Diwali campaigns and the pressure of managing ₹8 lakh in ad spend in four weeks

Diwali 2022 was the first year we managed meaningful budgets across multiple clients simultaneously. Three clients. Combined spend of just over ₹8 lakh across October. Two e-commerce brands and one consumer services company running aggressive promotions for the festive season.

I am not going to pretend it was easy or that we did everything right. We made mistakes. We also got some things very right and the combination of both is why this month stays with me.

What Diwali does to performance marketing

The festive season is not just higher volume. It is a fundamentally different environment. CPMs on Meta go up significantly because every brand in India is buying impressions simultaneously. Cost-per-click on Google Search increases because competitors who are dormant for ten months of the year suddenly reactivate their campaigns with inflated bids. The user behavior also changes: browsing intent goes up, purchase intent goes up, but so does noise. More impressions, more competition, more distraction.

We had built our budgets and projections based on historical data, but the October CPMs we saw were 40 to 60 percent higher than our Q2 benchmarks. We had accounted for some increase. We had not accounted for that much. Two clients needed an honest conversation about revised expectations mid-campaign. One of them pushed back hard. The other appreciated the transparency.

What we did differently because of the pressure

We set up a shared Slack channel for real-time campaign updates with each client. Not daily reports, actual live visibility. If something went wrong, they saw it when we saw it. If something worked better than expected, they knew immediately. That transparency, which we had not always offered before, changed the client conversations significantly. The client who pushed back on the revised projections pushed back less hard than they might have because they had been watching the data alongside us all month.

We also made harder calls faster than we normally would. A campaign that was underperforming at day seven got paused and restructured at day eight. In a normal month, we might have given it another week. In a four-week sprint with real money at stake, we could not afford a slow diagnosis.

The lesson from Diwali 2022 is one I come back to often: high-pressure situations reveal your actual processes, not the ones you think you have. The gaps show up fast when the stakes are real. After that month, we rebuilt our campaign monitoring process to assume that conditions can change fast and that client communication needs to keep pace with the data.