Zenith India CEO: CTV spend now mainstream, Publicis builds cross-platform reach tool

August 25, 2026 · storyboard18.com

Brands now debate what percentage of the budget, 5%, 10% or 20%, to commit to CTV, a sign the format has moved into the mainstream across categories, Zenith India CEO Jai Lala told Storyboard18. Zenith recently won L'Oréal's media mandate by proposing one integrated team spanning awareness, consideration and commerce, replacing the separate top-funnel and bottom-funnel agencies the client used before. Lala pointed to Nespresso and Centrum as brands that lean on CTV specifically to reach cord-cutters, metros, mini metros and high-purchase individuals, audiences he called difficult to find elsewhere.

Cross-platform measurement is becoming the harder problem behind the budget shift. Publicis has built a proprietary tool that inputs reach curves across YouTube, Meta, TV and OTT so planners can tell whether a campaign keeps hitting the same viewers or is adding incremental reach, addressing the walled-garden fragmentation Lala flagged as the industry's biggest measurement challenge. Zenith runs a separate proprietary attribution tool, reviewed monthly against client and media data, to isolate how much of a brand's business output comes from media. Lala summed up the mandate in one line: "Zenith stands for ROI."