MAM
Team Marksmen engages industry heavyweights to sharpen its strategic edge
MUMBAI: In a move that screams ‘boardroom but make it bold’, Team Marksmen Network (TMN) has taken a solid step up the influence ladder by unveiling its newly minted advisory board—a hand-picked league of industry legends, policy powerhouses, and innovation whisperers.
Known for stirring India’s business cauldron with hot-brewed insights and sharp-edged forums, TMN has now doubled down on its mission to lead transformation across sectors with a boardroom stacked with brainpower and bragging rights.
Let’s talk lineup. You’ve got Tayeb Kamali—education bigwig from the UAE Ministry of Interior and a man whose Rolodex probably includes half of Silicon Valley and most of Abu Dhabi. There’s C.P. Gurnani, the man who made digital transformation sexy back when people still said “blockchain” with a straight face. Add to that Datin Seri Sunita Rajakumar, a climate warrior in a boardroom blazer, juggling global councils, professorships, and multiple directorships while saving the planet.
If that wasn’t enough, Suresh Prabhu—yes, that Suresh Prabhu—brings his weight as a six-time MP and former Union Minister across 10 different ministries (we’re exhausted just writing that). Rounding it out is Ajay Dua, economic policy ace and former Secretary to the Ministry of Commerce & Industry, who knows how to make sense of GDPs, FDI flows, and government jargon like nobody else.
This star-studded power panel has one goal: steer TMN’s future with grit, gravitas, and global vision.
“Collaboration is key to meaningful change. With such accomplished leaders guiding us, we are set to elevate industry dialogue and knowledge-sharing to new heights,” said co-founders Rajesh Khubchandani, Akash Tiwari, and Sharad Gupta.
CEO Rishi Kapoor added, “This marks a new phase of growth for TMN. With our Advisory Board’s guidance, we will strengthen our strategic initiatives, drive impactful discussions, and create lasting industry transformation.”
As the network broadens its footprint across sectors, expect sharper debates, smarter policies, and boardroom brawls with a side of insight. With this squad steering the ship, the business ecosystem should buckle up for a wild, wise ride.
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.
