India’s digital advertising industry is moving towards a more sophisticated approach to audience targeting, with streaming platforms looking beyond traditional age, gender and location-based profiles. In a new development, Zee5 has partnered with audience intelligence company Saptharushi to introduce the Zee5 Audience Platform (ZAP), a proprietary advertising platform designed to help brands connect with more relevant viewers while keeping data privacy at the centre.
Announced on November 2, 2026, the platform combines Zee5’s understanding of viewing behaviour with consented behavioural and transactional signals from participating partners. The aim is to help advertisers create customised audience groups based on consumer interests, category relevance and purchase behaviour.
Moving Beyond Traditional Audience Targeting
For years, advertisers have relied on demographic categories to identify potential customers. While these segments remain useful, they do not always reveal what consumers are interested in or what they may be planning to purchase.
ZAP aims to address this gap by combining different types of audience insights. Zee5 contributes contextual information related to viewing behaviour, while participating partners provide consented behavioural and transactional signals.
These insights can help brands build audience cohorts according to specific products, categories and campaign objectives. For example, a brand may want to reach viewers who show an interest in a particular category rather than simply targeting everyone within a broad age group.
The approach could give advertisers more flexibility when planning campaigns across entertainment genres and viewing occasions.
Privacy at the Centre of the Platform
One of the important aspects of ZAP is its federated data collaboration model.
Under this approach, participating partners retain their data within their respective environments. Audience collaboration takes place through consented queries rather than transferring or pooling underlying datasets between organisations.
In simple terms, the objective is to make insights available for advertising decisions without requiring partners to surrender control of their data.
The model is designed around the principles of India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) framework. However, the actual privacy protections will depend on how consent, data processing, governance and user rights are implemented in practice.
As advertisers increasingly depend on consumer information, privacy-conscious collaboration is becoming an important consideration for the future of digital marketing.
Quick Commerce and Digital Payments Add New Signals
The platform’s intelligence layer draws on participating partners across sectors such as quick commerce and digital payments.
These sectors can provide useful signals about consumer behaviour, category interest and purchasing activity. When combined with viewing context, such information may help advertisers understand audiences beyond their entertainment preferences.
For brands, this creates the possibility of connecting media planning more closely with business objectives. Instead of measuring campaigns only through exposure, advertisers can explore how audience relevance relates to engagement and potential purchase interest.
The platform is intended to support customised audience creation and activation across Zee5’s content ecosystem.
New Advertising Opportunities Around Content
Zee5’s advertising proposition spans premium Originals, movies, sports, Free5, international entertainment, children’s programming and content across multiple languages.
This variety gives advertisers different environments in which to connect with audiences. A campaign aimed at sports viewers, for instance, may require a different audience strategy from one targeting viewers of family entertainment or regional programming.
ZAP is also expected to explore co-branded attention and loyalty rewards, particularly around premium content and sports. These formats could offer brands additional opportunities to engage viewers beyond conventional advertising placements.
Such initiatives reflect a wider shift towards advertising experiences that combine content, interaction and audience participation.
What Advertisers Stand to Gain
According to ZEEL’s Head of Advertisement Revenue, Broadcast and Digital, Prashant Shetty, previous deployments by Saptharushi have demonstrated a significant, multifold improvement in click-through rates compared with campaigns using brands’ existing customer relationship management audiences.
The company has not publicly provided detailed campaign-level figures or sample sizes alongside this claim, so advertisers will need further evidence to assess the results.
Nevertheless, the launch highlights an important industry priority: improving the connection between media investment and audience relevance.
The Next Phase of Streaming Advertising
ZAP arrives as advertisers seek more meaningful ways to use consumer insights while responding to growing expectations around responsible data practices.
For Zee5, the partnership adds an audience intelligence layer to its advertising business. For brands, it introduces another potential way to plan campaigns using viewing context and consented consumer signals.
The platform’s long-term value will depend on the quality of its audience segments, the transparency of its measurement systems and the effectiveness of its privacy safeguards.
The bigger shift: Streaming advertising is moving beyond the question of how many people watch a platform. Increasingly, the focus is on understanding which audiences are relevant to a brand, how they can be reached responsibly and whether campaigns deliver measurable business value.
Official announcement: Zee5 launches ZAP with Saptharushi
