On his invitation, I spent an afternoon at Aditya Sharma’s office on Sohna Road in Gurugram. He is the founder of AdSynergiX, where he lists his title as Chief, Executions and Technology. The office is a quiet, compact space for now, and he is quick to tell me that will not last, since he is about to triple it in size. What followed was less a company pitch and more an argument against the way most of the market still buys media. Here is what I gathered.
Aditya tells his own story before he tells the company’s, and he tells it quietly. He does not perform. He is young, soft-spoken, and unhurried, the sort of person who lets a question sit for a moment before he answers it. The polish is in the details rather than the volume: the carefully chosen and clearly branded clothes and the accessories that are not cheap, none of it is loud about itself. Nothing in his bearing announces where he started. What it does announce is the steady ambition of someone who has decided he will be measured by results rather than noise and who talks about where AdSynergiX is heading with the calm of a man who has already done the arithmetic.
The arithmetic started early. He grew up in a small city in Bihar, he tells me, with a straightforward plan: study hard, crack the IIT entrance, and build a stable life. He delivered on the first part, an all-India rank of 123 in the JEE, the kind of number that usually settles a young person’s path for them. Then he walked away from it. He chose the civil services instead and gave thirteen months to the preparation, only to miss the cut by four marks. It is not hard to draw a line from that grind to the way he now talks about campaigns as problems to be worked rather than dashboards to be watched.
The first thing Aditya wants to clear up is a belief he thinks most Indian agencies still quietly run on, that programmatic success means finding the cheapest audience at scale. In his telling, the truth is closer to the opposite. The cheapest audience is simply the easiest one for the algorithm to find. It is rarely the most valuable customer for the brand.
A note before any numbers. Everything that follows is his, drawn from his own campaign dashboards and shared in our conversation. The figures are his account of his own work, reported here as he presented them rather than as audited fact. Read them in that spirit.
With that said, the account is specific, which is more than you can say for most agency conversations.
Take the idea he keeps returning to, what he calls “wrong learning”. His argument runs like this. An algorithm optimises whatever you reward it for. If a campaign rewards cheap clicks, it will find cheap clicks, and it will get better at it every week. The campaign looks like it is improving, because the cost per lead keeps falling and the dashboard turns greener. Underneath, he says, the brand is only getting more efficient at reaching people who will never become valuable customers. Six months in, the CRM is full of low-value cohorts, the sales team quietly writes them off, and nobody can explain why revenue did not move the way the dashboard promised.
“A cheap lead has one signal,” he tells me. “It clicked, or it filled a form. That is it. A valuable customer leaves a pattern.”
That pattern, in his description, is the whole game. Someone who looks at pricing, compares plans, comes back two days later from a different device, abandons a cart and reopens it on a Sunday. He says his team hunts for that pattern at the bidding layer, before the money is spent, rather than reading it off a report at the end of the month. He would rather raise the cost per lead by thirty percent and bring in customers the sales team is glad to see than celebrate a low cost per lead that the same team quietly disqualifies.
He points to a SaaS campaign to make the idea concrete. The standard playbook, he says, is well known and quietly broken: drive top-of-funnel traffic, retarget for a flat thirty days, and let the algorithm sort it out. The problem is that some buyers do not convert in a flat thirty days. They convert in waves, first research, then comparison, then budget approval, often weeks apart. So his team split the retargeting into three windows. The first week got urgency. The second got trust and proof. The back half got the hard offer. By his account, that one change took a campaign a templated setup would have flattened into a single average and turned it into something with economics that actually worked.
Then there is the example he seems proudest of, because it is the cleanest. By his telling, his team ran two offers under one campaign for a hosting brand across a single quarter. One offer converted at a rate roughly twenty times higher than the other. A templated setup, he says, would have read the dashboard, scaled the high-converting offer, and walked the campaign off a cliff because the lower-converting offer was the one actually producing the revenue. His team did the opposite, because they had separated the two before the bid was placed, not after. His point is blunt. The dashboard was telling a story that the bank account flatly contradicted.
The future is not cheaper media. It is cleaner intent.
Where the conversation gets genuinely India-specific is on why imported playbooks struggle here. Global templates, he argues, walk in with one audience called travel, one called fashion, one called SaaS, and assume the machine will work out the rest. The rest, in India, is the hard part: the language, the region, the income gap between a metro and a small town, the family influence on a big purchase, the festive urgency, the price sensitivity that shifts pincode by pincode. The algorithm does not work that out on its own, he says. It optimises what it is rewarded for, and if you have not told it what a good customer looks like in this market, it will simply find you more of the wrong one, faster.
Festive season is where he gets most animated and most contrarian. Most brands, he says, spend the most money during the worst-value weeks. In the seven days before Diwali, rates run two to three times higher than normal, and you are bidding against the large marketplaces, who will burn cash to acquire a customer they expect to monetise for the next decade. You cannot win that auction on cost. His approach, by his telling, is to build the audience before the auction goes nuclear, then dominate the two weeks after the festival, when rates collapse and abandoned carts are at their warmest. He has little patience for the habit of running one flat festive creative unchanged for forty-five days. In the festive window, he says, you do not just raise budgets. You change the architecture of the campaign.
He raises fraud without being asked, which is unusual, because it is the part of Indian programmatic that everyone knows about and few discuss on a stage. Indian inventory, he says, carries meaningfully higher invalid-traffic rates than Western markets, and that gap is often the difference between a campaign that works and one that quietly bleeds out. He treats clean traffic as a number most agencies leave off the deck because they cannot stand behind it.
So what does he actually want to build. When I push him on the ambition, it is not a bigger media-buying shop. It is a smaller, sharper one that competes on judgement rather than volume, a team that decides the right audience, message, and moment first and lets the automation handle speed and scale second. The way he puts it, the future is not cheaper media. It is a cleaner intent.
Whether the wider industry agrees with him is a separate question, and the numbers behind his confidence are his to defend. But the argument itself is a useful one, and it is sharper than a good deal of what gets said from a conference stage. India, in his view, does not need more programmatic automation. It needs more programmatic interrogation. On that much, at least, he is hard to argue with.
