AI in Digital Advertising: Building Capabilities for a Cookie-less Era

Speaking at the second edition of Adgully’s CMOs’ Charcha - Kolkata Chapter 2024 on June 14, 2024, Gandharv Sachdeva, Country Head - India, Hybrid, shared his insights on ‘AI in Digital Advertising: Building Capabilities for a Cookie-less Era’.

Sachdeva started with AI in digital advertising after a small introduction about him, saying, “I’m not here to sell anything to any one of you, but yes, let’s have a discussion and to let you know what Hybrid is doing as an organization in India for the last three years now.”

He further said, “As we know, the Indian digital advertising is growing and is expected to reach Rs 51,000 crore by the end of 2024. When we collated all the data, we saw that FMCG and e-commerce are the contributing partners to digital’s growth. FMCG is growing at 38% at this point of time. Digital media has again surpassed television media.”

Sachdeva recalled that when digital started, around 12 years back, there were a lot of clients who were actually talking about just putting their ads by doing a normal CPM by going to a direct publisher. But soon the change came and programmatic is helping people not to remain at one side of the business.

He then touched upon the subject of cookies which are becoming obsolete because of privacy concerns and browser changes are happening, which are impacting the targeting. He noted that without cookies, the advertisers will face difficulties in tracking user behaviour and there will be decreased advertising effectiveness as they may struggle to measure and track the effectiveness of their campaigns.

“However, when cookies go off, there will be a rise of non-cookie solutions, and this is where we, as Hybrid, come into place. With our non-cookie targeting methods, we do contextual targeting and we do device ID targeting,” he said.

He noted that one of the benefits of moving away from cookies is that no one is able to track what you are doing and where you are.”

Speaking about Hybrid, Sachdeva said, “Hybrid as an organization started in India three years back. When we started, we were a very layman team of about five people. And today we have around 30 people across India, working with all top brands, top agencies. We have got three products – one is our platform, which is a demand side platform where we can do any kind of targeting, whatever audience the client wants to reach at the right time, we can do that. Hybe is our in-house platform for mobile app promotions. So, if you have an app and you want to have app downloads or go to the lower funnel as well, that is something that we can do with Hybe. Contextual marketing suite is something that is more in demand over here. We are across the world in 12 countries, including India, Poland, Indonesia, Vietnam, Germany, Cyprus, US, Thailand and Singapore.”

Speaking about Hybrid’s offerings, he said, “We have our own development stack ecosystem. We are an AI-driven contextual marketing suite and we have our own creative studios. You do not need to go to anyone to get your creatives done, we just need open files. We will make the creatives and run the campaigns for you. We can give innovative solutions too. With our Contextual marketing suite we can give you a lot of innovations.”

These are edited excerpts. For the complete keynote adder, please watch below: