A household graph connects multiple devices — a smart TV, two mobile phones, a laptop — to a single household identity. In CTV advertising, this matters because a TV ad is seen by a room, not a person. Knowing that the smart TV, the household head's phone, and a family member's tablet all belong to the same home enables household-level frequency management, cross-screen attribution, and household-level targeting based on combined signals from all devices. In India, household graphs are built primarily from shared IP addresses, JioFiber household identity, and publisher login data — not from credit bureau or postal data as in Western markets.
What is a household graph
A household graph is a probabilistic or deterministic mapping of devices to households. It answers: "Which devices are used by the same household?"
Two methods are used to build the mapping:
- Deterministic: Explicit signals tie devices together. The same email address logs into JioHotstar on a smart TV and a mobile phone. The same phone number is the registered ID for both a streaming account and a mobile app account. These hard links are highly reliable but cover fewer households than probabilistic methods.
- Probabilistic: Statistical inference links devices that share IP addresses, similar usage patterns, and overlapping geographic signals. A smart TV and two phones that consistently share the same home WiFi IP, consume content in similar time windows, and resolve to the same area pin code are very likely in the same household. This is less precise than deterministic linking but extends graph coverage to tens of millions of households where deterministic signals are unavailable.
In practice, all major household graphs use a combination — deterministic links as anchors, probabilistic expansion to fill gaps.
Household graph signals in India
India's household graph construction relies on different inputs than Western markets:
- Shared home WiFi IP: The primary probabilistic signal. JioFiber and Airtel Fiber assign static or near-static residential IPs to most broadband plans — more stable than mobile IPs. A consistent household IP shared by a smart TV and a mobile device is a strong co-residency signal. This signal degrades in dense urban housing where shared routers cover multiple flats on a single IP block.
- Publisher login (OTT accounts): JioHotstar, SonyLIV, and Zee5 have registered, phone-number-verified accounts. When a single phone-number-linked account streams on both a smart TV app and a mobile app, the publisher has deterministic proof of a cross-device, same-household link. This data is used internally by publishers for their own household graphs; it is shared with buyers in aggregated, privacy-safe forms through publisher audience segments, not as raw device maps.
- Jio ecosystem: Reliance Jio has significant cross-device visibility: JioFiber broadband connects the home network, Jio mobile accounts connect individual devices, and JioHotstar accounts link OTT consumption. This gives Jio-linked households one of the richest deterministic household graphs in India.
- Telecom billing address: Indian telecom operators (Jio, Airtel, Vi) know residential billing addresses. Combined with device IMEI/IMSI data, telcos can construct household-level device maps with high accuracy. This data is used in telco-DSP partnerships but is not available in open programmatic.
Household targeting methods
Household-level CTV targeting uses the graph in three ways:
- Household frequency capping: Instead of capping per device IFA (which misses co-viewers), cap at the household IP or household graph ID level. This prevents a household from seeing the same ad 10 times across the smart TV and two mobile devices while the campaign's device-level cap shows only 3–4 exposures per device. Household-level capping is available on JioHotstar (through DV360 household frequency settings) and is a recommended default for any India CTV campaign with a weekly frequency target.
- Cross-device retargeting: A user who saw a CTV ad can be retargeted with a related creative on mobile within the same household graph. The most practical implementation in India is within the JioHotstar ecosystem (CTV exposure → mobile retargeting for the same registered account). Cross-publisher cross-device retargeting (CTV on JioHotstar → mobile retargeting on a third-party app) requires an identity resolution layer and has significantly lower match rates.
- Household-level audience targeting: If any device in the household matches a target audience segment (e.g., a mobile phone showing auto-intent signals), the household graph enables that signal to extend to the CTV device. This is used by DV360 and TTD when household extension is enabled in their respective identity graphs.
India household graph providers
The household graph capability available to India CTV buyers comes from:
- Google/DV360: Google's identity graph uses signed-in users across YouTube, Google Search, Android devices, and Chrome to build household clusters. Coverage is strong for Android TV households where a Google account is the device login — a significant share of India's smart TV market given Android TV dominance.
- The Trade Desk (Unified ID 2.0): UID2 links hashed email addresses across publisher and advertiser data, enabling household-level identity where multiple household members share email-based IDs. Adoption in India is growing but less mature than in the US.
- JioHotstar publisher graph: The richest deterministic household graph for India CTV within a single publisher's ecosystem. Available to direct deal buyers and through DV360 for programmatic buyers.
- Telco DSP partnerships (Airtel Ads, Vi Ads): India telecom operators offer household-level targeting through their own DSP interfaces or data partnerships, using billing address as the household anchor. Coverage is limited to their own subscriber base.
Limits and practical guidance
Household graphs in India have real limitations that planners need to account for:
- Graph coverage is not universal: Household graph-based targeting works well for JioFiber/Jio mobile households and for Android TV households with active Google accounts. It degrades for premium Airtel/BSNL broadband households without strong platform login data, and for rural households on mobile hotspot (not fixed broadband), where IP stability is low.
- PG households complicate single-person targeting: India's paying-guest and shared accommodation market (significant in urban metros) means IP-based household graphs frequently conflate unrelated individuals who share a flat and a router. Household-level frequency management in these environments may under-cap frequency relative to intent.
- DPDPA compliance: Cross-device linking and household graph construction using personal data (phone numbers, email hashes, account data) requires compliance with India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023. Buyers using publisher household graph data or telco-derived segments should confirm the data chain has valid consent in place.
- Use household capping as a default: The highest-value practical application of household graphs for most India CTV buyers is frequency capping, not audience extension. A simple rule — cap at 4 exposures per household per week — significantly reduces over-exposure and creative fatigue without requiring any sophisticated graph integration on the buyer side.