Humology, a next-gen ad platform across gaming, video and social, has appointed Raushida Vasaiwala as its new global senior vice president of commercial. Drawing on her experience across creative technology and media intelligence, Vasaiwala told in an exclusive interview with MARKETECH APAC that she will spearhead a strategy aimed at reshaping how brands and agencies capture audience attention—particularly in gaming environments where Gen Z spends the majority of its time.
Flipping the DSP Equation
Vasaiwala said her immediate priority is a three-pillar commercial strategy designed to tackle what she calls a “fundamental problem that’s bleeding budgets across APAC.”
“The truth is legacy DSPs are optimised for scale, not outcomes because brands are paying for impressions that don’t convert, and agencies are caught in the middle, struggling to prove ROI while watching margins erode. We are flipping that equation,” she explained.
Vasaiwala outlined a three-pillar strategy focused on incrementality, margin resilience, and outcome-driven education. Instead of simply shifting media budgets, she said Humology aims to drive true incremental results by leveraging its direct Unity SDK partnership—one of only six worldwide—to secure exclusive, high-attention inventory and early-session placements when users are most engaged.
She also added that the company is helping agencies protect 30–50% of their spend by cutting out multiple mediation layers and offers both programmatic and managed-service options with guaranteed placement quality.
Finally, Humology is running workshops to help teams move beyond viewability metrics and learn to track attention and optimise for conversions, enabling agencies to speak the language of business impact rather than basic media metrics.
“The goal [is] to be the performance engine that makes agencies more profitable and brands more effective in reaching the next generation.”
Lessons from previous roles
Vasaiwala’s career includes regional leadership roles at creative automation platform Celtra and media-intelligence firm Isentia. Prior to her role at Humology, she served as vice president of sales for APAC at Isentia. She also previously worked with Celtra as director of business development for INSEA before being promoted as general manager (sales & BD) for APAC.
“Both roles taught me technology without an adoption strategy is just expensive infrastructure,” she said. “At Celtra, I led the regional rollout of creative automation across APAC. What I learned was that media-creative alignment is the difference between campaigns that perform and campaigns that burn budget. When creative is format-native, when it’s built for the environment where it will be seen, performance lifts dramatically. This is absolutely crucial in gaming environments where jarring and interruption-based ads destroy user experience and brand perception.”
She added, “At Isentia, it was all about sales transformation at scale. Taking cutting-edge technology and making it accessible, adoptable, and profitable for teams with varying levels of sophistication.
Given Humology’s six-year presence in the market, she said that she is excited to accelerate the company’s commercial engine globally while maintaining that local and hands-on approach.
“The synthesis is I am focused on enabling agencies to unlock Gen Z attention through what we call our ‘full-stack performance engine’—the right data and targeting, high-attention inventory that isn’t available on open exchanges and paired with innovative yet native immersive formats. We do not want to have just rewarded video and playables, but creative that feels like it belongs in the gaming environment and critically, ROI accountability through first-party attention metrics,” she explained.
She added, “We don’t want to focus on viewability or CTR, which tell you nothing about actual engagement, but scroll depth, dwell time, and conversion correlation, because at the end of the day, agencies need to prove business impact, not just media delivery.”
Overcoming risk aversion in immersive media
For brands exploring immersive media, Vasaiwala sees hesitation as the main barrier.
“The biggest challenge is risk aversion masquerading as strategy. I see it constantly, where media planners who are experts at Facebook and Google, freeze when you mention in-game advertising. Senior marketers carry unconscious bias because they don’t game themselves, so they assume their customers don’t either. Meanwhile, Gen Z is spending 98% of their media time in gaming, an environment where traditional ad formats simply don’t register,” she said.
Vasaiwala warned that brands are wasting money by paying premium CPMs for ads that fail to capture attention in distraction-heavy environments. She noted that Gen Z moves quickly through content, instinctively skips ads, and often uses ad blockers, yet many marketers have not updated their strategies. The real opportunity, she said, lies in reaching this audience within games in a way that enhances rather than interrupts the experience
“However, what most people get wrong is immersion, a full-stack discipline. You need the right media access, audience intelligence, creative modularity, and measurement framework working in harmony,” she said.
She added, “At Humology, we ensure early-session and high-impact delivery with zero mediation waste, and the results speak for themselves, because we are seeing up to 28% incremental VCR contribution and 35%+ install-to-signup conversions across verticals like BFSI, QSR, and entertainment. That is business transformation.”
Rethinking media fundamentals
Vasaiwala emphasised that attention has become the key performance indicator for modern campaigns, replacing viewability. Brands, she explained, now need to know whether audiences truly watched an ad and for how long, as the gap between what is merely “seen” and what is actually absorbed can drain budgets.
She also stressed that creative must be tailored to each platform—pointing out that a LinkedIn video will not work on TikTok and a Facebook carousel will underperform in gaming environments—yet many agencies still rely on one-size-fits-all content due to tight budgets and timelines.
Finally, she noted that minimising technology layers is critical for return on investment, since each additional data pass or mediation step can cut 30 to 50% of value and leave brands paying premium prices for lower-quality inventory.
“Humology is built specifically for this reality because we deliver true attention measurement, not just viewability, but scroll depth, eye-tracking data, dwell time, and attention decay curves. Brands can finally correlate attention with business outcomes,” she said.
Vasaiwala also said that Humology delivers format-native creative by using modular, AI-tested assets that can be optimised in real time for the gaming environments where they appear, avoiding the look of content repurposed from other platforms and without charging base production fees. She added that the company’s direct Unity SDK partnership removes costly mediation layers, providing cleaner inventory, faster load times, guaranteed format compatibility, and direct player ID access for more precise targeting.
“The result is campaigns convert audiences because in a world where everyone’s optimising for attention, the platforms that can actually capture and measure it will separate the leaders from the laggards,” she concluded.
