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WPP’s Xaxis launches Light Reaction
MUMBAI: WPP’s programmatic media and technology platform Xaxis has formally launched Light Reaction, a new mobile-first performance advertising business with an innovative outcomes-based, pay-for-performance media model.
Light Reaction’s performance model is designed to combine scientific insight into how audiences perceive, relate and react to advertising with the data resources and scale of Xaxis to deliver highly accountable results for global brands. At launch, Light Reaction will be available in 20 markets across North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Light Reaction’s response-oriented methodology and model is designed to maximize the volume of outcomes a brand is able to achieve. In an engagement with German retailer Walbusch, Light Reaction was tasked with the specific outcome of driving new customer sales. Utilizing real-time creative optimization, Light Reaction’s campaign increased new customer sales by 17 per cent, while decreasing new customer acquisition costs by eight per cent. Walbusch utilized Light Reaction’s pay-for-performance model and only paid for directly attributed new customer sales.
Light Reaction’s performance marketing platform leverages the mobile-first technology of recent Xaxis acquisition ActionX, a leader in mobile app and cross-screen advertising; the programmatic capabilities of the QuismaX performance products previously provided by GroupM’s QUISMA; and Turbine, Xaxis’ proprietary data management platform, which provides real-time audience segmentation and modelling capabilities. Advertisers will have the opportunity to pair Light Reaction outcome-focused media products alongside Xaxis audience products.
Xaxis executive vice president, general manager, performance marketing Paul Dolan will head Light Reaction as general manager.
“Light Reaction makes it easy for global advertisers to garner the outcomes they want with zero upfront risk and unparalleled capability to scale results across multiple channels. We’ve developed a model for performance marketing that allows brands to meet precise objectives of customer response while drawing a direct line between ads and results,” said Dolan.
In addition to leveraging robust audience data, high-performing media inventory and real-time programmatic technologies, Light Reaction is developing tools that tap the emerging field of perceptual science to help advertisers stand out amidst the crowded digital real-estate of consumers’ mobile devices. This understanding of the perceptual pathway by which audiences process and respond to dynamic creative will enhance Light Reaction’s ability to maximize desired outcomes under the broadest possible set of conditions. While Light Reaction’s mobile-first approach reflects the ever-increasing prominence of mobile, its products are channel agnostic. Advertisers can run coordinated campaigns across multiple channels to capture outcomes wherever they may be.
“Mobile is the only digital media channel that’s essentially always-on, making it a huge target for global advertisers. With Light Reaction we’re arming clients to cut the through the clutter of the space with a platform that takes performance marketing to a new level of customization and accountability, particularly in driving outcomes via mobile devices,” said Xaxis global CEO Brian Lesser.
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Kevin Vaz opens FICCI-EY report with a declaration: India’s M&E industry set to breach Rs 3 trillion mark by 2027
In a keynote address at the FICCI-EY report launch, Kevin Vaz says sport, AI and the connected TV boom are driving a multi-screen revolution with no signs of slowing
MUMBAI: India’s media and entertainment industry is growing faster than the economy, reshaping global benchmarks and is on course to blow past Rs 3 trillion by 2027. That was the headline message from Kevin Vaz, chairman of the FICCI Media and Entertainment Committee and chief executive of entertainment at JioStar, who delivered the opening keynote at the launch of the FICCI-EY Media and Entertainment Report 2026 in Mumbai on Monday. He did not waste much time on caveats.
The industry hit Rs 2.78 trillion in 2025, outpacing GDP per capita growth and surpassing even last year’s bullish forecasts. Vaz described the year in three words: scale, convergence, transformation. The numbers, he suggested, were only half the story. The other half was how that growth was happening.
Digital has become the industry’s largest segment, driven by advertising, subscriptions and commerce. But Vaz was quick to puncture the familiar narrative of digital killing everything else. India, he argued, is not an either-or market. It is an AND market. Connected TV is surging. Linear television, mobile, films and print are all still expanding. AVGC, the animation, visual effects, gaming and comics sector, is emerging as a serious growth engine, opening new storytelling formats and new global revenue streams. Nothing, he said, is replacing anything. Everything is reinforcing everything else.
Nowhere is that more vivid than in sport. In an on-demand world where audiences can watch anything, anytime, Indians still show up live. “Sports don’t fragment audiences,” Vaz said. “They unite them, just on different screens.” The ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026 made the point emphatically. During the final, JioHotstar delivered 72.5 million concurrent streams, a global record. Group chats exploded. Families renegotiated control of the television. Advertisers, Vaz noted with undisguised relish, stopped asking where audiences were and started asking how fast they could get in.
Cinema had its own landmark year. More than 1,900 films were released, with several crossing the Rs 1 billion mark. Dhurandhar was singled out as proof that Indian audiences will still turn up in large numbers for content that grips them. Live experiences, too, are getting bigger and more immersive, though Vaz suggested the surface has barely been scratched.
Then there is artificial intelligence, which he described as quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, reshaping everything. AI is enabling personalisation, efficiency and scale, but Vaz argued its deeper significance lies in what it is doing to creativity itself. He pointed to Mahabharat: Ek Dharmayudh, billed as the world’s first AI-produced show, as evidence that the technology can amplify creative ambition rather than hollow it out. He also used the platform to call on Indian policymakers to engage seriously with the creative industry on AI and copyright, ensuring that creators are fairly compensated as the technology spreads.
The picture that emerges from the report, and from Vaz’s keynote, is of an industry that has stopped thinking of itself as a fast-growing emerging market and started thinking of itself as a global template. Scale, diversity and innovation, he said, are no longer in tension in India. They are coexisting, and the rest of the world is taking notes.
The Rs 3 trillion milestone is two years away. As the man who chairs the committee that shapes the industry’s policy agenda and runs the country’s most powerful entertainment platform, Vaz set the tone for the day with characteristic directness: India’s media business is not just chasing growth. It is deciding what the country talks about at dinner. That is a different kind of power altogether.
