Influencer marketing in Pune and Jaipur

Pune gives influencer marketing three reasons to exist: a very large student population, an IT workforce and a car-and-parts belt. A Pune brief is mostly a decision about which of those people you want and whether you speak to them in Marathi, Hindi or English. Jaipur gives it tourism, a jewellery and block-print trade that sells far beyond Rajasthan, and a wedding calendar. A Jaipur brief is mostly a decision about which of those you are selling into and which month you are in. In both cities the two things a first brief gets wrong are the calendar and the permission to film.

Everything below rests on public records as of 24 October 2026. Where a point rests on a trade directory or a news report and not on an official page, the text says so.

Pune keeps four calendars at once

Three of the city’s commercial engines are on public record. The IT parks come first. Hinjewadi is formally the Rajiv Gandhi Infotech Park, and the Districts Project’s industry page for Pune lists further campuses at Kharadi, Magarpatta and Viman Nagar. The auto and engineering cluster comes second, on the Chakan estate north of the city and in Pimpri-Chinchwad, where Bajaj Auto and Tata Motors set up in the mid-1960s. Education comes third. Savitribai Phule Pune University is the affiliating university for a long list of engineering, management, commerce and education colleges, and the city’s rental flats, cafes and cheap eating streets are shaped by that student crowd.

The fourth buyer is older than the other three: the Peths, the old-city neighbourhoods around Laxmi Road and Tulshibaug where the wholesale trade, the festival year and the Marathi-speaking household sit. Students move with term dates, campus staff with appraisal cycles and the monsoon commute, the auto belt with shifts and the Peths with the festival year. A brief that says only “Pune” has not chosen one of them.

Nobody publishes a list of who spends on influencers in Pune, and this guide will not invent one. What the economy makes plausible is a shortlist. Student-facing brands sell housing, food and courses, and the edtech guide covers that category. Brands aimed at salaried professionals sell flats along the corridors, two-wheelers, finance and fitness. Automotive brands can lean on the city’s industry, and automotive YouTubers in India maps the creators. A car plant is not a customer for a reel, but the people who work around it are an audience.

Fig. 01 · At a glance

The four buyers inside a Pune brief

Marathi, Hindi or English in Pune: what the Census gives you and what it cannot

In the 2011 Census, as the Districts Project compiles it, about 78 per cent of Pune district residents gave Marathi as their mother tongue and about 10 per cent gave Hindi. The same tables read for the municipal corporation alone, in one market-research firm’s reading of the Census language tables, put Marathi nearer two in three and the Hindi group nearer one in six. The city is less Marathi and more Hindi-speaking than the district around it.

Treat those as a 2011 mother-tongue count and nothing more. They say nothing about the language a twenty-year-old watches reels in today, and a good deal of Pune content code-switches inside one sentence. The cheap test: for a creator’s last ten posts, write down the language of the spoken hook, the caption and the comments. If the comments run in a different language from the hook, the audience is not the one the hook suggests.

Public creator directories list Pune-based creators working in Marathi on humour, culture and festival coverage, and in Marathi or English on food, fashion, motorbikes and travel. Use them for discovery and nothing else, because they take a city from a profile bio and not from the audience. Instagram’s help page says its Viewers insight shows top countries and top cities of the accounts reached, once an account reaches more than a hundred. Ask for that screen. Checking an influencer’s audience covers the rest of the audit.

Where Pune shops, studies and goes out

Pune has no single centre, so a store, cafe or clinic brief should name a zone. Laxmi Road, Tulshibaug and the Peths carry old-city festival retail. FC Road and Deccan carry the student crowd. Koregaon Park, Kalyani Nagar and Viman Nagar carry cafes, nightlife and malls, and the NH7 Weekender music festival began in Koregaon Park in 2010. Baner, Aundh and Wakad are housing for the IT workforce, with Hinjewadi, Kharadi and Magarpatta as the campuses. Pimpri-Chinchwad and Chakan are the industrial belt. A person crosses Pune for an event and rarely for a coffee, so if the product is a place, cast a creator whose audience lives near it.

Ganeshotsav, the Wari and the weeks central Pune stops

Ganeshotsav ends with the Anant Chaturdashi immersion, and Pune’s version is a city event with its own order of precedence. Five honoured mandals, led by Kasba Ganpati, go first and hundreds of others follow. In 2026 the main procession ran for 33 hours and 27 minutes, longer than in each of the previous four years, according to the Indian Express report of 26 September 2026. The police commissioner put about 650 mandals on four routes: Laxmi, Tilak, Kelkar and Kumthekar roads.

For a brief this means three things. Do not plan a creator shoot or a product handover in the old city in that window. Expect creators to be busy with their own festival coverage, so availability thins before the festival and not only during it. And expect a paid post that is not about Ganpati to compete with a feed full of Ganpati. Published almanacs put Ganesh Chaturthi in early September in 2027. Festive-season planning covers the run into Diwali.

The Ashadhi Wari is the other date that moves a Pune shoot. The palkhis of Sant Dnyaneshwar and Sant Tukaram walk from Alandi and Dehu and halt in the city for two nights on the way to Pandharpur, in June or July, as the Maharashtra municipal administration directorate’s schedule shows for 2025. The date tracks Ashadhi Ekadashi and moves each year. Event tie-ins carry a different risk. The NH7 Weekender took a year-long break after its 2024 edition was cancelled at the last minute by local police, as Music Ally reported. Do not pay for assets built around an event until the organiser holds police and venue approval.

Filming in Pune: Shaniwar Wada, the metro and the state single window

Maharashtra runs a single-window system for film, serial, advertisement and documentary shoots. Its 2018 government resolution made the Maharashtra Film, Stage and Cultural Development Corporation the nodal agency and limited the system to government land, so private locations fall outside it. A later resolution, reported by Hindustan Times, waived location charges at state-owned public places other than the film cities but kept a security deposit. The Corporation’s joint managing director has also said there is a 50 per cent rental concession for Marathi films and series.

Pune Metro has its own written policy. Maha Metro’s filming policy prices stations and trains by the scheduled hour, asks for applications at least fifteen days ahead, wants a synopsis shown before approval, requires crew to buy tickets to enter the paid area and bars any use that projects a negative image of the metro. It gives Marathi films and television series half the rate. Shaniwar Wada, the Peshwa palace, is a centrally protected monument, and the Government of India’s India Cine Hub lists it among its shooting locations. One ASI circle’s visitor guidelines prohibit commercial or professional photography, videography, tripods and drones without prior written permission.

A brand-paid reel is commercial in that sense, even if one person shoots it on a phone. Whether a guard enforces that on a given afternoon is another question, and the brand cannot rely on the answer, because the brand pays for the content and owns the reputational risk. Ask the creator in writing which authority manages the location. Influencer contract clauses covers where that line goes.

Fig. 03 · At a glance

Permission comes before the shot list

Jaipur sells to the world from a walled city and an export zone

The Government of Rajasthan’s own investment page for gems and jewellery says the state accounts for 17.5 per cent of India’s gem and jewellery exports and about 90 per cent of its meenakari exports. It also says Jaipur processes more than 300 varieties of precious and semi-precious stones and that the Sitapura special economic zone houses 154 units. Johari Bazaar in the old city is the retail and trading street. Sitapura, south of the city, is where export manufacturing and testing sit. The Jaipur Gem and Jewellery Bourse, promoted by the export council GJEPC and the Jewellers Association Jaipur, is planned there, with groundbreaking reported for June 2026.

Cloth is the second trade. Sanganeri hand block printing comes from Sanganer, a village near Jaipur, and Bagru has its own block-printing tradition. UNESCO inscribed the walled city on the World Heritage List in 2019 and named Jaipur a Creative City of Crafts and Folk Art in 2015. Its World Heritage entry describes a city designed as a commercial capital that has kept its commercial, artisanal and cooperative traditions. A heritage or craft brief can cite either record instead of leaning on an unsourced local claim.

Who buys here is again a reasoned list. Heritage hotels, palace venues and restaurants buy for tourists. Jewellers buy for wedding customers, many of whom live outside Jaipur. Block-print and home-textile brands sell online to the whole country. The catch is that much of the jewellery and textile trade is wholesale or export, and a Jaipur-based exporter may have no use for a reel, since its buyers are traders reading catalogues. Travel and hospitality briefs cover the tourist side.

Creators film at the trade shows, so know the dates. GJEPC lists IGJS Jaipur for 16 to 18 April 2027. The Jaipur Jewellery Show is listed for December 2026 at the JECC exhibition centre in Sitapura, though its own Instagram account and a trade-press listing give different day ranges. A creator filming an exhibitor’s stand needs the exhibitor’s consent, and that belongs in the contract.

Hindi first, with Dhundari and Marwari underneath

The 2011 Census, as summarised on Wikipedia, has 69.69 per cent of the city giving Hindi, 9.85 per cent Rajasthani, 5.86 per cent Urdu, 4.36 per cent Marwari, 3.93 per cent Dhundari and 2.54 per cent Sindhi. A reply from the Ministry of Home Affairs to the Lok Sabha on 20 July 2021 adds the detail that matters for a brief: the Census counts Rajasthani as a mother tongue grouped under Hindi. So a Census table that says “Hindi” for Jaipur includes the speech people use at home.

A Jaipur brief should choose among three voices and say why. Plain Hindi is the safe default for retail and consumer goods. Hindi with local idiom suits a heritage or food brand that wants to sound like the city. English suits hospitality, exports and anything aimed at visitors. Say whether captions run in Devanagari or Roman script, because creators split on it. Running a regional launch in four languages covers casting when one claim has to run in more than one.

The Jaipur creator pool, as public directories show it, leans to travel, food, heritage photography, wedding photography and film, drone work and a kind of account that is a city page and not a person: Jaipur updates, memes and news. Ask who runs those pages and whether the audience is local, tourist or Jaipur natives living elsewhere. A fair share of travel content about Jaipur is made by creators from Delhi and Mumbai who come to shoot, which matters when you decide whether a local creator is worth the premium. Travel vloggers in India covers that side.

Fig. 04 · At a glance

Jaipur in three lines

Wedding dates, tourist winter and Teej: Jaipur’s year

Published muhurat listings put the first vivah date of the 2026 season on 21 November, after Dev Uthani Ekadashi on 20 November. They show no dates from the Kharmas period in mid-December until about 15 January 2027 and no dates through Chaturmas from the middle of July. The listings disagree on how many dates there are in a month, so confirm with the Drik Panchang or a priest before you build a plan on one date. Wedding-season influencer marketing in India covers the planning side.

The tourist season sits on the same months. An ETTravelWorld report on the current season put the peak at November through February. The Jaipur Literature Festival runs from 14 to 18 January 2027 at Hotel Clarks Amer, which the organiser names as the venue for its twentieth edition.

Two other dates close the old city. The Rajasthan Tourism festivals page lists the Teej procession from the City Palace through Tripolia Bazaar and Chhoti Chaupar on 15 and 16 August 2026, and Gangaur in Chaitra with a procession through Tripolia Bazaar and Gangauri Bazaar. For a jeweller or an outfitter the plan is to shoot in October and early November, release into the season and keep a buffer for the weeks when creators are booked.

Filming in Jaipur: the state window and the walls

Rajasthan runs one window for all of it. The Commissioner of Tourism is the nodal officer, and the state’s film shooting page routes applications for the police, the district collector, the municipal corporation and state-protected monuments through it. The 2025 film policy says an application goes in on the SSO portal at least fifteen days before the shoot, is forwarded to the collector, the police and the department concerned, and is location and date specific and non-transferable.

The monuments matter most to a Jaipur brief. The state list of protected monuments includes Hawa Mahal, Albert Hall, Jyotish Yantralaya, Nahargarh, the Amber Palace and the ramparts and gates of the old city. The shooting regulations bar filming in any part of a monument covered by a roof, bar heavy equipment such as a crane near it, bar vehicles inside the protected area and bar flash on paintings. The film policy names drones, explosives, animals, firearms and special effects in a clause of their own, so read that clause before a drone goes anywhere near a monument.

Payment rules do not change with the city. A creator in Pune or Jaipur who invoices with GST and is paid after TDS is handled the same way as one in any other city, and GST invoicing for influencer payments and TDS on influencer payments cover both. The generic lines of a brief are covered once in how to brief an influencer marketing agency. What follows is only the part that changes with the city.

What a Pune brief changes, and what a Jaipur brief changes

A Pune brief changes four lines. It names the buyer from the four above, writes the language of the hook line and the caption separately, names a zone for any physical product and lists the dates the city loses: the immersion, the Wari halt and the monsoon. The generic lines of a brief are covered once in how to brief an influencer marketing agency. An illustrative paragraph, with every detail replaced by yours: “Audience: salaried residents of Baner, Aundh and Wakad. Hook line in Marathi, product details in English. Post live outside Ganeshotsav and the Wari. Shoot where the creator holds written permission.”

A Jaipur brief changes four other lines. It says whether the viewer is a tourist, a local family or a buyer in another city, picks the voice among plain Hindi, Hindi with local idiom and English, puts the shoot before the season and the release inside it, and names who holds the permit for every heritage location. An illustrative paragraph: “Audience: wedding customers in Delhi and Mumbai buying Jaipur jewellery. Hindi with local idiom. Shoot in October. Release from the third week of November. Locations: our own showroom and one private palace hotel, permit held by the hotel.”

When a city campaign is the wrong tool

Do not run a city filter on a product that ships to the whole country. A block-print label in Jaipur or a food brand in Pune that sells online should cast for language and category and let the audience export decide the geography. Do not use the Census figures above as targeting, because they describe mother tongue fifteen years ago and not viewing. Do not build a trade brief for Jaipur exporters around reels. And do not plan a heritage shoot you cannot get permission for in time: a permitted private venue and a good shot list beat a monument and a stopped shoot.

Questions brands ask

Do Pune campaigns need Marathi creators? Not by default. Pune district is mostly Marathi by mother tongue, the city is more mixed, and much content switches between Marathi, Hindi and English. Check the language of the hook, caption and comments on recent posts and cast for the one your buyer uses.

Which categories suit Pune? The public record points to student-facing products, categories aimed at salaried IT and engineering households, automotive and old-city festival retail. No public source ranks them by spend, so test a small set with an audience export in hand.

Do I need permission to shoot a branded reel at Hawa Mahal or Amer Palace? Both are on the Rajasthan state list of protected monuments, so the state film-shooting regulations and single-window portal apply to a film unit. How they apply to one creator with a phone is not stated publicly, so ask the Department of Tourism and get the answer in writing.

Can I film at Shaniwar Wada or on Pune Metro? Shaniwar Wada is a centrally protected monument, so commercial filming needs prior written permission from the Archaeological Survey of India. Pune Metro has its own policy with an hourly booking fee and a fifteen-day application window.

When is the wedding season in Jaipur, and how early should I plan? Published listings put the first date of the 2026 season on 21 November, with a pause from mid-December to mid-January and another from mid-July. Shoot creator content in October, because wedding photographers are busiest inside the season.

What language should a Jaipur campaign use? Hindi is the default, and the Census groups Rajasthani under Hindi. Choose plain Hindi for retail, Hindi with local idiom for heritage or food and English for hospitality and exports.

Does the creator need to live in the city? Only if the audience does. A bio city is not an audience city. Ask for the Instagram Viewers screen that lists top cities and cast on that.

What dates should I keep clear in Pune? The Ganeshotsav immersion day and the days around it, which ran over thirty-three hours in 2026, and the two nights the Wari palkhis halt in the city in June or July. Check police and organiser notices before locking a shoot.

To brief a Pune or Jaipur campaign, write down the buyer, the language of the hook, the zone or the season and who holds each permit, then send it through the contact page. vexo.club works from one desk in Delhi NCR and has no office in either city, so briefs from both are run from there. The desk also writes a page of its own for each city: Pune and Jaipur.