaign is aimed at a non-Indian audience, we are the wrong agency and we will say so on the first call rather than after you have paid a retainer. Our creator network and our market judgement are Indian; that is the thing we are good at and it is the only thing we sell.

We also will not quote you an Indian rate card. Rates here vary by multiples for identical verified reach depending on city, language, category, season and how much advertiser competition exists in that market — which is why this site publishes no benchmark tables at all. You get real negotiated numbers against your actual brief, not a spreadsheet we made up.