Having witnessed multiple eras of the media world starting with public broadcast to physical and retail infrastructures and now Artificial Intelligence, if there is one thing that has remained constant in the eyes of Vikram Sakhuja, Group CEO, Madison Media and OOH (part of Madison World), is principles of marketing.
Taking the centre stage in a fireside chat with Vivek Malhotra, COO and CMO, India Today Group, at the India Digital Summit 2025, Sakhuja who is popularly known as Thalaiva of Indian M&E Industry, emphasised that while the methods of marketing may have changed time and again with the proliferation of different mediums, what stands strong as the bedrock of marketing since time immemorial has been its principles.
These principles of marketing in Sakhuja’s lens are fairly simple- Marketing is the demand generating engine of any business as its sole job is to get more people to buy a product or service from a brand and at higher prices, leading to higher sales revenue.
With regards to the aforementioned statement, the role of media therefore in his viewpoint is to put out a message or stimulus in front of the consumers in a way that is most likely to elicit a response.
And with the fragmentation of mediums and their resulting proliferation and transformation, with the latest being AI, he stated that the way to look at this rapidly advancing technology is to view it as Aladdin’s lamp owing to the fact that the tool has massive power, and all it needs to create magic is a relevant and adequate query or prompt and that is already transforming the methods of marketing.
Most recently, Sakhuja was also conferred with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award by the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI).
During the course of his conversation with India Today Group’s Malhotra who threw light on an interesting fact that Indian A&M Industry is going to do only algorithm- based ad media worth 1 trillion dollars in the next 5-10 years and given that these algorithms are platform-ised and run on big global tech platforms, Sakhuja highlighted that at this stage all that’s happening on AI is just a preface in the larger plans of the big tech to move from information gathering to insights to knowledge and finally to predictions.
Elaborating further on this analogy, he shared an older experience of attending a WPP Leadership Summit in 2012, where he met Google’s then chief evangelist- Amit Singhal and learnt from him how the Metas and Googles of the world were working on organising the entire world’s information and make its usage easy with layers of AI, Machine Learning as well as a combination of both.
“You can’t really write an algorithm for AI because it’s the data which is being fed to it that leads to its programming and helps it learn constantly. However, what we can do at this point in time is identify who are the right guys that are writing the best AI applications and use cases of all this data and even agencies who are writing their own kind of technology to make AI engineering better,” he added.
From here onwards, he turned the page to talk about how targeting has changed over the past couple of years with the media fragmentation and stated that while the early stages of targeting saw companies identifying certain kind of audiences in terms of their age demographics, socio economic class, etc. and send them the messaging, what AIs and Metas and Googles of the world essentially do today is send out a message to everybody and then wait for signals to get the right set of intelligence.
“If you take a company like Disney, the way they help brands target audiences on their platform is by allowing them to use their ad inventory for brand building rather than brand awareness and relevancy, which probably YouTube would do better owing to the kind of environment and context it has from an engagement perspective,” he said.
In the case of AI, Sakhuja stated that it allows brands to better target users via personalization at scale and elucidated that the example for this kind of advertising powered by star power would be that of Cadbury’s My SRK Ad Campaign.
Upon being questioned if the usage of these comparatively complicated technologies and researches is attracting legacy brands or is limited to new age brands, Sakhuja responded that the response from legacy companies has been promising on the usage of AI and that it has already made its way in the media side of things with AI entering the arena of attribution and optimisation already with say, for example, Google’s Broad Search which allows advertisers to not necessarily resort to keywords ranking be it their own or of competitors to serve the users their ads, but broadening the entire scope of search in terms of the duration.
With DemandGen and PerformanceMax, he pointed out that optimisation could be done across all of the big tech’s information inventory comprising spaces like Gmail, Google Movies, YouTube, Maps, etc.
“Earlier, we used to use statistical models like SaaS and SPSS to get our marketing-mix modelling right, but with the coming of Google and Meta’s age and AI-based models like Merdien and Robinhood, we have honed our predicting jobs at managing data. On top of it, we have our customization tools which help us in both media and creative optimization,” he stated.
However, in his views, this digitalisation of things doesn’t mean that other mediums don’t have potential or opportunities as media mix models today do not need to be linear and therefore, be it is print, radio, TV, outdoor, or any other medium per se, all will have a role to play in attracting, targeting and even retaining consumers and it is multimedia reach that moves the needle today.
“All mediums need to be in sync with each other to actually support each other’s efforts as the job of media is to follow where consumers are. If we do it right, we should be able to meet the attentional capability, traffic and even impact across borders,” Sakhuja concluded.
