MiQ Sigma wants to make media chaos marketable

India’s media buying landscape is increasingly complex — sprawling, fragmented, and harder than ever to navigate. Brands and agencies are contending with a maze of platforms, signals, inventories, and shifting consumer behaviours. When managed effectively, these layers offer a wealth of opportunities; when left siloed, they lead to inefficiencies and missed connections.

This challenge is global in scale, but it takes on unique urgency in India’s hyper-diverse digital environment. Lee Puri, co-founder of global programmatic agency MiQ, underlines the issue: “When data is fragmented and execution occurs in silos, it naturally leads to inefficient media spends, misaligned messaging, and missed reach among fast-moving audiences,” he told Campaign.

According to internal MiQ data, campaigns run on MiQ Sigma’s integrated platform achieved a 132% higher conversion rate and a 57% lower cost per action compared to those routed through single-DSP setups. These efficiency gains highlight the pressing need for smarter, more connected solutions in a market as varied as India.

Making sense of media chaos

Launched in June 2025, MiQ Sigma is the company’s bid to bring order to India’s fragmented programmatic ecosystem. The AI-powered platform promises to unify multiple signals, platforms, and data feeds into a single, actionable view. It aims to enable brands to execute campaigns that are not only efficient but contextually relevant across India’s highly regionalised media and consumer base.

"It traverses India’s digital terrain using an array of unique features and functionality that have not been seen in a unified form before in the programmatic landscape," Varun Mohan, chief commercial officer, India at MiQ told Campaign.

One of the core features, Sigma Intelligence, visualises hundreds of diverse data feeds, capturing watching, browsing, and buying behaviours from more than 1.7 billion global audience profiles. For Indian marketers, this means access to behavioural signals from hundreds of millions of consumers.

This connected intelligence helps identify patterns not just by age or geography, but by lifestyle and intent. Whether it’s a gamer in Bengaluru looking for a new device or a food enthusiast in Mumbai catching a cooking show, Sigma lets marketers deliver tailored messages grounded in real-time behaviour.

From raw data to real insights

MiQ Sigma’s generative AI also enables the creation of detailed “AI personas,” allowing marketers to simulate campaign performance from the point of view of realistic audience archetypes.

“For marketers who want to penetrate a consumer segment in rural Bengal, for instance, [MiQ Sigma] will have access to data about millions of consumers, and the power to experiment with GenAI personas to see the impact of specific campaigns,” said Mohan.

MiQ’s co-founder Lee Puri and its chief commercial officer, India, Varun Mohan.

He cites dentsu’s deployment of MiQ Sigma to reach a new metropolitan segment. The platform processed over 700 trillion signals to identify where, when, and how segments engaged with the campaign — down to the time a food ad was watched on a particular channel. “These three signals — time, TV channel, and food item — across an entire demographic helped Dentsu make inroads into a new market segment,” he noted.

The key strength, Mohan further emphasised, is agility. Sigma allows real-time performance measurement and optimisation, helping marketers adjust campaigns dynamically. “It is a tool that helps marketers supercharge their campaigns and gain the strongest return on investment to connect with their desired audiences,” he said.

To make sense of massive data volumes, MiQ has integrated large language models — Gemini, GPT, and Claude — each assigned distinct roles, from classification to reasoning. This enables marketers to interact with the platform via natural language prompts.

For example, a user might ask: “Who is watching Stranger Things, browsing travel blogs, and shopping on Amazon?” MiQ Sigma translates this into a detailed audience segment, offering insights that would traditionally require a team of analysts.

Brand safety in a fragmented ecosystem

According to GroupM, over 80% of digital ad spends in India are now programmatic. But automation brings risk, particularly around brand safety. Content misalignment — from adjacency to pirated material to explicit content — remains a serious concern.

MiQ Sigma has been developed with a preventative focus. “Where standard DSPs and verification tools often react to violations, it is built to preempt them,” said Puri. He added that the platform takes a "privacy-by-design" approach and is powered by a proprietary trading agent trained on MiQ’s 15 years of global campaign data.

Its contextual and generative AI systems can anticipate unsafe environments and suggest alternative placements in real time. Using identity resolution across device, household, and person-level datasets, the platform gives marketers granular control over where and how their ads appear. “This prevents a crisis from developing and lets marketers control their adjacencies,” Puri explained.

Operational clarity

Campaign orchestration across multiple platforms is another growing pain point. As Puri described, MiQ Sigma is built for "end-to-end intelligence and seamless activation, eliminating the friction of cross-platform planning."

By removing redundant steps and reducing manual intervention, the platform is designed to improve time and cost efficiency. For price-sensitive markets like India, this operational fluidity can directly enhance return on ad spend.

Another value proposition is the ability to integrate with agency, platform, and brand teams. Puri said this shared view facilitates “shared accountability,” allowing each stakeholder to work from the same dataset while aligning on campaign objectives, measurement criteria, and brand safety requirements.

Elevating expectations in programmatic

The launch of MiQ Sigma positions the company at the intersection of two industry-wide shifts: the increasing complexity of programmatic advertising and the rising demand for accountability and contextual relevance.

"Today’s consumers are hyper-aware and value-conscious, demanding that brands not only deliver but behave responsibly,” said Puri.

In this context, Sigma’s ambition is not just operational efficiency but strategic clarity — giving marketers the tools to navigate complexity while staying aligned with consumer values and brand equity.

As Mohan summarised, “MiQ Sigma makes it possible to measure the effectiveness of campaigns in real time, allowing marketers to connect more directly with their intended audiences.”

While no single platform is a panacea for all of programmatic’s challenges, MiQ Sigma offers a case study in how AI, identity resolution, and real-time insight can be woven together into a cohesive tool for modern marketers. The broader takeaway for the industry? In a market where every signal counts, context and clarity may well prove to be the most valuable currencies.