AI is reshaping digital marketing faster than most agencies can adapt. In this episode of Velocity, Abhishek Upadhyay, SVP at Hiveminds, reveals how his team stays ahead with creative intelligence that reduced client CPL by 27% to festive season strategies that help brands hit targets not in months but in days.

About Abhishek Upadhyay: SVP at Hiveminds, Abhishek leads strategy and innovation at the intersection of marketing and technology. With an engineering background and extensive experience across travel, luxury retail, real estate, and e-commerce, he's driving AI innovations that are reshaping how agencies deliver results for enterprise, SMB, and startup clients.

The Agency Advantage: Why Leading Agencies Stay Ahead

One of the most valuable aspects of working with a full-service digital marketing agency is their ability to identify trends and implement solutions faster than individual brands. Abhishek explains the strategic advantage: "The very fact that we are glued into so many brands at the same time with diverse experiences, different life stages, new technology or creative or new thoughts bringing in at the same time, we are able to think of it and percolate it in the right manner to our entire portfolio of brands in a quick way."

This cross-pollination effect creates multiple benefits:

Early Warning System: When algorithm changes or market shifts occur, agencies can detect patterns across their entire portfolio and shield clients before problems escalate.

Rapid Best Practice Sharing: Successful tactics discovered on one account can be quickly adapted and deployed across relevant brands, accelerating growth.

Risk Distribution: Agencies can alpha test and beta test new products and platforms with curious early-adopter clients before rolling out to their broader portfolio.

Dedicated Innovation Focus: While brand teams focus on daily execution, agencies can dedicate resources to solving for both present needs and future opportunities.

The Friday Knowledge Sharing Ritual: Building a Culture for Innovation

Rather than creating siloed innovation teams, Hiveminds has implemented a fascinating approach to knowledge sharing. Every Friday without fail, the entire team gathers to discuss new industry developments, platform changes, and emerging opportunities.

"By week's time, all of us are champions of that idea," Abhishek explains. "That percolation has been really helpful."

This systematic approach ensures:

• No single person becomes the bottleneck for innovation

• Platform updates, consumer trends, and new tools are quickly disseminated

• Ideas are immediately made actionable with specific brand applications

• Everyone is empowered to bring new concepts regardless of role

The rhythm creates what Abhishek calls "the heartbeat or that mind thing of the company" a continuous pulse of learning and adaptation that keeps the agency at the cutting edge.

Creative Intelligence: From Manual Analysis to AI-Powered Insights

Hiveminds doesn't just talk about AI innovation, they've proven its impact. As a full-service digital marketing agency, they faced a critical challenge: manual creative and competitor analysis was consuming resources that should have been allocated to strategic work.

Historical Approach:

• Manual analysis of creative performance across video, static, and influencer content

• Semi-automated reporting through tools like Power BI

• Slow refresh cycles (e.g., changing creatives only on Tuesdays to preserve weekend learning)

The problem was clear: teams spent hours manually analyzing performance across platforms, generating reports that were outdated by the time they reached decision-makers. Delayed insights meant missed optimization windows and budget leakage, while resources that should have been allocated to strategic work were consumed by manual analysis.

The AI-Powered Transformation

Abhishek captures the transformation perfectly: "There are people in the organization who are capable of driving a Ferrari but they have been given a barely okayish car. Imagine giving that Ferrari to them, the kind of wonders they'll do with it."

By implementing Hawky's Creative & Competitor Intelligence suite, everything changed. The AI-powered platform automatically identifies, categorizes, and analyzes creative assets across Facebook, Instagram, and Google; processing thousands of variations daily and extracting visual components, copy themes, and performance patterns from both client and competitor campaigns.

What Hiveminds Now Achieves:

Micro-Level Insights: Understanding which colors work versus which don't, which poses perform better, and whether parent-child dynamics outperform single-person creatives

Democratized Intelligence: Insights available regardless of brand budget to spend X amount to access data-driven creative learnings

Instant Onboarding: New clients can hit the ground running from day one by ingesting past campaign data and starting with informed creative strategies

Automated Competitor Tracking: Continuous monitoring of competitor creative strategies and market trends, enabling faster response to market changes

The results within three months:

• 27% average CPL reduction across managed brand portfolios

• 160+ hours saved monthly per brand on manual reporting and analysis

• Real-time insights enabling faster campaign optimization

• Comprehensive automated creative analysis across all major platforms

The time once spent on manual data collection is now redirected toward strategic campaign development and creative optimization, transforming Hiveminds into an industry leader in AI-driven marketing.

Read the full Hiveminds case study →

Festive Season Mastery: The 75-Day Planning Cycle

With festive season being a critical revenue period for most Indian brands, Hiveminds' approach reveals how leading agencies prepare for high-stakes moments.

Planning Timeline:

• 75-60 Days Before: Strategic planning phase covering brand messaging, advertising strategy, buy-ins, and major campaign elements

• 60-45 Days Before: Tactical preparation including creative development, media buys, and cross-functional coordination

• Execution Phase: "Pure execution at scale and with rigor" with teams monitoring performance around the clock

The 2024 festive season revealed several important trends:

E-commerce Acceleration: Many electronics and phone brands completed their entire festive targets within just a few days of major sales events, indicating extremely strong consumer sentiment.

Quick Commerce Maturation: Quick commerce platforms mirrored traditional e-commerce spike patterns for the first time, showing adoption by near-mass premium audiences. Quick commerce brands ran major sale events 3-4 days before traditional e-commerce sales.

Hyper-Local Complexity: Quick commerce has introduced unprecedented granularity in consumer insights. "No two pin codes are the same when it comes to affluency," Abhishek notes. "Some parts of northern Tamil Nadu might have different festive nuances than parts of southern Tamil Nadu."

This micro-market understanding is now flowing back into broader marketing strategies, enabling individual-level personalization in creative, messaging, and product showcasing.

AI-Era Skills: What Agencies Look For Now

As AI reshapes marketing operations, the fundamental skills that Hiveminds values haven't completely changed but the emphasis has shifted.

Unchanged Core Values:

• Hunger and curiosity

• Problem-solving rigor

• Strategic thinking ability

Increased Emphasis on:

Technology Comfort: Exposure to various tools and willingness to adapt to new platforms

Clarity of Thought: The ability to articulate problems clearly is essential for effective prompt engineering and AI collaboration

First Principles Thinking: Deep understanding of business fundamentals, consumer behavior, and brand strategy

Business Acumen: Knowing the brand, understanding category dynamics, and translating business needs into marketing solutions

"The human plus AI will perform better than either the human or the AI alone," Abhishek emphasizes. "That synergy is something that we are quite bullish on."

The future belongs to marketers who can provide clear strategic direction while leveraging AI for execution, analysis, and optimization. As Abhishek notes, AI is democratizing access to sophisticated marketing capabilities that were previously only available to brands with massive budgets.

The Road Ahead

The convergence of AI capabilities, platform automation, and granular consumer insights is creating unprecedented opportunities for digital marketers. Agencies like Hiveminds that successfully balance strategic human oversight with AI-powered execution are setting new standards for efficiency and results.

As Abhishek envisions: "I cannot wait for the kind of genius apps that are going to come about, the kind of technological solutions that are going to come out. Maybe someone is going to solve traffic using AI."

The key is maintaining that human strategic core; the business understanding, consumer empathy, and creative judgment. While leveraging AI to amplify capabilities far beyond what was previously possible.

For marketers looking to implement these strategies: start experimenting with AI tools now, but focus on 2-3 platforms initially. Build meaningful capabilities through systematic testing using frameworks like use-vs-usability. And never lose sight of the fundamental strategic thinking that separates great marketing from mere execution.

This post is based on our conversation with Abhishek Upadhyay in Episode 4 of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky. Listen to the full episode for deeper insights into agency innovation and AI implementation strategies.

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