MAM
Lodestar UM taps Vijayalakshmi Ramesh to drive its strategy function
Mumbai: In a bid to strengthen the strategy function for the Southern market, media agency Lodestar UM has appointed Vijayalakshmi Ramesh as head of strategy – South.
In this new role, Vijayalakshmi will be responsible for enhancing the strategy product for existing and new clients for the South market and will be based out of Lodestar UM’s Bengaluru office.
In her previous role, Vijayalakshmi was associated with Mindshare. Her professional experience includes an analytics role at IMRB, account planning at HTA, Media planning at Mudra & Initiative Media, as well as a stint as a marketing strategist for IBM at GPJ.
“We are delighted to have Viji as an integral part of our strategy function,” said Lodestar UM CEO Nandini Dias. “Bengaluru is home to several established technology-based businesses and our office has shown a robust growth rate across categories in the region over the last couple of years. Bangalore office handles many prestigious businesses like Wipro, Accenture, PhonePe, Ather Energy, Exide Life, Inbisco, etc.”
“The ever-evolving media landscape compounds the challenge,” commented Lodestar UM executive vice president Laya Menon. “Viji’s deep understanding of this entire spectrum will further strengthen our product that’s underpinned by Lodestar UM’s philosophy of Better Science Better Art Better Outcomes.”
During her career of 18 years in media and communications, Vijayalakshmi has worked with both B2C and B2B clients extensively. Her vast area of experience ranges from FMCG, retail, fashion, technology (B2B & B2C), new age services and startups.
“Lodestar has several cutting-edge products & planning tools, and I would endeavor to strengthen our strategic offerings to our clients on the back of those products to drive better business outcomes. I am looking forward to working closely with Laya and the Lodestar UM leadership team in driving this agenda,” said Vijayalakshmi Ramesh about her new role.
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.
