Done right, this can be a powerful, helpful tool. Done wrong, it’ll just become another source of consumer fatigue.
Mumbai: The advertising landscape is undergoing a profound transformation. As AI assistants seamlessly suggest products mid-conversation and retailers evolve into influential media platforms, the boundaries between content, commerce, and communication are dissolving. Leading the charge in this new paradigm is AHA—a strategy-first creative collective built to spark momentum and drive real growth for brands.
In a world where retail media commands a growing share of digital budgets and AI-native advertising actively shapes customer journeys, AHA is guiding brands to rethink not just their messaging, but their entire ecosystem.
Today, advertising isn’t just about capturing attention—it’s about building systems that generate sustained impact. At the center of this shift is AHA, partnering with forward-thinking brands to transform complexity into growth.
Sushobhan Chowdhury Founder of AHA, has been closely tracking how these shifts are reshaping the balance between media, creativity, and strategy. He believes the real opportunity isn’t just in adopting new tools it’s in rethinking the systems behind how brands show up. From media-fluid storytelling and predictive creative intelligence to the chaos sparked by Google’s antitrust ruling his perspective cuts through the hype to what actually moves the needle.
In this conversation with Sushobhan Chowdhury, Founder of AHA, a media-fluid, business-first creative agency with a presence in both India and Dubai. W e explore the evolving role of agencies, the promise and pitfalls of AI-led advertising, and why craft still matters more than ever
Retail media is rapidly eating into digital budgets. How are you helping brands rethink their strategy to make the most of this shift?*
Absolutely retail media is growing fast, and it’s only going to accelerate. It already accounts for around 22% of overall digital spends in India, and honestly, I won’t be surprised if that number doubles in the next 18 to 24 months. So yes, it’s imperative for brands to participate but that doesn’t mean jumping in blindly.
The real question is: how is that spend working for the brand? Is it delivering short-term lifts at the cost of long-term equity? Is it adding value beyond just conversions? At AHA, we help clients make every rupee work harder. And that starts with creative.
We don’t advise clients to simply repurpose existing assets for commerce platforms. What works on YouTube or Instagram doesn’t automatically work on Blinkit or BigBasket. Unless you create commerce-native creative, you won’t see results even if that same content worked wonders elsewhere.
We help brands custom-tailor assets to the context of each platform. The message, the format, the visual language everything is built for performance in that specific space. That’s how you get the media to work as hard as the money behind it.
Do you see retail media becoming the new default for performance and brand visibility alike?
It’s not a simple yes or no. Yes, brands need conversions, and retail media is an effective way to drive those. You can target fence-sitters, trigger purchase with an offer or a bundle, and drive results fast.
But, and it’s a big but, brands aren’t built on offers alone. They’re built on stories, values, and a sense of identity. And that doesn’t come through when all you’re doing is pushing promos. So if you move your entire strategy onto retail media just because it’s “working,” you risk creating a purely transactional relationship with your customers. Over time, that erodes equity.
The smarter move is to not treat retail media in isolation, but as part of a multi-platform plan. Yes, retail media has evolved from just a lower-funnel tool to a full-funnel opportunity with options like video, influencer collabs, branded content, and even live commerce. But just because these features exist doesn’t mean your consumers are using the platform like they use Instagram or YouTube.
That’s the critical difference. Intent and behaviour differ by platform, and so must the content. You can’t just push the same ad everywhere and hope it works. At AHA, we hand-hold our clients through these nuances, understanding what each medium offers, what role it plays, and how to design content that fits the medium, the moment, and the mindset of the audience.
We’re now seeing product suggestions mid-chat via AI assistants. What excites or concerns you about this trend? What’s your view on the ethical boundaries of embedding ads within AI-led conversations?
It’s a fantastic innovation. The potential to collapse the user journey from curiosity to purchase within a single chat is massive. Imagine asking about sun protection and instantly getting a relevant product recommendation. It’s efficient and frictionless.
But it has to be done right. If it’s intrusive, irritating, or deceptive, it will backfire. Users should always know if a suggestion is an ad, and they must have opted into that experience. No one wants to be sold to without consent.
Especially in the Indian context with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP) in place transparency and consent aren’t optional anymore. They’re legal and ethical necessities.
Our stance is simple:
If it’s paid, say it’s paid. If it’s AI, disclose it. If it’s personalised, get consent.
Done right, this can be a powerful, helpful tool. Done wrong, it’ll just become another source of consumer fatigue
The balance between personalisation and privacy in conversational AI formats?
Look, I can’t speak for how marketplaces handle this, but for the D2C brands we work with, we’re very clear: personalisation should never cross the line into intrusion.
Yes, Indian consumers have traditionally been casual about data but that’s changing. Post-DPDP, there’s a shift happening. People are becoming more privacy-conscious, and they want relevance on their own terms.
We encourage brands to earn the right to personalise. Start by offering utility. If your AI assistant solves a query be it skincare advice or clarifying insurance jargon you’ve added value. Only then do you layer in a product nudge.
Our mantra is: Solve, don’t sell.
That means using first- and zero-party data ethically and transparently, giving clear opt-in/opt-out controls, and avoiding anything that feels like surveillance. Personalisation should be helpful, not creepy. That’s the difference between a great brand experience and a trust-destroying one.
How does AHA apply system-thinking in creative strategies? Could you share a case where this made a tangible difference?
System-thinking, for us, is about zooming out and designing the entire experience, not just individual assets. We think in terms of interconnected touchpoints where creative, media, data, and product strategy work together as one loop.
One example that stands out: we worked with a gourmet retail chain that wanted to grow wallet share among its loyalty customers. Their first instinct was to run a promo campaign. We challenged that, suggesting a system-thinking approach instead.
We began by understanding their customer base in detail who they are, what they eat, how they live, where they work. We enriched and filtered the data, bringing the universe down from 750K to a focused set of 350K customers. From there, we built seven personas: health-conscious users, cooking enthusiasts, busy professionals, and so on.
Then we matched those personas to relevant SKUs. Super seeds for the health-first group. Exotic oils for the gourmet home chef. Each persona got their own landing page, and we sent out an opt-in message. 175K people opted in, and we targeted them with hyper-personalised communication.
Over six months, across three cities, this led to a 54% month-on-month lift in engagement and sales.
Why did it work? Because we didn’t just push an offer we solved real problems. These customers were time-strapped. The stores weren’t easy to access. Many weren’t even aware of the full range of products available. So we used data, design, and behavioural insights to build a system that brought the right discovery to the right person at the right time.
That’s system-thinking in action. It’s not a campaign it’s an ecosystem designed to drive behaviour.
You often talk about moving from campaign-thinking to system-thinking. What does that look like in practice?
In practice, it means we move away from isolated spikes and towards ongoing, layered engagement. Campaigns are great, they create noise. But systems build momentum.
We design strategies that span formats, touchpoints, and time. It’s about creating feedback loops: what worked, what didn’t, what next? Instead of waiting for quarterly performance reviews, we build creative systems that can iterate weekly, evolve in real time, and speak to different audience needs simultaneously.
So yes, campaign-thinking is episodic. But system-thinking is holistic, responsive, and built to last.
Where do brands go wrong when they rely too heavily on AI for creativity?
The biggest mistake? Confusing generation with resonance.
AI can write grammatically correct, on-brand lines. But it can’t read the room. It doesn’t understand the subtext of a Bengali Durga Puja ad or the emotional weight of a Tamil Pongal story. In a country like India, culture is everything.
Brands that lean too hard on AI risk sounding generic, repetitive, or emotionally tone-deaf. Creativity isn’t just about output it’s about context, emotion, and intuition.
AI can scale content. It can optimise language. But it can’t capture those tiny moments that make us feel something. And in a cluttered digital world, that feeling is what cuts through.
Where do you draw the line between efficiency and creativity when using AI? Can you share an example where human craft clearly outperformed AI-generated content in a campaign?
We draw the line where creativity starts losing its distinctive human edge.
Yes, AI is brilliant for speed, for automating repetitive tasks, for handling scale. But it often leads to a sea of sameness.
Take the Ghibli-style content wave. When it first appeared, it felt magical, intimate, flawed, beautiful. But then everyone jumped on the bandwagon, and suddenly your feed was flooded with AI-generated Ghibli clones. It lost all its charm. That’s the difference between human-crafted Ghibli and soulful Ghibli. AI versions felt formulaic.
AI gives us structure. But craft lives in the margins and that’s where humans still outperform every time.
What trend or shift in the industry are most brands still underestimating?
Two things: attention fragility and unified commerce.
We’re living in a scroll-happy, skip-button world. Most brands still optimise for reach, but they should be designing for retention in the first two seconds. You’ve got to win attention in-frame, on mute, and under pressure. If you’re not designing for that, you’re just wasting budget.
Second, many brands treat their offline, q-comm, and retail strategies in silos. But the future is seamless integration. A consumer doesn’t care which channel they’re on. They care about relevance, speed, and consistency.
Add to that the underleveraged power of regional influencers and purpose-led storytelling in India, and there’s a lot brands still aren’t capitalising on.
If momentum is the new metric, how do you define and build it for a brand today?
For us at AHA, momentum = growth. And the formula is simple:
Momentum = (Moments of Truth × Right Action) × Consistency
It’s not about going viral. It’s about showing up again and again, across every meaningful moment of awareness, consideration, conversion, and beyond.
We map out momentum loops systems that connect content, feedback, and iteration across multiple touchpoints. That means:
Designing for 10 formats, not one film.
Surfing trends without losing brand tone.
Building systems that allow for real-time creativity, not quarterly refreshes. We treat momentum like compounding interest: A big idea, reinforced by smart, small moves, repeated consistently that’s how brands grow now.