Connect Network’s New Agentic AI Targets India’s Opaque Ad Pricing

Connect Network Inc. has launched IMMERSIVE, an agentic AI platform it says can plan an ad campaign anywhere across India’s 6.49 lakh cities, towns and villages, roughly 649,000 in all, using India’s lakh, or hundred-thousand, counting system. The Mumbai advertising network built it to replace guesswork in hyperlocal media buying, the unglamorous business of picking which billboard, cinema screen or village mela stall actually reaches a buyer. Five years of data collection went into it, according to the company’s own announcement, first carried by Indian advertising trade outlet Impact on July 20.

Buried in the feature list is live rate benchmarking, letting a brand see what a hoarding actually costs before it negotiates. That one feature could unwind decades of price opacity that has sheltered small local media owners and the human planners who know their patch better than any algorithm.

An AI Built to Read Traffic, Weather and Market Days

Most AI tools that marketers already use process text, images or documents. Connect says IMMERSIVE is built differently: it weighs campaign objectives, consumer behaviour, geography, mobility patterns, media inventory, pricing benchmarks, environmental conditions and historical campaign performance before it spits out a recommendation.

Haresh Nayak, founder and chief executive of Connect Network Inc., said traditional AI tools largely focus on text and visual inputs, while IMMERSIVE was built to understand real-world factors such as geography, mobility and consumer behaviour before making a recommendation. He said the goal is to make hyperlocal marketing intelligence usable for planners working in markets they don’t know personally.

Multiple AI agents work in tandem inside the system, according to the company, each analysing media inventory, consumer behaviour, mobility data and market signals before combining their findings into a plan. The platform is also designed to keep learning from every campaign it plans, runs and evaluates.

The categories it covers span most of the ways Indian brands spend outside their phones and TVs:

• Out-of-home (OOH) and digital out-of-home (DOOH) hoardings
• Cinema and airport advertising
• Transit media and rural marketing
• Experiential campaigns and shopper marketing
• Retail activations and brand experiences

Creative tools sit alongside the planning layer. Marketers can preview creative across different OOH formats, simulate where an AI model predicts eyes will land on a design, get optimisation suggestions, and stack multiple executions side by side before anything goes to print, drawing on a repository the company says holds more than 7,000 past creative case studies.

The Numbers Behind the Pitch

Connect frames the platform as the payoff of a long, unglamorous data-gathering exercise rather than a quick build. The scale claims, as the company describes them:

• 649,000 cities, towns and villages the company says its data now covers
• 550,000 media inventory assets mapped, from roadside hoardings to airport panels
• 80-plus data APIs feeding mobility, weather and pricing signals into the system
• Nearly 10,000 cinemas folded into a dedicated screen-planning module

Globally, the market IMMERSIVE is chasing a slice of is not small. The out-of-home advertising market was worth $23.27 billion in 2025 and is climbing toward $58.8 billion by 2034, with Asia-Pacific, including India, accounting for roughly a third of global spending.

Nayak’s own recent writing adds a small wrinkle to the origin story. In a LinkedIn post days before the launch, he described the team having spent “the past many months” building a platform to rethink static planning, a shorter runway than the five years the company attributes to the underlying data layer. The two claims aren’t necessarily in conflict. Assembling five years of location data is a different task from assembling the software product that finally packages it, but the gap is worth noting for anyone taking the origin story at face value.

A Billboard’s Price Can Swing a Hundredfold Down One Road

India’s outdoor ad market has run for decades on relationships, not rate cards. A metro junction site can cost twenty times what an identical-sized board a kilometre away commands, with almost no published logic connecting the two prices.

One Mumbai media-buying guide puts a number on just how wide that gap gets, noting the same physical format renting for 100 times more depending purely on location and demand. City-level data shows the same pattern at scale:

There is no regulator setting these numbers and no exchange publishing them. A brand’s only real check has been an agency’s own relationships and whatever a media owner chooses to disclose. That is exactly the gap IMMERSIVE’s live rate benchmarking is built to close.

Who Loses When Ad Prices Go Public?

Price transparency almost always favours the buyer over the seller, and national brands and large agencies are the buyers here. If IMMERSIVE’s benchmarks catch on, a planner in Mumbai will be able to see, in real time, what a hoarding in a small Bihar town or a Rajasthan mela ground should cost before ever calling the local owner.

Local hoarding owners, cinema operators and mela organisers have historically priced on what an unfamiliar advertiser will pay, not on a public rate. That advantage narrows the moment a national platform can quote a benchmark back at them. Human regional planners, the people whose entire professional value has been knowing which junction in which town actually performs, face the same squeeze from the other direction: their tacit knowledge becomes a checkable data point instead of a scarce skill.

Aditya Goel, president of Connect OOH, the company’s outdoor advertising division, called IMMERSIVE “an operating system for marketing” that folds planning, buying, creative optimisation, campaign monitoring and performance evaluation into a single workflow. An operating system, by definition, standardises what used to be handled case by case. That is the upside for a brand’s media budget and the downside for anyone whose living depended on the old, uneven system.

The Posterscope Veteran Automating His Own Old Job

There is a personal irony sitting underneath the corporate pitch. Nayak spent more than 20 years building exactly the kind of relationship-driven OOH expertise IMMERSIVE is now designed to systematise. He launched Posterscope’s Indian operation in 2008 and rose to president and chief operating officer of Posterscope, running Dentsu’s location-based marketing business across South Asia and the Asia-Pacific, before striking out on his own.

Every once in a while, an industry reaches a point where incremental improvements are no longer enough. I believe media is at that point.

Nayak wrote that on LinkedIn days before IMMERSIVE’s launch. He founded Connect Network Inc. as an independent venture in December 2021, describing it at the time as a step toward building an Indian network with global ambitions. Four years later, the same executive who built his career on tacit local knowledge is trying to encode that knowledge into software available to any client, not just his own.

Agentic Tools Are Still a Minority Sport in Ad Agencies

IMMERSIVE arrives while the rest of the advertising industry is still figuring out what agentic AI is actually for. A survey of 250 agencies by marketing analytics firm Digital Applied found that 34% of enterprise marketing teams now run agents in production, more than double the 14% share reported just two quarters earlier. Adoption is accelerating, but two-thirds of teams still haven’t shipped one.

A separate industry survey of 180 agencies, publishers and brands by Digiday and ad-tech firm Optable found most describe their agentic advertising work as “early but moving quickly” or “experimenting but fragmented,” not mature. In India specifically, digital formats are projected to reach only 15% of total outdoor ad revenue by 2026, with transit media making up 40% of that digital slice, per a joint FICCI and EY report. Traditional, relationship-priced hoardings still dominate the spend IMMERSIVE is trying to rationalise.

That makes Connect, a mid-sized independent network competing against giants like GroupM and Dentsu on one side and horizontal AI platforms from Google and Adobe on the other, an unusually small player making an unusually large infrastructure bet.

The Numbers Nobody Outside Connect Has Checked

Everything above comes from Connect’s own account of its platform. That’s worth stating plainly before treating the numbers as settled fact.

• What we know: Connect Network built IMMERSIVE using five years of proprietary data collection and launched it on July 20, 2026, according to its own statement.
• What we know: Aditya Goel has publicly described it as “an operating system for marketing” spanning planning through performance evaluation.

• Unconfirmed: No outside auditor has verified the claimed 550,000 media inventory assets or the accuracy of the live rate benchmarks.
• Unconfirmed: Connect has not disclosed pricing, a client roster, or whether competing agencies can license IMMERSIVE rather than only its own account teams.

Connect said it expects hyperlocal, agentic AI-driven planning to play a larger role in Indian media decisions going forward. Whether that role includes an audited, third-party view of its own numbers is the question the company hasn’t yet answered.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Agentic AI, And How Is It Different From a Chatbot?

Agentic AI refers to systems that independently plan and carry out multi-step tasks toward a goal rather than just answering a single prompt. In advertising specifically, adoption still lags: the Digiday and Optable survey found agentic tools ranked lowest for media planning among four workflows tested, at 21%, trailing pacing, reporting and client strategy.

What Counts as Hyperlocal Media Planning in India?

It means planning down to neighbourhood or village level rather than city or state level. Connect says its rural module maps mandis (wholesale markets), haats (village markets) and primary health centres as ad touchpoints, and keeps a database of more than 750 melas, yatras and religious gatherings to flag high-footfall opportunities that national planners typically miss.

How Big Is India’s Out-of-Home Advertising Market?

Estimates vary by methodology, but one 2026 industry guide puts India’s outdoor ad market at roughly ₹4,200 crore, about $500 million, growing 12-15% a year, making India the world’s fifth-largest OOH market by that measure.

What Does IMMERSIVE’s Cinema Module Actually Recommend?

It suggests film genres, specific titles and cinema locations for a campaign based on audience personas, social listening data and a brand’s objectives, aimed at advertisers buying screen time rather than investing in the films themselves.

Who Else Is Building Agentic AI Tools for Advertising?

Global platforms are moving the same direction. Google has spent 2026 promoting its own agentic tools for ad buyers, and Adobe has added AI-driven brand intelligence features to its GenStudio marketing suite, part of a broader industry shift toward AI systems that plan and optimise campaigns with less manual input.