Brands
Shilpa Dureja Puri elevated as director marketing – new computing & wearables at Samsung Electronics India
GURGAON: Shilpa Dureja Puri has been elevated as director marketing, new computing and wearables at Samsung Electronics India, signalling the company’s confidence in a leader steeped in digital, premium and ecosystem storytelling.
She now leads marketing for tablets, laptops, watches, buds, rings and accessories, shaping the next phase of connected consumer experiences and driving growth in categories that straddle work, play and everyday digital life.
Within Samsung, Dureja Puri has climbed steadily. She has handled director marketing roles across luxury, flagship and ecosystem portfolios, served as gm marketing for luxury and flagship mobiles, and earlier as general manager digital from Gurugram, sharpening the brand’s premium and online muscle.
Her grounding in technology marketing was forged at Microsoft, where she held director roles in digital and experiential marketing and earlier led digital marketing across content, search, analytics and demand generation. She worked on governance, privacy and large-scale digital transformation, and drove partner and education marketing programmes across India.
Before that came agency and global exposure. As vice president at Publicis Modem, part of Publicis Groupe, she ran India operations, managed P&L and built digital strategy for clients including HP and Beam Global. She also served as marketing director, India at Dada S.p.A, working on web and mobile community services across markets.
Her early career blended media, marketing and academia. She taught as senior guest faculty at National Institute of Fashion Technology, University of Delhi and Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, covering new media, journalism and communication skills.
In media and publishing, she worked with HT Media Ltd on the relaunch of Hindustan Times’ digital properties and brand activations, including a luxury conference at Taj Mahal Palace & Towers. At Times Internet Limited, she handled editorial and product roles across lifestyle and city guides. As a freelance journalist, she wrote for The Times of India, The Asian Age, The Statesman and Femina, among others.
Recognition has followed. She has been named among the 100 Smartest Digital Marketing Leaders by World Digital Marketing Congress and CMO Asia. An alumna of International Management Institute New Delhi, she also completed the Modern Marketing programme at Kellogg School of Management, finishing with distinction.
For Samsung, the logic is clear. As screens, wearables and services converge, marketing must stitch them into one story. Dureja Puri’s brief is to make that story sell. The race now is for mindshare, wallet share and a place in the consumer’s daily routine. Samsung has picked its narrator.
Brands
Creative Intelligence: Using AI to Predict Which Ads Will Actually Convert
Priyanka Aeron, Director & Co-founder of Thrive Global AI
MUMBAI: In a heavily populated digital landscape, simply being creative with your advertising will not guarantee that your ad will be successful. In fact, brands today are producing more content than ever. However, very little of that results in actual engagement or sales. However, Creative Intelligence, powered by AI, is fundamentally transforming the advertising industry.
Creative Intelligence utilizes data, machine learning, and statistical behavioral insights to analyze and predict how well a creative asset will perform prior to it being published. Therefore, marketers no longer have to rely on either their gut instincts or post-campaign analytics for making informed decisions before production. That said, AI-powered creative intelligence greatly improves results and decreases wasted dollars spent.
Moving Beyond Guesswork
In the past, making ads was a mix of gut feeling, experience, and A/B testing. These methods were useful, but reactive by nature. People have already spent their budgets by the time the results are looked at. AI models can find patterns that are linked to higher engagement and conversion rates by looking at huge datasets. These datasets can include things like past campaign performance, audience behavior, and visual elements like color, composition, and facial expressions. This helps marketers guess which ads will do well even before they go live.
Decoding What Truly Drives Conversions
AI-powered creative intelligence allows for an evaluation of advertisements that is not limited to the basic data but also explores the elements of an effective advertisement through subtle reactions; clarity and directness of the ad message and how well the ad captures audience’s attention in the first three seconds. AI can also provide insights into the successful use of advertisements directed to human faces, which connect through eye contact based on media channels, and how advertisements that utilize shorter but clear calls to action may produce more clicks from certain populations. The insights, provided through AI, provide marketers with the ability to think beyond creating more advertising material and additionally create more effective ad campaigns that actually convert.
Personalization at Scale
Consumers expect relevance more than ever. Irrelevant mass messaging is not going to work in a society inundated with information. Hyper-personalization, using AI, allows companies to create content that suits individual segments within their target markets based on their demographics, interests, and behaviors. Rather than having one single message that aims to reach everyone, brands can have many versions of their messages tailored to each segment within the market. Such flexibility is what makes campaigns successful nowadays.
Faster Iteration, Better Results
Another advantage to using AI in creative decision-making is speed. Companies must improvise because their campaign cycles are shorter than ever before, and having the ability to iterate rapidly is more important than it has ever been. There is no greater way to do this work than through AI, as new technologies give brands the ability to test multiple creative avenues and figure out which ones are working well. This reduces a lot of the testing that companies would otherwise have to do and makes the process faster.
With AI, brands can also make creative changes in real-time during a campaign, allowing the, to make vital decisions and adjust their creatives, rather than waiting out. This allows for faster adaptability, well-tested campaigns and reduced lost ad spend.
The Human-AI Collaboration
Even though AI is capable of performing certain tasks, its purpose is not to eliminate human creativity. Successful campaigns require human collaboration with computer intellect since both complement each other. While computers are capable of dealing with massive amounts of information, discovering patterns, and providing predictions, humans are the one to inject stories and emotions into campaigns.
The Future of Advertising
As the complexity of advertising becomes harder with the passage of time, Creative Intelligence will play a significant role in helping marketers formulate a strategic approach. The yardstick that will set standards for determining whether a marketing firm has fulfilled its responsibilities will be the forecasting of future outcomes, as well as personalized content and optimization of creative elements in real-time. In contrast to the existing scenario where the campaigns remain fixed, these campaigns will be capable of adjusting themselves according to the customer interacting with the brand, as well as other trends on social media channels. This will enable brands to offer customers an engaging experience that will exceed expectations. The biggest hurdle marketers will face will be finding ways to utilize these capabilities without compromising branding and enhancing the creativity of the team involved.
