For this edition of MM Talks Exclusive, we feature Gandharv Sachdeva, a business growth and commercial leader with over 18 years of experience across AI, ad-tech, programmatic advertising, and digital media.
He was Country Head – India at Hybrid.ai, Gandharv has been instrumental in building and scaling the company’s India business while driving significant growth across the region. His career spans leadership roles at Hybrid.ai, GadgetsNow, Times Internet, and Mediascope Representation India, where he worked with leading global media brands including Reuters, Forbes, and The New York Times.Recognised for his contributions to the industry, Gandharv is the recipient of the Adgully AdTech Leader of the Year Award 2025 and the Viksit Bharat Business Leadership Award 2026.
1. Your career spans leadership roles across digital media, advertising, and ad-tech. Looking back, what were the pivotal experiences that shaped your understanding of the industry and influenced your leadership approach?
Early in my career, media buying ran almost entirely on instinct, a planner’s gut feel decided where a brand’s budget went, not data. That gap between decision and evidence stuck with me. When real-time bidding and ad exchanges first showed up in India, most of the industry treated them as a black box. I spent years learning to read that box from the inside: bid logic, inventory quality, where waste actually hides in a media plan. The bigger shift came later, once privacy rules tightened everywhere. That forced a real rethink, how do you find the right audience without watching them? Contextual intelligence, reading content and imagery instead of tracking a person, became the answer I kept coming back to, and it changed how I think about targeting altogether. That history left me with a bias toward evidence over opinion as a leader. I push teams to question a targeting assumption the way I’d question a media plan: show me the data first, then we’ll talk about the story.
2. Having witnessed the evolution of digital advertising firsthand, what are the most significant changes you’ve seen in consumer behaviour, and how should marketers adapt to remain relevant in this rapidly changing landscape?
Attention has fragmented more than the industry expected. A consumer moves between a news article, a shopping app, and a short video within minutes, and each carries a different intent. Marketers still planning around one “reach” number miss that entirely. The bigger change is trust. Audiences have grown wary of being tracked, and that wariness pushes them toward walled platforms and ad blockers the moment tracking feels invasive.Relevance now has to come from context, what someone is reading or watching right now, rather than a profile built on their past. Format has shifted too. CTV and OTT have pulled attention away from linear TV, and interactive, shoppable formats are replacing static banners as the default expectation, not the exception. Adapting means two things: build first-party data and context-led strategies now, before the next privacy rule forces the issue, and judge creative on how well it adapts to a moment, not how polished it looks sitting still.
3. The advertising industry is increasingly driven by data, technology, and automation. How do you balance analytical decision-making with the creativity required to build impactful campaigns and brand experiences?
Automation is very good at scale; it can test a thousand creative variants overnight and tell a bid engine which one to favour. What it can’t do is decide why a message matters to someone in the first place. That’s still a human call. I think of it less as a balance and more as a sequence. Data narrows the field first, which audience, and what moment of attention is actually worth paying for. Creativity fills in what’s left: the idea that makes someone stop scrolling. Dynamic creative optimisation is a good example, the technology can swap a headline or an image based on device or the content someone’s reading, but a strategist still has to write the variations worth swapping in. Feed the system a flat idea, and personalisation just delivers flatness faster.The failure mode I watch for is a team treating the dashboard as the whole answer. Even a well-tuned brand-safety system that gets the vast majority of placements right still needs a person looking at the small percentage of edge cases an algorithm reads as fine and a human immediately flags as wrong.
4. Building and scaling successful businesses require a combination of vision, execution, and resilience. What leadership principles have been most instrumental in helping you navigate periods of growth and transformation?
Growth exposes whatever wasn’t solid to begin with. So the first principle I hold onto: fix the foundation before chasing the next milestone. Scaling a shaky process just multiplies the shakiness. Trust with agencies and publishers builds on its own timeline, and that timeline is usually longer than anyone wants. It took years, not months, to earn credibility with some of the harder-to-crack partners. Patience there is a discipline, not a personality trait. Resilience, in my experience, looks less like a heroic turnaround moment and more like showing up through a run of ordinary, unglamorous weeks where nothing is dramatically wrong or right. I’ve also learned to respect competition rather than resent it. More serious players entering a category usually forces everyone to sharpen their offer, I’d rather build in a market being pushed forward than one sitting still. And transparency with partners, real numbers instead of polished ones, has done more for long-term growth than any single campaign win.
5. As emerging technologies such as AI continue to reshape marketing and media, which opportunities excite you the most, and what challenges should industry leaders be prepared to address?
What excites me most is how AI lets an ad understand a moment instead of just a person. Computer vision can now read an image alongside the text around it, so a placement responds to what someone is actually looking at right now, not a stale profile of who they were last month. That’s a genuinely different foundation for relevance, and it’s still early. Hyperlocal is the other one I watch closely. Layer location intelligence with AI, and a brand can finally connect a digital impression to real footfall for an on-ground business, something that used to be guesswork. The challenge leaders need to prepare for is scale without judgment. A system built to catch harmful content at volume will still misread nuance, sarcasm, a sensitive news cycle, an image that reads differently in context. Treating AI as a replacement for editorial judgment rather than an extension of it is where brand safety programs start to fail quietly, long before anyone notices.
6. Throughout your career, you’ve worked closely with brands, agencies, publishers, and technology partners. What common traits differentiate organizations that consistently outperform their peers?
The ones that hold up over time treat transparency as a habit, not a talking point. Real numbers shared with a partner, even the uncomfortable ones, build a kind of trust that a polished report never does. They also tend to be honest early about the small percentage a system gets wrong. Full confidence in automation, without a human checking the edge cases, tends to catch up with a business eventually. Patience with regional and mid-sized markets matters more than people expect too. Markets that were slow to adopt digital, or smaller brands still cautious about the category, often need years of relationship-building before they trust a new way of working. Organisations that stay through that slow period, rather than chasing only the easy, large accounts, end up owning the market once it turns. And the strongest ones welcome competition instead of resenting it. A category getting more crowded usually means the underlying opportunity is real, and it pushes everyone, including them, to build a sharper product.
7. In an era where consumer attention is fragmented across multiple platforms, what strategies do you believe are most effective for creating meaningful engagement and long-term brand affinity?
Chasing a person across every platform they touch isn’t really a strategy anymore, it’s an arms race nobody wins cleanly. What works better is meeting someone inside whatever they’re already paying attention to. Contextual targeting does this well: a travel ad placed inside an article a reader is genuinely absorbed in earns more attention than the same ad interrupting a feed they’re scrolling past. Dynamic creative optimisation adds the second layer. The same brand message can shift by device, by time of day, by the content sitting around it, so the ad feels tailored to that moment rather than blasted out identically everywhere. That’s closer to how affinity actually forms; a fixed message eventually reads as noise, and noise is easy to ignore.CTV and OTT have added a format worth paying attention to as well. A viewer settling into long-form content on a connected screen is in a different headspace than someone thumb scrolling, and creative built for that patience earns more than a shortened TV spot dropped in unchanged. Long-term brand affinity, in my experience, comes less from frequency and more from a brand consistently showing up in places where it already makes sense to the person seeing it.
8. For young professionals aspiring to build successful careers in media, marketing, and technology, what advice would you offer on developing the skills and mindset needed to thrive in a highly competitive industry?
Learn the mechanics before the buzzwords. Anyone can repeat that AI is changing advertising; fewer people can explain how a bid actually clears, why one placement outperforms another, or what a brand safety system is actually checking for. That grounding is worth more than familiarity with whatever term is trending that quarter. Get comfortable with ambiguity early. Technology in this space moves faster than any playbook can keep up with, so the useful skill isn’t memorising today’s best practice, it’s building judgment that still holds when the tools change again next year. Stay curious about the parts of the industry that feel unglamorous. Measurement, attribution, the quiet plumbing behind a campaign, that’s usually where the real problems and real opportunities live, not in the pitch deck. And don’t mistake activity for progress. Trust with a market or a partner builds slowly and rarely on schedule. The professionals who last are the ones patient enough to keep showing up through the slow stretch, not just the ones chasing the next visible win.