Samsung Ads’ Nishit Kanchan: ‘The Big Picture’ is trust, not just bottom-funnel metrics

Nishit Kanchan, GM & Head of Revenue, Samsung Ads, opened his spotlight session at the Pitch BFSI Summit 2026 with a nostalgic exercise, calling out iconic taglines from Amul, Asian Paints, Thumbs Up and Cadbury to make a point about television's enduring power to build trust. "There is one device on which these brands were actually able to build trust, build the kind of resonance and the top-of-mind recall that we just experienced today. And that device is actually the television," he said.

Kanchan highlighted that in an era obsessed with bottom-funnel metrics like ROAS and conversions, marketers are losing sight of what truly builds brands. "We are forgetting the essence that a brand needs to drive, and that is trust," he said, positioning Samsung not merely as a player in the CTV ecosystem but as its architect. He cited Samsung's scale in India, reaching 74 million users and offering advertisers up to 5 million single-day device reach.

Addressing the shift to streaming, Kanchan noted that nearly 95 percent of Indian viewing time is now spent on streaming content, leaving 12 million of Samsung's 16.5 million TVs in India unreachable through traditional formats. He explained Samsung's "D2D" (Discovery to Destination) strategy, powered by Automatic Content Recognition, and shared BFSI case studies including Kotak Bank's masthead campaign and Axis Bank's World Cup activation, which achieved a 0.36 percent click-through rate. He also highlighted PolicyBazaar's campaign, which reached over 4.5 million Samsung households and drove a 20 percent lift in aided awareness and purchase intent.

On frequency, Kanchan cautioned against applying digital-first planning logic to CTV. "Your TV is not always on. So the kind of frequency management that you actually create on a CTV campaign has to be higher," he said, citing an insurance brand that saw ad awareness jump from 8 percent to 26 percent after raising frequency caps from 2 to 8.

The session's final stretch focused on upcoming AI-led innovations still in beta, including contextual ad targeting driven by Vision AI that reads on-screen tonality, an AI companion banner for interactive overlays, and "Game Breaks," which let viewers play branded games during ad breaks to hold attention on the TV screen. Kanchan also pointed to a dedicated festive content hub built around occasions like Dhanteras, offering brands sponsorship-style visibility.

Closing his address, Kanchan said the shift to connected television is no longer on the horizon. "I don't think the future of TV is coming. I think it is already here and it is sitting in the households of 16.5 million Samsung devices," he said, urging brand marketers to aim not just to be seen, but to be remembered.