Posted on 15th Jun 2026
For as long as advertising has existed in its modern form, there has been a gatekeeper between the brand and the screen. First it was the media owner, then the agency, then the ad exchange, each adding a layer of negotiation, opacity and cost before a single rupee reached the audience. The promise of the internet was that this chain would shorten. For years, it largely did not. Instead, digital advertising simply rebuilt the same hierarchy in code, with programmatic platforms and demand-side tools standing in for the old media buyers.
What is changing now, quietly but unmistakably across India's advertising landscape, is the reappearance of a much older idea, the brand doing it themselves. Self-serve advertising - where a business can log in, set a budget, choose an audience and launch a campaign without an intermediary - is no longer confined to social media giants.
It is showing up on streaming platforms, on professional networks, and increasingly, on messaging apps that were never built as ad platforms in the first place. The recent self-serve advertising push from JioHotstar is one example of this trend playing out in premium video, but it sits alongside a much broader pattern, from LinkedIn's long-running Campaign Manager to WhatsApp's own self-serve tools that brands have already begun adopting.
The significance of this shift goes beyond convenience. Self-serve advertising is forcing a rethink of who premium media is actually for, how campaigns are judged successful, and whether the comfort of working through an agency is worth the loss of control it often implies. For an industry that has spent two decades automating the middle of the funnel, the next phase may be about removing the middle altogether.
The Great Unbundling of Media Buying
The traditional argument for working through an agency or a programmatic platform was access, only they had the relationships, the inventory and the tools to plan campaigns at scale. Self-serve tools chip away at that argument by putting the dashboard directly in front of the advertiser.
Chirag Jagwani, Chief Marketing Officer at skincare brand Fixderma, says his team has already begun experimenting with this model through WhatsApp's self-serve advertising, and sees it as a natural extension of a broader move toward in-house control. "It is good that brands are getting the option to do it themselves, not by agencies," he says, describing how his team is "already making the base for it" as more platforms open up similar access.
This unbundling is not limited to messaging platforms. LinkedIn has operated a fully featured self-serve platform, Campaign Manager, for years, allowing businesses to build, launch and measure B2B campaigns with no minimum spend or long-term contracts, a model that effectively normalised the idea that even premium, professionally-targeted advertising does not require an agency in the loop. JioHotstar's entry into self-serve, with campaign entry points starting as low as Rs 4,000 according to the platform, extends that same logic into premium streaming video, a category that has historically been the most agency-dependent of all.
According to Pankaj Sharma, CEO and Director at MGID India, this proliferation of self-serve options is reshaping how media plans are built from the ground up. "Now they know that if I am working with Meta ads and Google ads, I need to also work with a self-serve platform, because they have their own server, their own ecosystem. So it becomes another line item in media planning, in the advertising budget, because there is a parallel ad ecosystem that is being run by Jio for instance," he says.
Sharma points to industry estimates that roughly 90-95 per cent of digital ad spend in India still flows through the Google and Meta duopoly, leaving a thin remainder for everyone else to compete over. Self-serve platforms with their own audience data, he argues, are precisely how new entrants chip into that imbalance. "Maybe out of that 95 per cent, self-serve ad platforms like Jio might be able to take some share from there because they have the audiences and the behavioural data, and better KPI management tools in house."
Smaller Players, Bigger Stakes
If self-serve advertising has a defining beneficiary, it may not be the large brands with established agency relationships, but the smaller and regional advertisers who were effectively priced out of premium inventory before.
Saurabh Kanojia, Head of Growth and Analytics for Malaysia, Indonesia, MEA and South Africa at Viu, frames this as a reduction of the friction that has long kept premium digital video out of reach for smaller players. "The significance of self-serve advertising lies in its ability to reduce the traditional friction associated with premium digital media buying. By enabling direct campaign creation, audience-led targeting, reach forecasting and easier access to premium inventory, it broadens participation beyond large advertisers," he says.
He adds that startups and direct-to-consumer brands have historically gravitated toward platforms offering speed and measurement, and that early movers on self-serve tools could benefit from "lower competition and higher attention density during the early stages of ecosystem development".
An industry expert who requested anonymity goes further, arguing that large agencies are unlikely to be the primary audience for these tools at all, since they already have access to programmatic platforms such as DV360 that offer scale across the open web.
"The real impact of self-serve advertising is likely to be felt among regional advertisers, SMEs and brands operating in Tier II and Tier III markets rather than large agencies," the expert says, noting that a platform-specific self-serve solution is inherently more content centric and operates within a single ecosystem. "Its strength lies in lowering entry barriers for smaller and vernacular-focused advertisers, giving them easier access to premium video inventory and audiences that may have previously been out of reach."
Control Without Clarity
The appeal of self-serve advertising is often summed up in one word - control, the ability to launch, pause and adjust a campaign in real time without waiting on an account manager. Jagwani describes this in almost literal terms, checking order numbers on his phone as campaigns run.
"Anything goes wrong, I can change it right then, right now," he says, adding that no external partner can judge a campaign's efficacy better than someone sitting inside the brand itself. Asked how much this kind of direct control could improve outcomes compared to working purely through agencies or programmatic buys, his estimate is striking. "The efficacy will improve, easily thirty to forty percent."
But control over execution does not automatically solve the harder problem of attribution, knowing which campaign actually drove a sale. Jagwani points to Amazon's DSP as a cautionary tale familiar to many brands, where impressive view counts on the advertising side rarely reconcile with the search and conversion data that actually shows where sales come from. "We might be getting crores of views and attributions, but it might not get converted, and the conversions might be coming from somewhere else," he says, describing the recurring disconnect between platform-reported performance and real sales data as one of the most persistent frustrations for in-house marketing teams.
This is where the deeper layer of India's evolving advertising stack becomes relevant. Self-serve tools are increasingly being paired with first-party data and contextual intelligence, the kind of signals that come from a platform knowing not just that an ad was shown, but who saw it and what they did next. Speaking on this trend, a JioHotstar spokesperson said, "AI led contextual intelligence is another important part of how the ecosystem is evolving," pointing to tools such as Moment.AI that aim to make advertising more context aware within content environments, with the broader goal, in the spokesperson's words, of "creating stronger long term value for both brands and consumers."
For an advertising industry that has spent years debating reach versus relevance, self-serve tools may finally force the issue. As access widens and control shifts back to brands themselves, the platforms that win will not be the ones offering the most inventory, but the ones that can prove, in real time, that the click actually led somewhere.