What UPI Did To Indian Advertising
Every conversion funnel ever drawn has a step near the bottom where people fall out. For a long time in India that step was payment, and an enormous amount of marketing effort existed to push people through it.
UPI removed it. Not reduced it, removed it: a two-second authentication that works between strangers, across banks, at a roadside stall and inside an app, at no cost to either side.
What UPI removed, and what advertising was compensating for
A lot. Cash on delivery existed because people did not trust paying first. Discount codes existed partly to justify the effort of completing a card form. Repeated retargeting existed because abandoned baskets were abandoned at the payment page.
Strip out the friction and a meaningful share of what looked like persuasion work turns out to have been administrative work. The campaign was not changing minds; it was compensating for a bad checkout.
The subscription economy this made possible
Recurring payments in India were historically difficult, which is why so many categories that are subscription-first elsewhere were one-off purchases here. Autopay mandates changed the shape of what can be sold.
That is a marketing change disguised as a payments change. A brand that can charge monthly can afford to acquire a customer at a loss, which alters what it is willing to spend on advertising and how it measures whether the spend worked.
Half of what Indian marketing called persuasion was really just paperwork that somebody eventually deleted.
What got harder, not easier
Impulse cuts both ways. If buying takes two seconds, so does buying a competitor, and the loyalty that came from the effort of setting up a payment relationship has gone with the effort.
Switching costs used to be a real moat in Indian consumer services, and a great deal of them were payment friction rather than genuine preference. Brands that mistook one for the other have been finding out.
The part still being underused
The most interesting consequence is at the smallest scale. A vendor with a printed code can accept money from anyone, which means the smallest businesses in the country now have the same transaction capability as the largest.
Advertising has barely engaged with that. Most thinking about the payment revolution has focused on apps and platforms, when the more consequential change is that millions of tiny businesses became addressable commercial entities, and almost nobody is talking to them.
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