CTV spend jumps 43%, but Huella says views are not enough
Huella's Singapore push bets that interactive CTV formats, not just better targeting, can turn viewer attention into measurable action.
Creative adtech firm Huella is taking its interactive advertising model beyond India. The company has opened a Southeast Asia headquarters in Singapore and is building teams to go after Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, with connected TV as a central focus.
The market context makes the timing easy to understand. Huella points to a 43% rise in open programmatic CTV spending in Southeast Asia compared with 2023. It adds that 57% of Asia-Pacific marketers now allocate at least 40% of their media budgets to the channel.
The money, in other words, is moving. Huella’s bet is that effectiveness has not moved with it.
Reaching the right screen is not the same as being remembered
The company’s starting point is that most adtech has focused on audiences, data signals, targeting and delivery, while paying less attention to what consumers actually see. Co-founder and CEO Prrincey Roy puts it bluntly: “We thrive on the attention economy. For us, attention is the biggest currency.”
That framing matters for brands. Ads can be well targeted and still vanish before the viewer picks up the remote. Huella’s response is to make the creative itself interactive: encouraging consumers to engage with an ad rather than passively watch it.
When a CTV ad asks for participation
An example is a CTV campaign Huella ran for Bacardi Mixers between November 7, 2025 and January 5, 2026. It paired a video-first experience with an interactive carousel built around the brand’s “Bring Your Own Mix” proposition. The video set the mood; the carousel let viewers explore different facets of the brand within the same ad experience.
This turns the television from a passive video screen into a two-way surface. It also creates extra behavioural signals, such as QR scans or carousel interactions, that go beyond whether an impression was served.
The measurement gap
That is where Roy sees the bigger industry problem. CTV often gets bought like a smarter version of linear television, around popular programmes or OTT platforms, and measured with conventional video metrics such as impressions, viewability and completion. Those numbers show an ad was delivered or watched, but not whether a viewer did anything afterward.
Huella’s answer is to build action into the format itself. QR codes and interactive elements signal a next step, while third-party verification and brand-lift studies track delivery and recall. It is not a complete fix; Roy expects measurement to keep evolving. But it re-frames effectiveness as something marketers should plan for, not measure after the fact.
What this means for your next CTV campaign
- Treat CTV as a digital canvas, not a linear slot: add a tappable carousel, QR code or overlay.
- Track post-view action such as scan rate, exploration time or brand lift, not just completion.
- Ask for transparent placement data as programmatic budgets grow.
Huella’s wider story is a bootstrapped one: the firm has grown from four people to 40, reports 100% year-on-year growth, and says it works with more than 300 brands including Coca-Cola, Meta, BMW, LEGO and Mondelez. In 2026 it launched its own ad server, with products named Newsroom AI and AIgnite on the roadmap.
Its Southeast Asia experiment will test whether a creative-first model built in India travels. For marketers, the underlying question is closer to home: now that you can reach almost anyone, are you giving them a reason to care?
Source: Afaqs!
