Zee5 has launched the Zee5 Audience Platform (ZAP), a privacy-first advertiser platform built with audience intelligence specialist Saptharushi. The move is aimed at helping brands go beyond demographic reach and activate campaigns against the viewers most likely to care about their products.
ZAP sits on top of Zee5’s existing advertising inventory across premium SVOD, Free5, sports, KidZ, news and multilingual entertainment. It adds an audience intelligence layer that connects what people watch with what they are willing to share about how they buy, through consent-based signals from partners in quick commerce, digital payments and other sectors.
How ZAP works
The platform lets advertisers construct cohorts around category, product and campaign objective, rather than age and gender alone. It combines Zee5’s contextual understanding of viewing behaviour with deterministic purchase and intent signals from participating partners.
- Contextual signals from Zee5 content and viewing occasions.
- Consented behavioural and transactional signals from quick commerce, payments and other partners.
- A cohort-building layer brands can customise to specific business objectives.
- Co-branded attention and loyalty reward formats planned around premium content and sports.
Privacy by design
The operating model is built around a federated approach. Zee5 and Saptharushi say that data remains inside each partner’s environment; only a consent-based query moves across systems. This is designed to align with India’s Digital Personal Data Protection framework.
Why it matters for marketers
For brands, ZAP represents a shift from broad inventory packages to more precise audience activation on a major homegrown streaming service. ZEEL’s head of advertisement revenue for broadcast and digital, Prashant Shetty, says earlier Saptharushi deployments have shown a “multifold uplift” in click-through rate versus campaigns activated only against a brand’s existing CRM audience.
That proof point matters because it frames the platform’s promise as performance, not just privacy. Marketers can test whether context-plus-consent cohorts outperform CRM retargeting or demographic buys.
What to watch next
ZAP’s roadmap includes engagement formats such as co-branded loyalty and attention rewards around high-interest viewing moments. Gowthaman Ragothaman, founder and CEO of Saptharushi, frames the ambition as reach made addressable: Zee5 supplies the reach, and Saptharushi makes it targeted with permission.
As third-party cookies disappear and India’s data protection rules mature, this kind of query-based collaboration may become a template for other streaming and retail media networks.
Source: MediaNews4U
