Diwali 2025 campaigns -- what we planned vs what actually happened
Diwali 2025 fell on October 20. By mid-September we were in planning mode for four clients who had Diwali campaigns in scope. By late October we had results, most of them good, one of them instructive in all the wrong ways.
I want to write this down while it is fresh because campaign post-mortems are only useful if you actually record what happened rather than letting the memory smooth over the rough parts.
The campaign that exceeded targets
A D2C gifts and lifestyle brand we work with had their best Diwali in four years. The difference from prior years was not a bigger budget. It was a longer lead time and earlier audience warming.
We started building the warm audience in August. Instagram content around gifting themes, email newsletter shifts to seasonal topics, retargeting audiences set up and seeded with summer traffic. By the time the Diwali promotion launched in early October, we were advertising to an audience that had been consuming relevant content for six weeks. Cost per acquisition was 31 percent lower than Diwali 2024 on the same budget.
The campaign that was genuinely average
An education client running admissions for a January batch used Diwali as a promotional hook for early admissions. The campaign performed to expectations, about 2.8x ROAS on their ad spend, which was the target. Nothing wrong with it. But looking at the creative in hindsight, the Diwali hook felt like a theme rather than a genuine reason to act. "Diwali special offer: 15% off on January batch fees" is functional. It is not compelling in a market where every education brand runs a Diwali discount.
Next year the brief for this client will push harder on specificity. What makes this batch meaningful to someone considering it in October versus January? The Diwali timing should be a reason to decide now, not just a peg for a discount.
The campaign we will not repeat in this form
A retail client came to us in early October asking for a full Diwali campaign by October 15. Five weeks of lead time for a client with no existing email list, no warm retargeting audience, no approved creative assets, and a new landing page needed.
We should have said no to the timeline. We did not. We delivered what we could in five weeks, which was a Google Search campaign targeting existing demand and a basic Meta campaign with cold audiences. The Google campaign performed fine. The Meta campaign underperformed because cold audiences at Diwali rates, when every brand in India is running Diwali ads simultaneously, are expensive and unconverted.
The lesson is one I already knew and needed to be reminded of: Diwali performance marketing requires a head start you cannot compress. The audience warming, the creative testing, the landing page optimisation, those are not steps you can skip. They are the work.
Next year, any client who wants a Diwali campaign gets the planning conversation in July.