Indy Khabra and the art of seeing beyond the ball

Indy Khabra has a football maxim that sounds like advice for anyone attempting to build a company: “In football, the worst blindness is only seeing the ball”. The visible action is persuasive. It is also only part of the game. Elsewhere, someone is moving into space.

For Khabra, a Canadian hockey fan who became an advertising executive and then a founder, that thought makes a useful starting point. His career has followed audiences through changing media habits. With Livewire, the company he launched with Brad Manuel in 2021, the space he chose was gaming. The players were already there. Getting advertisers to understand them was another matter.

The whiteboard years

In September 2016, Khabra became managing director of Amnet Australia and New Zealand, the programmatic specialist within Dentsu Aegis Network. He had been its general manager. The promotion put him in charge of a business concerned with the machinery of advertising: buying media, analysing audience information and turning that information into decisions about where messages should appear.

His employer’s announcement singled out ambition, passion and charisma alongside his experience. That combination makes sense for the assignment. Automated buying still needs people who can explain it to other people, particularly when those people have budgets to defend. Khabra’s remit covered Australia and New Zealand, with the support of the wider group. Before that, he had worked in digital leadership roles across markets.

A 2017 interview supplies a less ceremonial picture. He enjoyed numbers and whiteboarding, liked sports content and listened to house music. Headphones had become a diplomatic solution for his colleagues. Asked about networking, he recommended listening. Asked about an alternative career, he fancied dancing in Michael Jackson’s Cirque du Soleil show. The spreadsheets evidently had to share an imagination.

His professional interests already stretched beyond the immediate media transaction. On his public profile, appearances and articles from this period cover people-based marketing and programmatic television. The recurring concern was how buying systems could become more useful as audiences moved between devices and environments. A television screen was becoming one part of a larger picture.

“In football, the worst blindness is only seeing the ball”

Indy Khabra, describing his philosophy in 2017

Two careers meet in a game

Livewire began in Australia in March 2021. Its founders arrived with different experience. Manuel had been chief executive of a global gaming talent business; Khabra came from programmatic advertising. Between them sat a practical question: how could a brand enter gaming with enough understanding to spend its money sensibly?

The pairing helps explain the company’s shape. Gaming involves publishers, creators, audiences, advertising systems and creative work. A brand might want a campaign inside a game, around a streamer or across several connected experiences. Someone has to translate among those parties. Livewire set out to make that translation a business, bringing media expertise into contact with gaming culture.

For Khabra, the connection also reached back to childhood. When announcing the company’s Series A in 2022, he recalled playing sport and video games with family and friends. He described a crossroads about 18 months earlier, followed by the experience of watching an idea become an international company. The post thanked advisors and investors by name. Founding, in this telling, involved quite a few people beyond the founders.

The September 2022 financing brought A$4.7 million, led by RealVC. Other participants included Perennial Private Ventures, Alua, Hills Cider Company co-founder Toby Kline and former Electronic Arts Asia Pacific regional president Nigel Sandiford. RealVC’s Matt Berriman joined the board. The announced uses were recognisable founder concerns: more people and further expansion. A large potential audience still required a functioning organisation to reach it.

The player gets a vote

By October 2023, Livewire had appointed Tom Simpson global CEO, with a London base. The founders moved into senior executive roles: Manuel took responsibility for publisher partnerships, while Khabra headed the in- and around-game media division. It was a change in the distribution of responsibility as the business grew. Subsequent public biographies in 2025 and 2026 again identify Khabra as co-CEO.

The operational distinction matters. Creating a company and organising it for its next stage are separate jobs, even when the same people remain involved. Khabra’s media remit placed him close to the business’s original problem: finding workable ways for advertisers to participate in environments they did not own.

At Advertising Week New York in 2023, he joined Jonathan Stringfield of Activision Blizzard Media and Spark Foundry president Kim Thompson for a discussion moderated by Digiday’s Alexander Lee. Their subject was fandom. The central difficulty was easy to grasp: a brand may benefit from a player’s attachment to a game, but that attachment brings expectations about how the brand behaves.

A fan’s enthusiasm cannot be treated as an empty advertising slot. The panel considered how brands might share in the affinity surrounding games, characters and stories, while complementing the experience. That is a demanding brief for an industry accustomed to measuring exposure. Being seen and being welcome are different achievements.

At a CES roundtable in 2024, Khabra returned to the less glamorous business of education. As marketers increased programmatic spending in games, he argued, they needed to keep learning about the medium. He wanted the industry to work together on that task. Even an automated transaction depends on someone understanding what they are buying.

Hockey, GoldenEye and the long season

His own preferences give the conversation a useful anchor. In a 2025 podcast, Khabra named GoldenEye and EA’s NHL franchise among his favourites. He identified himself as Canadian and a hockey fan, and said work with the NFL had brought more Madden into his playing. He also joked about laser tag evoking GoldenEye. A corporate partnership can produce many deliverables; an excuse for another game is an agreeable side effect.

In the same conversation, he discussed the need for advertising to fit the experience. In sports games, familiar brands can contribute to the feeling of a recognisable stadium. His broader point was about the relationship between the developer, the player and the advertiser. Each has an interest in what happens when a brand arrives.

Sport offers another useful connection: the calendar. During a February 2026 conversation about the business of sport, Khabra pointed out that video games continue between seasons. The fixture list ends; the player can still pick up a controller. For leagues thinking about younger fans, that leaves an opportunity to maintain a relationship beyond match day.

Livewire’s work with the NFL gives that idea a format. NFL Race to the End Zone brings together football players and gaming creators in a competition series. The first season extended toward a live event during Super Bowl LX week in San Francisco. It gave the relationship a sequence of episodes and a destination, rather than asking one isolated appearance to carry everything.

A smaller door into a large market

By its fifth anniversary in 2026, Livewire reported a global team of 60 and campaigns for brands including Samsung, Amazon, Nike, Uber and Verizon. Its anniversary account included work across Fortnite experiences, Roblox integrations and creator content. Khabra’s own anniversary post put particular emphasis on the people who had built the company. An audience thesis had become a team with different disciplines and time zones.

Another development was taking place underneath the creative work. Gamer.ID, Livewire’s audience platform, is designed to connect gaming behaviour across screens and formats. The company describes a system for understanding players through gameplay, media consumption and device signals, then using those insights in planning and activation.

Its premise is familiar to anyone who has followed Khabra’s earlier career: the same person can appear in several places. Treating each appearance as an unrelated audience can make a campaign repetitive or wasteful. Livewire says its platform helps advertisers manage those connections. The technology description has changed since the Amnet years, but the underlying interest in understanding an audience is recognisable.

In September 2026, that infrastructure acquired a more accessible front door. Ads by Livewire launched inside Canva, letting marketers select a format, audience, location and budget, preview the creative and submit a campaign for review. Launch formats included in-game billboards and interstitial banners. The announced starting budget was $500, with submitted campaigns reviewed within 24 hours.

“Gaming’s audience has always been there. The access has not.”

Indy Khabra, on the Canva integration

The product offered an answer to a problem Khabra had spent years discussing: a marketer might accept the case for gaming and still find the purchase difficult. In his launch interview, he described the ambition as making the buying process as straightforward as social advertising. There is a distinctly practical pleasure in that goal. After the presentation comes the form someone must actually complete.

There is still space off the ball

Later that September, the NFL and Livewire announced a second season of Race to the End Zone, with 21 episodes and a finale planned for Super Bowl LXI week in Los Angeles. The announcement reported 178 million total first-season views on NFL YouTube and recognition from the Telly and Digiday awards. Those are the partners’ reported results, attached to a particular series and season.

The two September announcements show the range of Khabra’s current work. One is an entertainment partnership with an ongoing story. The other is a route for an advertiser to place a campaign through a familiar creative tool. Both require attention to what happens between wanting an audience and reaching it.

That is where his football maxim earns its place. Following the obvious action is easy. Khabra’s career has involved watching the surrounding movement: audiences changing habits, brands looking for a route in, and the systems needed to connect them. Somewhere nearby, a Canadian hockey fan still has a controller. The next opening may appear between games.