Chandrahas Shetty, Head of Demand at Magnite, brings 14 years of experience in digital advertising, with expertise in business planning, operations, and revenue analysis. He has built a strong network across industries, driving consistent business growth. In this interview, Chandrahas shares insights on the evolving digital ad landscape, highlighting data-driven strategies, programmatic advertising, and the future potential of CTV and retail media.
How does Magnite Audiences help Indian advertisers target audiences more effectively, and what advantages does it offer?
As the identity landscape evolves, different models and approaches will be necessary to solve for audience addressability. Publishers hold valuable insights into user interests and behavior, making their first party data and models critical to buyers’ future audience strategies. Magnite Audiences is part of the Magnite Access suite, a collection of audience and addressability tools purpose-built for publishers and buyers to maximise the value of their data assets. It offers first-party audience segments that help buyers curate customised ad inventory that aligns with campaign goals to drive impact. This makes it easier and more efficient for buyers to reach their desired audiences at scale without sacrificing quality.
With Smart TVs representing 90% of new TV sales and 74% of viewers watching ad-supported streaming content, how can advertisers effectively target this growing CTV audience to maximize their reach and ROI?
The ability to tailor a message to a specific audience on CTV creates opportunities for advertisers to reach viewers during the most ideal moments. The key to a successful CTV ad campaign, however, is a quality ad experience. Ensuring ad relevancy and optimising frequency and placement of advertising is essential to capture the attention of the intended audience at the right time. The true power of CTV advertising emerges when it’s woven into a broader omnichannel strategy. Magnite works with brands and advertisers across each of these mediums to help them optimise their strategies and reap the benefits of cross-screen reach to ensure they’re maximising engagement and ROI.
How do you see pause ads on OTT platforms enhancing viewer engagement through contextually relevant content?
When viewers hit pause while watching content, publishers have an opportunity to transform this otherwise idle screen time into a revenue opportunity by selling the space to advertisers who want to showcase their messages or recommend related content. What makes pause ads particularly appealing is their unobtrusive nature. Rather than interrupting the viewing experience, they appear only when viewers have already chosen to take a break. Advertisers can craft messages that complement what the person is watching, making the ads feel more relevant and less like interruptions. Publishers are afforded an additional revenue stream and opportunity to enhance the viewer experience. The key to success lies in implementation and the ability to maintain contextual relevance for the user, which requires an ad server that can efficiently manage and execute ad delivery seamlessly.
How do you foresee the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning transforming programmatic advertising in India?
Even in just the past year, we’ve seen remarkable advancements in the way AI and machine learning are being leveraged to improve a wide range of processes across various industries. In programmatic, machine learning can help streamline the buying and selling of ads more to enhance monetisation. It can also reduce the time and resources necessary to process large amounts of data and requests, or help personalise ad campaigns. This unlocks additional resources for teams and provides them with more time to focus on high-level tasks.
In line with these advancements, Magnite introduced automated wrapper management within its Demand Manager product last year to help publishers grow revenue and increase efficiency. Using machine learning, the feature finds the optimal configurations in a publisher’s Prebid wrapper per impression and has the potential to enhance billions of settings to improve performance. The rise of AI and machine learning technology has the potential to help the digital advertising industry become more innovative and efficient, while also bringing additional industry-wide benefits, such as enhanced sustainability.
Given the rise of live sports streaming in India, how can advertisers leverage this trend to engage audiences effectively, and what innovative approaches are being implemented?
With more people relying on streaming services to watch their favorite content, live sports offer opportunities for marketers across various industries to reach highly engaged, live audiences at scale. Sports streamers are more likely to watch multiple ad-supported services, giving brands additional touchpoints to interact with the consumer along the sales funnel and ensuring delivery of the right message, at the right time, on the right channel.
Although advertising in a live environment is not without its challenges, innovations such as Magnite’s Live Stream Acceleration (LSA) are opening up additional opportunities for advertisers. Magnite developed LSA to improve time out and ad response time, thereby helping publishers optimize the amount of ad break time they have to monetise. This also allows buyers to take advantage of important opportunities to reach engaged audiences that might otherwise be missed in a live environment.
What are the 3 key trends and innovations in digital advertising that you believe will define the Indian market in 2025?
In the coming year, I believe we’ll see continued growth in ad-supported streaming, particularly as key players incorporate ad tiers into their offerings. I also expect to see CTV continue to scale as viewers choose to replace their TVs with smart TVs or new set top boxes. In addition, it’s likely that we’ll see continued adoption of programmatic as more buyers leverage its data-driven targeting capabilities to deliver effective, scalable campaigns. And finally, I expect we’ll continue to see retail media scale amid the shift to digital, and as brands increasingly seek to leverage retailers’ valuable first party data to gain a clearer picture of consumer behaviour and future purchasing patterns.
