Beyond Ads: How AI, Intuition, and Ethics Shape Modern Marketing

In this episode of Innovation Fuel, hosts Dave and Glory sit down with Satvic Sinha, a global marketing leader and head of growth at  Saura, known for transforming messy business challenges into structured systems for growth. With over a decade of experience leading campaigns for brands like Samsung, Honda, Coca-Cola, and Reckitt Benckiser, Satvic shares how marketers can go beyond ad campaigns to build sustainable systems that drive awareness, acquisition, and retention.

He dives into his philosophy of “marketing as a system of levers,” explaining how each stage of the customer journey demands its own strategy, message, and mindset. From using AI ethically to balancing data with intuition, Satvic explores how automation, personalization, and creativity intersect in today’s marketing landscape.

Transcript

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;27;25

GELAREH 

Today on Innovation Fuel, we're joined by Satvik Sinha, a marketing leader who thinks like a product strategist, with over a decade of experience across Fortune 500, high growth startups and everything in between. Satvik specializes in turning messy business challenges into structured systems for growth. He's led campaigns for brands like Samsung, Honda and Coca-Cola, and today he is head of growth at Saura.

00;00;28;00 - 00;00;35;13

DAVE

Welcome to the show. Welcome to Innovation Fuel. Before we get into this, tell us a little about you and your journey.

00;00;35;16 - 00;01;10;29

SATVIK SINHA

Absolutely. First of all, thank you Dave. Thank you Gelareh, for inviting me. And congratulations to Innovation Fuel on this brand new chapter. It's an absolute pleasure being here, and I cannot wait to dive deep into our discussion. Well, to answer your question, I call myself an AI powered marketer who has spent over a decade scaling various fortune 500 brands and many B2B startups and small and medium enterprises, usually working at the intersection of creativity, data and technology across Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

00;01;11;04 - 00;01;30;21

SATVIK SINHA

So as you mentioned, I've worked with names like Honda, Samsung, Coca-Cola and Reckitt Benckiser. I've also worked with some of the biggest agencies in the world, like IPG Media Brands and Shell Worldwide, which is a part of the Samsung Group. And that sort of gave me the chance to understand campaigns and growth strategies across very different markets and categories.

00;01;30;21 - 00;01;54;28

SATVIK SINHA

And today at Sora, I help small and medium enterprises navigating the world of marketing, artificial intelligence and technology in the most efficient way possible. Building strategies and systems that are practical, data driven, and designed to adapt. And that experience has instilled a belief in me that marketing is a system of various levers that you need to pull and push from time to time. And all of it goes far beyond a set of campaigns as most brands see at today.

00;02;02;02 - 00;02;10;18

GELAREH 

Yeah, exactly. When you say marketing is just a set up campaign, what exactly do you mean? Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

00;02;10;21 - 00;02;37;20

SATVIK SINHA

Absolutely. So I advocate the idea that marketers is not just a set of campaigns. So what happens is usually brands start thinking from an ad campaign perspective like on meta, should we run a CBO campaign or an ad campaign or on Google? Should we prioritize p max or a standard search or display? But I believe that it is more important to understand how to take your audience to various stages of marketing funnel, or what I call different levers.

00;02;37;23 - 00;03;01;24

SATVIK SINHA

And it's almost like a video game. Your protagonist faces sort of a different villain or obstacle at every stage, and you have to equip them with the right powers to win at that stage. So when you adopt that mindset, you naturally start doing more justice to your brand's marketing. So if you think only from a campaign mindset, you'd never even consider that level of justice.

00;03;01;24 - 00;03;24;01

SATVIK SINHA

You can bring to your own marketing. For example, think of the awareness level and retention level as separate entities altogether. You could run campaigns separately for them, but when you start to build this mindset of marketing as different systems of levers, you start not only the communication becomes different, but in my view, everything else becomes different as well.

00;03;24;03 - 00;03;32;27

DAVE

So when you're dropped into, say, one example of struggling company, or you were talking about these sort of nimble startup elements, what's the first lever you're looking at?

00;03;32;29 - 00;03;51;25

SATVIK SINHA

It's important to understand that when I say levers, I mean different stages of how your customer navigates to the final. So the first one is obviously the awareness stage. And then it goes on to or acquisition stage as I again like to call it. And then it goes on to the retention stage. So these are two different levels.

00;03;52;00 - 00;04;10;28

SATVIK SINHA

So for example I'll tell you with a D to C pet brand that I worked on, we initially had sort of same landing page at different funnel stages. Traditionally a landing page is seen as a place where conversion happens. So it was started with testimonials. It was filled with benefits and call to action. So and it worked absolutely fine for new customers.

00;04;11;02 - 00;04;30;22

SATVIK SINHA

But when you go to a different level. So first level is your acquisition. The other level is your retention. So when you go there, customers had already tried and loved your product. So they do not need more convincing. They are already be testimony. So when pulling the retention level you have to build a different landing page entirely for them.

00;04;30;25 - 00;04;49;17

SATVIK SINHA

The message that we did was looks like you have exhausted your supplies. Don't worry, we have got you covered. So it is less clutter. It is no extra testimonials. It has a direct path for them to reorder. So this is what I mean when I say that you have to navigate your strategies not from campaign to campaign, but from different stages of a customer's journey.

00;04;49;25 - 00;05;13;12

SATVIK SINHA

So we also showed that same sort of landing page goes to the emails that we are sending out to the past customers. And this small change created more of psychological and relationship driven interaction at the retention stage. And it meant that customers not only came back, but remembered us the next time their supplies ran out, helping us grow more LTV without needing to increase the spend.

00;05;13;14 - 00;05;21;03

GELAREH 

That's the really good things. But what is this strategy you recommend for app cards when especially for the new visitors?

00;05;21;05 - 00;05;40;09

SATVIK SINHA

So first of all, you have the audience of people who have abandoned the card. And then you have to find the information that you have already shared with them, which means due to whatever reason, they did not convert at that stage, you cannot begin your funnel. Now, for that audience from the same messaging that you started while you were acquiring them at the first time.

00;05;40;13 - 00;06;01;17

SATVIK SINHA

So you have to start with additional messaging. You have to start telling them about more offers. So there's a stage called awareness, consideration, preference and purchase. So they are between preference and purchase stage. So probably a push of an offer would make them converge faster. Now that is the communication part that you have to change on your ad creatives.

00;06;01;22 - 00;06;08;02

SATVIK SINHA

But if you see a landing page in my opinion the landing page should also change and it should be easier for them to order now.

00;06;08;04 - 00;06;24;22

DAVE

How do you balance out? Because data is a big element of this. How? Looking at the data, looking at the information gallery says abandonment cart. You're looking at the numbers and saying hey percentage of examine card. How do we correct this? So balancing the data with your intuition how do you balance that. How do you connect these two things?

00;06;24;28 - 00;06;49;14

SATVIK SINHA

So I think the balance between data and intuition does not just have to be considered at a stage when you have a set of audience abandoning the cart. It has to be catered to while you're forming the entire brand strategy. So when I talk about balancing your end user, I mean that platform data, whether it's from meta or industry decides that you do can tell you what people are doing in general on the platforms while they are active on the digital platforms.

00;06;49;15 - 00;07;13;23

SATVIK SINHA

It can guide you on targeting. It can guide you on the creative formats and what platforms your ad should run on. So this is still the time when they are on digital landscape, but what happens when they are offline? So that's when it's your intuition that would guide your understanding of your audience. So it's the intuition that tells you why they are doing it and how to position your product so that it actually resonates with them.

00;07;13;24 - 00;07;34;26

SATVIK SINHA

One example that comes on top of mind and brilliant example is Google Colab. And so the reality of the drink is that every day if you drink it, you stand up in hospital. It's not a very healthy drink. And we know that brand and brand data will tell you that people who are in college while they are, you know, tolerating the lecture, would also be drinking Coca Cola or while they're traveling from one place to another, they would have a can.

00;07;35;02 - 00;07;55;08

SATVIK SINHA

Data can also guide you that you know, these are the triggers that you know that your audience while navigating certain parts of the life, drink Coca-Cola. However, the brand decides to talk about understanding human behavior and insecurities, and that leads to positioning the brand for parties, for gatherings, for happy moments. And that's where the tagline, "open happiness" comes from.

00;07;55;09 - 00;08;15;15

SATVIK SINHA

So it is a very deliberate choice to drive the brand to celebration rather than to quenching thirst, which is very different from Mountain Dew, by contrast, which has positioned itself for around adventures. And same goes with a different category of brand like Jaguar. I remember a campaign which they did with Tom Hiddleston, where they leaned on with the lion into the lion called Why Brits Make the Best Villains.

00;08;15;20 - 00;08;37;07

SATVIK SINHA

And of course, they are not literally targeting villains. It's about creating a cinematic edge and aspirational feeling that if you had that charisma, power, and presence, you'd naturally choose Jaguar. So when I say balancing the data and intuition, your platform data can tell you what people are doing on the platform, but it might not guide you of their offline insecurities and feelings and behavior.

00;08;37;08 - 00;08;39;27

SATVIK SINHA

And that's when your intuition comes into action.

00;08;40;00 - 00;08;48;18

GELAREH 

That's great. So can you give us an example of a time that you pulled the wrong lever first, and then what you learned from it, and how do you do it?

00;08;48;20 - 00;09;10;25

SATVIK SINHA

It's the same example that I shared about the D2C. That would be one that I worked on. So initially what was happening was that all the communication was different at different stage. And the brand wanted to make sure that they do not spend a lot on generalizing it, because if the product is good and if the audience has already tried the product, if not automatically, they should be spending very less amount of money to get that audience back.

00;09;10;25 - 00;09;29;23

SATVIK SINHA

And how to do that was not have the same sort of communication and not have the same sort of landing pitch at every stage. So initially the long never I, never I would say was that was it was we had the same sort of landing page communication that was going on everywhere. But we wanted to simplify the journey for the audience, which is at the retention phase retention.

00;09;29;25 - 00;09;50;02

SATVIK SINHA

And we did it by having a very targeted communication that says, hey, it seems that you exhausted your supplies and your pet might be missing a brand, but don't worry, we have got you covered. So it seems personalized. It does not feel very intrusive and at the same time it kind of resonates next time. Every time when they exhaust their supplies, we would not need to target them deliberately. They would remember the sentence and hence psychologically we can increase the OTB.

00;09;54;27 - 00;10;03;17

DAVE

So Satvik, how is AI transformed your system mindset? How is the artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence using in this process?

00;10;03;19 - 00;10;29;28

SATVIK SINHA

So when it comes to artificial intelligence, there are few things that I keep on top of mind. Is it there to replace a function altogether, or is it there to have a direct impact on few things that are not going the right way? And that's how we realize that, at least for the brands that are heavily reliant on the sales funnel, that you need to have a sales team to call people from your CRM and to close them, that's where I can be implemented.

00;10;29;28 - 00;10;50;11

SATVIK SINHA

So it's not entirely part of marketing, but yes, it can benefit your sales funnel. And when it comes to AI in general being implemented at, let's say, Meta's and or Google, and I believe that they are making it more accessible for small businesses to not rely on agency, to not rely on external partners to run their ads. So currently this is in marketing. This is the current landscape that I see.

00;10;53;10 - 00;11;17;17

GELAREH 

It's a really interesting when you talked about AI, most of the AI driven campaign is working background, you know, and the consumer may not very fully aware how their data is using. Right. So how marketing people, marketers decide what level of transparency is ethically necessary when communicating with clients and audience.

00;11;17;19 - 00;11;40;22

SATVIK SINHA

Okay, so if you're talking about ethical use of data here, I believe that the line is very situational. And in my opinion, at least for brands and marketers, it is very blurred. And it has to be just case by case. There's no algorithm that anybody can follow, but it has to be remembered that when it comes to something deeply personal, like mental health or medical history, seeing ads in this space can feel really intrusive.

So if you are searching for a therapist and the next day you saw an ad for a gummy that claims helping with sleep or depression, it might not be really intrusive, but it can feel very intrusive and it is incredibly personalized. So as a marketer, I prefer to stick to the data a user knowingly provides. And when it comes to like artificial intelligence, how platforms are evolving, it is, I believe that today the reality is that it is often not in marketers control.

00;12;08;17 - 00;12;27;18

SATVIK SINHA

It is the hands of platforms like Meta and Google. They exactly know which micro segments are more likely to converge. And in the age of automation, that the facilities of automation that they have provided to the advertisers, especially in the case of current automated targeting, they will make the decision for you. It's the Meta and Google that helps you convert, get the conversion faster.

00;12;27;19 - 00;12;49;08

SATVIK SINHA

So that's why sometimes an ad ends up in such a narrow niche that it feels almost uncomfortably precise. But because you targeted and because the platforms optimization decided that the person was most likely to convert, they end up seeing the ad. One thing that you also mentioned about cart abandonment. So some people think that it is also that retargeting is very intrusive.

00;12;49;08 - 00;13;09;20

SATVIK SINHA

Hey, you left something in your cart. Are you still interested? So personally I do not see that as over the line. I already have the desire to buy it. And they realized and realized the intent of mind, but they hesitated to be due to some reason. So if you talk about that particular case, I think it's okay. But in the other case, it's not in the hands of marketers anymore.  It is the platform like Google and Meta, who know micro strengths and micro behaviors of users, and they would do anything to make sure that they convert.

00;13;19;15 - 00;13;41;05

DAVE

So in the world of marketing and even thinking of the world that when we're teaching in a classroom, we're thinking about market forces, and you're talking about market forces and the supplier market force is Google and Meta here, which they're controlling of ad space; with so much competition for attention online. What's been the most effective way that you've found to make a brand stand out in this crowded space?

00;13;41;10 - 00;14;00;13

SATVIK SINHA

So in a crowded market, it goes without saying that the quickest way and probably the most impractical ways, is to take the market share by pumping big budgets into paid ads, bidding higher than the market players. But let's face it, it is not for everyone. It's not a luxury that everyone can afford, especially small and medium sized brands.

00;14;00;17 - 00;14;19;28

SATVIK SINHA

So we need to start with precision and not with volume. The first step is to obviously understand who exactly is making the market crowded, and where they hold the strongest ground. I run an exercise for this, and I recommend to every marketer to do that. And you have to take a pen and paper and it's everything good starts from there.

And you have to create three rows and two columns in rows. You have to put product category and brand, and in the columns you have to put awareness and fallback. The fallback part is very important. What you do is you understand do people know about your product. So you take the product awareness, sell to people, know about the category or the brand.

00;14;38;17 - 00;14;56;22

SATVIK SINHA

In each case, you have to also ask the question, if your brand disappeared tomorrow or did not exist in the first place, where would the customers go? So do they have a safety net? Do they have a fallback? Similarly, for categories similar for brand. So an example if you talk about Netflix in the category, if they say yes the product awareness exists.

00;14;56;22 - 00;15;18;16

SATVIK SINHA

But if the brand disappeared what is the fallback? The fallback is reading books. The fallback is going out. So when we ask what is making the market crowded, it's not necessarily your direct competitors. It is probably a social signal as well. When I mentioned about the fallback column, that gives you the most insights. So once you see those gaps, you can decide the easiest and the most cost effective entry point.

00;15;18;23 - 00;15;46;25

SATVIK SINHA

Maybe it's the subcategory where the competitors aren't active, or maybe it's a specific product angle that they are ignoring altogether. So I don't believe that you need to start with paid ads right away. You can still accelerate the market share growth, and you can also start by building your visibility organically. When you talk about writing blogs or building content that services your expertise in the both category product and the brand level, capturing the audience attention without burning budget from the day one.

00;15;46;28 - 00;16;07;27

GELAREH 

That is very interesting, but I still have a one more ethical questions about AI driven. So there is a critic saying that AI driven ads is fuel consumptions and unsafe, sustainable growth. So how do you respond for ethical critics, especially if this is sustainability and consumption?

00;16;07;27 - 00;16;28;07

SATVIK SINHA

So be it AI or not and not AI. It's marketing and advertising. And this something that I recently wrote about on LinkedIn as well, that it has been so far a department of manipulation. And I'm reminded of one of my favorite shows, and Mad Men. If somebody hasn't seen this, definitely should; it's the show that teaches you more about human nature and advertising than most of the books can.

So this scene where there's a man who is fundamentally against capitalism, ask Don Draper, a protagonist, the creative director, how do you sleep at night? And Don Draper replies, on a bed full of money. So it's really a serious, and it's also an encouraging reason for a lot of people to enter advertising. But the reason the question is asked in the first place is because advertising has long been questioned for its ethics.

00;16;51;23 - 00;17;22;22

SATVIK SINHA

And now today's reality, although, is a little different. We are not even paid like Draper was, and we operate in a far more transparent and regulated environment. But the core challenge remains how do we make advertising more sustainable and responsible? And in most cases, marketers do not even have control on the product itself. Like if I'm hired by a Shein or H&M, I am not deciding the supply chain or sourcing policies, but I do control how the product is positioned and the kind of demand I can create, whether my messaging is being truthful to the product.

00;17;22;26 - 00;17;53;16

SATVIK SINHA

And that's where the responsibility starts. For me, it means no greenwashing, no exaggerated claims, and no tokenism just to capture market share. And when it comes to specifically AI, we still are navigating this. To what extent can AI personalize the ads? Google, for example, Max, which is a Google product, which Google has a feature on Google that Google has launched as of now for a few advertisers, it takes control of landing pages, creative messaging and everything else, and it promises that it will be able to.

Because of the data that has collected so far. It will be able to give you better conversion rate. But what is the science behind it? What are the micro triggers Google is using? In a way, as a marketer, you do not really have a lot of control.

00;18;06;15 - 00;18;18;27

DAVE

So the future, when we think about marketing communication in the future with AI and elements of moving towards more personalization and with these different tools are coming into play, where do we see the future of marketing communication?

00;18;18;29 - 00;18;39;04

SATVIK SINHA

First of all, there are regulations like the regulations on the cookies and the way data is being captured that is coming into place. So I think there would be a lot of shift happening for brands to also prioritize their organic interactions, because obviously, when this process becomes consensual, when people land on the website, it is still your own media assets, like your social media that you own.

00;18;39;04 - 00;19;07;17

SATVIK SINHA

And those triggers and interaction could also guide the purchase journey. So brands have to be very careful about that. And then in the future, I see that everything is becoming very favorable for advertisers in general, because every tool that we see, every next move that we see Google or Meta taking, it is in benefits for the advertiser, for example, like I mentioned about Max, it is becoming more accessible for brands to directly manage their advertising campaigns and not rely on external third parties.

00;19;07;22 - 00;19;23;04

DAVE

Brilliant. Oh, wonderful. This has been an exciting conversation. I have to ask the question if you could give one piece of advice to marketers are students and aspiring to be marketers or even entrepreneurs out there about building a smarter, more ethical marketing system? What would it be?

00;19;23;06 - 00;19;51;27

SATVIK SINHA

It is important understand what knowledge that you already have and be honest about what stage you are at. So if you are starting your journey in marketing, don't immediately jump into thinking about it from purely functional way like CEOs here, social ads here, email marketing is here, a step back and none. Thanks from Vida. Let's look at the history of capitalism, especially post-World War two, and how economies grew by selling more and more, and the sense at which consumerism has gone.

In order to create more desire. Ask yourself, why does the same phone with same configuration cost more in rose gold color than in black? So that is not a functional marketing question. That is a human behavior question. And I recommend reading this book called propaganda. You know that I'd read long nuggets by Edward Bernays, who is the father of modern PR and influence, which is the psychology of persuasion by doctors Albert Platini.

00;20;19;05 - 00;20;51;11

GELAREH 

I hope I'm not butchering his name, but if you're further along in your journey, if you know all of that, if you know the art and science behind advertising, behind marketing, then you should focus a shift towards walking into the customer's shoes. So a bit empathy for what they need at every stage. Done customer journey mapping from the moment they realize that they have a problem to how they can discover your product, to how they can decide to build and use it and map that journey, and then correlate it with what's likely going on in their minds at each step.

When you understand all of that, you start to see the real marketing levers, just not the, you know, campaigns.

00;20;58;15 - 00;21;07;08

DAVE

Hey, you know, it comes back to the old way of building relationships, saying all that, my friend, how can our listeners connect with you and learn more about your work?

00;21;07;10 - 00;21;22;02

SATVIK SINHA

I am there on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active over there, so you can type my name. It's S-A-T-V-I-K space S-I-N-H-A and actually that's the best way to reach out to me. And I make sure that I reply to every message that I get.

00;21;22;04 - 00;21;27;13

GELAREH 

Thank you very much Satvik. Thank you Dave. That was another episode of Innovation Fuel.

00;21;27;19 - 00;21;29;04

SATVIK SINHA

Thank you so much.