MAM
FCB Interface appoints Aditi Patwardhan as chief strategy officer
Mumbai: FCB Interface has announced the appointment of Aditi Patwardhan as the chief strategy officer, as a part of the agency’s reorganisation towards becoming future ready and providing strategic partnership to its clients. She will be based out of the Mumbai office.
In her role, Patwardhan will be leading the strategy mandate to drive the next level of growth for the agency, said the statement.
“With Aditi on board, I look forward to some scintillating work emanating from razor-sharp strategy,” stated FCB Interface vice chairman and chief creative office Robby Mathew.
A brand and business builder, Patwardhan’s expertise comes from her 25 years of marketing and advertising experience that includes stints at Lowe Lintas and Leo Burnett. She has partnered with global brands for multinationals like Unilever, P&G. Whisper, Fair & Lovely, Pureit, Knorr, Kissan & McDonald’s. Her Marketing stints include DCW Home Products, International Bestfoods, Dabur India and Mattel. Having been on both sides of the table, she is well versed in the intricacies of business and the pressures of P&L.
FCB Interface vice chairman and CEO Joe Thaliath said, “Aditi is a strong believer and practitioner of media agnostic solutions to real problems. Her well rounded experience and expertise is indeed a perfect fit to lead the agency in its next phase of growth! We look forward to creating inspiring Never Finished brand building stories with Aditi at the helm.”
“The agency’s strong strategy fundamentals and client partnerships made for a natural fit. But it’s the strong solutioning focus of the much awarded ideas like the ‘Punishing Signal” that excites me,” said Aditi Patwardhan on her new assignment. “I look forward to the mandate of taking the momentum to next level and sharpening the strategy offering. We are in process of building a powerhouse planning team which offers clients multidisciplinary competencies. Powered by the strong philosophy of Brand Bedrock and a suite of tools that have proven results within the network.”
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.
