Are Indian advertisers rewriting the rules of programmatic outsourcing?

By the end of 2025, India’s digital advertising market is estimated to be in the ₹49,000–59,200 crore range, growing at a robust 20–21% year-on-year. Programmatic advertising has expanded rapidly within this ecosystem, handling the vast majority of digital impressions (some estimates place this as high as 90% or more), but accounting for a smaller share of value.

Industry estimates place programmatic’s share of digital ad spends at roughly 42–44%, translating to approximately ₹20,000–26,000 crore annually. While this lags more mature global markets where programmatic dominates digital buying by value, it underscores programmatic’s growing operational centrality in India, particularly across display and video-led formats.

Within this landscape, adoption remains uneven across formats and advertiser segments. Video is the most prominent programmatic use case, driven by platforms such as YouTube and OTT services, while Connected TV, despite rapid growth, remains a relatively small part of the overall market. Total CTV advertising spends in India are estimated at ₹2,300–2,500 crore by the end of 2025, with only a portion transacted programmatically.

For large advertisers, this shift is increasingly about governance rather than capability. Rajiv Dubey, Head of Media at Dabur India, says there is “a clear shift away from fully outsourced programmatic models toward more hybrid operating structures,” with brands bringing “strategic control, data ownership, and governance in-house, while continuing to work with agencies for executional scale and specialist expertise.”

According to Dubey, the drivers are familiar ones: “the growing need for greater transparency and accountability in media spends,” the rising importance of first-party data, and the maturity of programmatic platforms that allow internal teams to make “faster, more informed, and business-relevant decisions.”

In this setup, he adds, brands need to own “strategy, audience architecture, measurement frameworks, and business KPIs,” while agencies contribute “executional excellence, innovation, and the ability to operate at scale.”

Importantly, this is not about brands losing faith in agencies. It is about narrowing the distance between decision-making and accountability. As programmatic budgets grow and finance teams ask harder questions, advertisers are increasingly uncomfortable outsourcing responsibility along with execution.

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At the same time, fully in-housed programmatic setups remain rare, limited to fewer than 10% of large advertisers, primarily in ecommerce, fintech, and gaming. Instead, a majority of large Indian advertisers now operate hybrid models, retaining internal control over strategy, data, and measurement while continuing to rely on agencies for execution. This reflects a cautious but deliberate shift toward greater oversight rather than wholesale insourcing.

That imbalance where programmatic is everywhere, yet confidence lags behind is pushing advertisers to rethink how much control they are willing to outsource. Programmatic has become too central to digital delivery to be treated as a black box, but it remains too complex, fragmented, and talent-intensive to bring fully in-house. The result is a growing preference for hybrid operating models that redraw the line between strategy and execution.

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Agency-side leaders caution against reading this as an in-housing moment. Russhabh R Thakkar, Founder and CEO at Frodoh, says he would not describe the current phase as a broad shift away from outsourcing. “Agencies continue to remain highly specialised solutions, especially with dedicated programmatic trading desks that operate at significant scale,” he says.

True in-housing, Thakkar notes, is still limited to “a small set of very large, performance-led advertisers,” and even there it is “rarely end-to-end.” What brands are actually seeking is “greater influence over decision-making rather than execution,” with clarity on how performance is driven and how data ties back to business outcomes, while buying and optimisation continue to sit with specialist teams.

That distinction of influence versus execution sits right at the heart of the hybrid model. Programmatic platforms may be more automated than before, but effective trading still requires constant optimisation, platform expertise, and scale that is difficult to replicate internally without significant investment.

Regulation and tooling have further accelerated this rethink. Vedavyas Badri, VP of Programmatic at LS Digital, says brands are moving away from outsourced setups “where they have limited visibility into their partner’s processes” toward hybrid approaches that give them greater control over data and decision-making.

The shift, he says, is being driven by “the increased need for transparency and control of data among brands due to regulatory requirements such as the DPDP Act,” as well as concerns around sharing sensitive customer and business information externally.

At the same time, the rise of white-label DSPs and AI-led tools has made it easier for brands to participate more closely in programmatic governance, even if execution remains complex.

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In Badri’s view, “the ownership of data and strategy must sit firmly with the brand, while execution and innovation are where agencies shine.” Agencies, he adds, bring “platform personality,” cross-industry perspective, and the “power of scale” in managing multiple DSPs, publisher relationships, and emerging formats, all of which are advantages that individual brand teams struggle to replicate.

From an outcome lens, that division of labour is becoming clearer, if perhaps at a more measured pace than some programmatic players would prefer.

Tejas Maha, Associate Director Media at White Rivers Media, says brands are internalising strategy, data infrastructure, and performance measurement to ensure that media spends support revenue goals rather than “vanity metrics like impressions.”

Ownership of first-party data, he adds, has become “a critical risk-management move,” particularly as privacy norms tighten. Agencies, meanwhile, continue to add value through “supply-side optimisation, fraud detection, and DSP negotiations,” leveraging scale and cross-client buying power that individual brands lack.

Taken together, these perspectives suggest Indian advertisers are not rethinking outsourcing so much as renegotiating it. Hybrid programmatic desks are emerging as a way to balance control with complexity, allowing brands to stay closer to data, measurement, and intent without taking on the full operational burden of execution.

In a market where programmatic is unavoidable but not yet fully trusted, rewriting the rules of outsourcing may be less a disruption than a necessary reset.