MAM
Ashika Group brings in Vishesh Sharma as CMO
Mumbai: Finacial services provider Ashika Group has appointed Vishesh Sharma as chief marketing officer (CMO). He will be based in Mumbai and report directly to Ashika Group CEO Chirag Jain.
The bolstering of the company’s leadership ranks is in line with its vision of fortifying the personal finance ecosystem and transforming how New India manages its savings and investments with the newly-launched My Dhanush app, said the statement.
At Ashika Group, Sharma will be responsible for brand building, content marketing, social media, and corporate communications for the retail business, which is stacked under the company’s master brand, My Dhanush, it added.
“We are excited to welcome Vishesh, a passionate brand-builder, and are confident he will play a vital role in building a truly world-class FinTech brand,” said Chirag Jain. “I believe under his able leadership and in-depth understanding of customer communication, we will strengthen Ashika further and drive growth across our portfolio.”
A communications veteran, Sharma joins Ashika Group with 13 years of extensive and diverse work experience across fields, including brand communication, content marketing, corporate communications, reputation management, internal communications, public affairs, and financial education. In his previous stint, he was with Angel One as head of content marketing, corporate communications, and strategic alliances, where he successfully transformed the company’s image from a traditional broker to a fintech. He also led the retail communication for Angel One’s IPO.
Earlier, Sharma also served as the chief content strategist for Sharekhan by BNP Paribas, where he helped set up the digital assets department. He has worked with some prominent brands like Dalal Street Investment Journal, Progressive Media Group among others.
In the last couple of years, he has been conferred with multiple marketing awards, including Corporate Communications Person of The Year, Marketing Leader of the Year (BFSI), and Content Marketing Professional of the Year.
“I am excited to join such a fast-growing organization and play a part in building one of India’s very first personal finance super app My Dhanush. Ashika has an excellent track record of helping its clients grow their wealth by helping them invest wisely,” said Vishesh Sharma. “With a strong vision to build solutions that revolutionize the way new India invests, I look forward to helping Ashika strengthen its national leadership to be both a force for growth and a force for good.”
AD Agencies
Amazon Ads launches AI tools to build and run campaigns in India
Two new agentic tools promise to slash the time and cost of building and running ad campaigns in India
MUMBAI Amazon Ads has thrown two agentic AI tools into the Indian market – Creative Agent and Ads Agent – and the pitch is blunt: do in hours what once took weeks, at no extra cost, and leave rivals eating algorithmic dust. The e-commerce giant is determined to democratise sophisticated advertising, handing small businesses the same firepower that until now only the biggest brands could afford.
Creative Agent, embedded within Amazon’s Creative Studio, works as a conversational AI creative partner. Click “chat” and it springs to life: researching products and audiences, brainstorming concepts, drafting multi-scene video scripts, generating images, animating scenes, laying in voiceovers and music, and spitting out finished display and video ads. The entire pipeline – from blank page to broadcast-ready creative – runs on Amazon’s own first-party signals, pulling from shopping behaviour, product-detail pages, brand stores and advertiser websites to ensure the final output resonates with real shoppers rather than just ticking creative boxes.
The tool supports multiple formats – Amazon DSP, Sponsored Display, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Brands Video and Streaming TV – and gives advertisers granular control at every stage, so they can edit everything from the overarching concept to the most minor scene detail without needing a designer or a brief. For a market stuffed with brands that have sharp products but thin creative budgets, that is a significant offer.
“AI is fundamentally changing what is possible in advertising. With Creative Agent and Ads Agent, we are giving every advertiser access to AI-powered intelligence and our insights be it a small business or an established brand. Our AI-powered tools help them create smarter, launch faster, and drive stronger business outcomes at every stage of the campaign lifecycle.” – Girish Prabhu, vice-president and head, Amazon Ads India.
The proof of concept is already in circulation. Frido, a growing Indian consumer brand, used early access to Creative Agent to run a Streaming TV campaign ahead of a sale event. Ganesh Sonawane, chief executive of Frido, is unequivocal: “Creative Agent removes that compromise entirely. We were able to launch our Streaming TV campaign for a sale event faster than ever – and the results were immediate.” The click-through rate for that campaign was 40 per cent higher than usual, Sonawane says, adding that the brand is now “testing more concepts, launching faster, and seeing stronger results, without increasing our creative spend.”
Running the numbers
The second tool, Ads Agent, tackles the unglamorous grind of campaign management. Currently live within Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and heading to Amazon Ads Campaign Manager later this year, it automates the tasks that consume disproportionate hours: identifying audience segments, adjusting pacing across hundreds of simultaneous campaigns, and generating SQL queries for advanced analytics – all through plain-language conversation rather than lines of code.
Advertisers can upload a custom media plan and let Ads Agent construct a campaign structure and ad groups. The tool then reviews thousands of audience segments to surface the most relevant Amazon audiences and keywords, serves them up for human review, and applies approved choices at scale. For AMC users, it translates business questions into complex SQL queries in real time, collapsing what was once a specialist task into a conversational exchange.
Amazon frames both tools as part of a broader full-funnel advertising proposition that already spans Prime Video, Amazon MX Player and third-party publishers, with generative AI now stitched throughout the creative and campaign layer. The company claims that combining first-party shopping signals with agentic AI delivers “accuracy and depth that drives real business outcomes” – a claim Frido’s 40 per cent CTR uplift lends at least some early credibility to.
