Playbook: Reaching India's "Two" Markets.

32.7 million Indians travelled abroad last year. Another 35.4 million already live abroad. Two audiences. One culture. Almost never one media plan.

Every tourism board and airline CMO now has India on the board agenda. Most briefs, though, stop at the border. Buy media in Mumbai and Delhi, translate the campaign, count the arrivals.

That plan reaches one India. There is a second, and it may be the more valuable of the two.

The first India is leaving home.

The volume is real and rising. 32.7 million Indian nationals travelled abroad in 2025, up from 30.89 million in 2024 (Ministry of Tourism, Government of India, Annual Tourism Snapshot, 2025). The Pacific Asia Travel Association ranks India among the top five source markets for Asia Pacific through 2027, powered by a rising middle class (PATA Asia Pacific Visitor Forecasts 2025-2027, with The Hong Kong Polytechnic University). PATA's Annual Tourism Monitor lists India's emergence as both a source and a destination market among the region's key opportunities (PATA, 2025).

The value skew is the story. International trips account for roughly 1 per cent of all Indian travel but around a quarter of total travel spend, a share on track to reach 35 per cent within the decade (Booking.com and McKinsey, How India Travels, 2023). The same research projects India becoming the world's fourth-largest travel spender by 2030, with total travel expenditure heading towards USD 410 billion (Booking.com and McKinsey, 2023). Indian carriers have more than 1,000 aircraft on order, taking the national fleet towards 1,500 to 1,700 by 2030 (Booking.com and McKinsey, 2023). The seats are being built. The question is whose destination fills them.

The second India already left.

The diaspora is the largest on Earth. 35.4 million overseas Indians live across the world, comprising roughly 15.9 million non-resident Indians and 19.5 million persons of Indian origin (Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, 2025). The Gulf alone hosts around 14 million (Ministry of External Affairs, 2025).

Follow the money and you find the media plan. India remains the world's largest recipient of remittances, at USD 135.4 billion in the 2024-25 financial year (Economic Survey 2025-26, Government of India). The corridors are precisely mapped: the United States contributes 27.7 per cent, the UAE 19.2 per cent, the United Kingdom 10.8 per cent and Singapore 6.6 per cent (Reserve Bank of India remittances survey, cited in Economic Survey 2025-26). Where money crosses borders monthly, travellers follow seasonally. Visits to family, weddings, festivals, cricket tours.

Diaspora travellers behave differently. Their journeys are long haul by definition, clustered around weddings, festivals and family visits, and they shape the itineraries of relatives back home. For an airline, they anchor year-round demand on trunk routes. For a destination, they are the bridge audience: reach them in London or Dubai, and the message lands in Ludhiana and Kochi at the dinner table.

Where both Indias watch: the publishers and media owners that matter.

In-market, two names anchor everything. JioStar reaches over 80 per cent of India's TV viewers, with 760 million monthly active viewers and primetime leadership in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi and Malayalam, while JioHotstar has passed 1 billion app downloads (JioStar, 2026). The Times of India group reaches 270 million monthly users across print, TV, radio, outdoor and digital, with more than 3 billion monthly page views and 70 per cent of digital users under 35 (Bennett, Coleman & Co., 2026). Times OOH dominates India's major airports from Delhi to Mumbai (Bennett, Coleman & Co., 2026). Departure-point advertising, at the literal point of departure.

Cricket is the connective tissue between the two Indias. The International Cricket Council reports over 30 billion viewing hours a year and 500 million social followers, concentrated in South Asia, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, and growing in North America (ICC, 2026). Lay the ICC's audience map over the diaspora map. They are nearly the same picture. One sponsorship and paid media strategy, built around the cricketing calendar, reaches both Indias simultaneously.

In the corridors, buy the media the diaspora actually lives with. MBC Group's entertainment portfolio broadcasts in Arabic, Hindi, English, Farsi and Turkish and reaches virtually every household in the Middle East and North Africa (MBC Group, 2026). Sky UK reaches 198 million individuals monthly across the UK and Europe (Sky UK, 2026). CBS reaches virtually 100 per cent of American households (Paramount Global, 2026). Netflix's advertising tier counts 190 million viewers, 81 per cent of whom travelled in the past year, and one in two say its advertising influences destination choice (Netflix, 2026). JCDecaux covers 153 airports across 37 countries, including the world's top seven (JCDecaux, 2026). Airports are the one channel where both Indias are guaranteed to stand still for a moment.

Paid media wins attention. GEO wins the answer.

India's outbound boom is digital to its core. PATA credits digital platforms and social-media travel inspiration with fuelling outbound growth (PATA, 2025), and trip planning is moving into AI answer engines and social search. Ask an AI assistant where to spend Diwali, which airline flies Delhi to Melbourne, or where a family of five should go in June. The answer is already being written. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) determines whether your destination or airline appears in it.

This is why we treat advertising and discovery as one system, not two budgets. Paid media across TV, Connected TV, digital, social and out-of-home builds the demand. GEO, structured content and share-of-voice benchmarking across the major AI engines make sure that when either India asks the question, your brand is in the answer. Multiverse Partners builds GEO programmes optimised across every major AI platform, alongside the media plan rather than after it.

One brief. Both Indias. How the buying works.

Buying this properly means media owners in India, corridor publishers across the Gulf, the UK, North America and Australia, airport networks, Connected TV and cricket. Different currencies, different regulators, different contracts. That is exactly the friction Multiverse Partners exists to remove.

"We make global media buying frictionless: one contract, one partner, every market." That is how our Co-Founder and Managing Director, Basil Chua, describes the model, and it is built for briefs like this one. As a global media buying partner, we contract international premium media directly and buy local media across 50+ markets through vetted in-market agency partners, in local languages, settling in 10+ currencies, with one report and one billing (Multiverse Partners, 2026). Mumbai sits inside our local partner execution network, alongside Dubai, London, New York and Sydney. The corridors are already wired.

We have done this at national scale. For a national tourism board client, Multiverse Partners executed a data-driven international media strategy across 50+ markets, engineered to drive arrivals, not just awareness, with measurable arrival uplift mapped to economic return (Multiverse Partners, 2026). For an aviation group client, we executed cross-border campaigns through more than 20 independent agency partners worldwide, settling in 14 currencies, selling seats on its airline brands (Multiverse Partners, 2026). Arrivals. Seats. Bookings. The outcome nouns that matter.

And if you hold the AOR, we extend you. We never compete with you. PR agencies, creative agencies, independent shops and holding group media agencies bring us the brief or the last mile. We deliver the markets, the publishers and the settlement, under your brand where required. Multiverse Partners is a member of the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA), the Singapore Business Federation and the Association of Advertising and Marketing Singapore.

Questions CMOs ask us about India.

How should a tourism board reach Indian travellers in 2026? Plan for two audiences from the first slide. In-market mass reach through JioStar and the Times of India group, corridor media across the Gulf, the UK, North America and Australia, cricket as the cultural spine, and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) so the destination surfaces when travellers ask AI where to go.

Which publishers and media owners reach the Indian diaspora? JioHotstar. the India's premier entertainment and sports media group, MBC Group's Hindi-language entertainment across the Middle East, Sky in the UK and Europe, CBS and Paramount in the United States, Netflix's advertising tier, ICC cricket properties, and JCDecaux's airport network across the departure and arrival points of every major corridor. And more.

Can one partner buy media in India and the diaspora markets at once? Yes. That is the purpose of a global media buying partner. One contract, one point of contact, one invoice, with in-market execution across every corridor and full support for multi-currency settlement and cross-border compliance.

Who are Multiverse Partners' accredited publishers? Jiostar Entertainment and Sports, Times of India, Economic Times. Through our vetted local agency partners, we have full access to all publishers in India and digital advertising.

Contact Multiverse Partners

Talk to us about your global media buying strategy:

• Basil Chua, Managing Director, basil@multiversepartners.com

• Eunice Goh, Chief Client Officer, eunice@multiverseparners.com.

• General enquiries: hello@multiversepartners.com

Multiverse Partners Network Pte Ltd. Registered office: 8 Wilkie Road 03-01, Wilkie Edge, Singapore 228095.

Website: www.multiversepartners.com

Sources

Ministry of Tourism, Government of India, Annual Tourism Snapshot (2025). Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, Population of Overseas Indians (2025). Economic Survey 2025 to 26, Government of India, including the Reserve Bank of India Survey on Remittances. Pacific Asia Travel Association, Asia Pacific Visitor Forecasts 2025-2027 (with The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) and Annual Tourism Monitor (2025). Booking.com and McKinsey, How India Travels (2023). Publisher and media owner audience figures as supplied by the respective media owners (2026); all remain the property of their respective owners.