Sayak Mukherjee, Co-Founder & Director at Creatorcult Media, is a seasoned marketing leader with over two decades of experience in digital marketing, branding, and strategy. He has helped numerous B2B, corporate, and D2C brands craft compelling stories online and scale their businesses. Through Brandwizz and Creatorcult, Sayak leads expert teams delivering influencer marketing, content creation, and full-spectrum branding solutions. In this conversation, he reflects on the convergence of growth and branding, the rise of creator-led content, and building strategies that balance efficiency with authenticity.
You’ve worked across agencies, corporates, D2C brands, and the creator economy. Looking back, what have been the most defining shifts you’ve observed in how businesses approach growth and branding today?
The most defining shift is that growth and branding are no longer separate conversations. When I started in the early 2000s, and 2010s most companies looked at branding as a long-term investment, something to be nurtured over years, while performance was seen as short-term, tactical execution. Today, every rupee spent is expected to deliver both — immediate efficiency and long-term equity. This has fundamentally changed how agencies, corporates, and startups plan their marketing. The question is no longer “brand vs. performance,” but “how does this campaign deliver both outcomes simultaneously?”
My own journey — building Brandwizz Communications, and now co-founding Creatorcult Media in the creator economy — has allowed me to see this evolution up close. A decade ago, polished ad films and big-ticket media buys were the gold standard of branding. Now, authentic, creator-driven content and UGC resonate far more with consumers than traditional storytelling. Consumers today demand relatability, speed, and transparency; they trust a creator’s honest reel or product demo more than a high-budget 30-second spot. This shift towards authenticity, backed by data-driven targeting, is what I consider the biggest transformation in how businesses approach growth and branding today.
Scaling agencies and building marketing playbooks across such diverse sectors must have given you a unique vantage point. What’s one learning that has consistently held true, regardless of the industry or client type?
The one constant I’ve seen across every industry is that consumer insight is everything. Platforms, tools, and trends may evolve at lightning speed, but the brands that sustain growth are those that deeply understand their audience and adapt messaging to real needs. Whether it’s an FMCG giant, a D2C challenger brand, or an enterprise client, success always comes when businesses stay genuinely customer-first. When consumer behaviour shifts, brands that listen closely and act quickly are the ones that create lasting impact.
Customer acquisition costs and ROI are pressure points for most brands today. In your experience, what are the smarter ways companies can rethink performance marketing to balance efficiency with long-term brand building?
The smarter approach is to stop treating performance and brand as silos. UGC and creator-led content, for example, can drive efficiency at scale while also reinforcing brand narratives. Companies must also diversify beyond pure acquisition — investing in retention, community, and owned media. When CAC rises, the best ROI often comes from lifetime value, not just the first conversion.
Content has become a key lever for both startups and creators. From your advisory experience, what separates brands and creators who scale meaningfully from those who struggle to sustain attention?
Consistency, clarity, and community. The ones who scale are consistent in storytelling, clear in their positioning, and focused on building a community rather than just chasing vanity metrics. Those who struggle usually spread themselves too thin — chasing every trend, but without anchoring it to a clear identity.
AI is moving from being a support tool to actively shaping campaigns and decisions. Where do you see its most practical applications in marketing and growth today — and is there a tool you’d personally recommend leaders experiment with?
The most practical uses of AI today are in creator discovery, performance benchmarking, and campaign optimisation. At agencies like ours, AI is helping cut turnaround times dramatically while allowing us to scale experimentation with content formats and audience targeting. For leaders, I would recommend experimenting with tools like ChatGPT for strategy and content drafts, and Midjourney/Runway for creative ideation.
That said, the real advantage comes when AI’s speed is combined with human taste, intuition, and brand context. Audiences still respond more strongly to authentic, relatable content than to content that feels purely machine-generated. The future isn’t about replacing human creativity, but about using AI as an accelerator to make our ideas sharper, faster, and more scalable.
Having navigated different stages of the marketing ecosystem — from agency floors to boardrooms, what advice would you give to young marketers who want to build careers that stay relevant through change?
My biggest advice to young marketers is to stay endlessly curious and keep learning. This industry evolves too fast for anyone to rely only on what they know today. Build a strong foundation in consumer psychology and storytelling because these skills never lose relevance, no matter how much technology changes. At the same time, make it a point to stay hands-on with emerging tools — whether it’s analytics dashboards, performance platforms, or the latest AI applications shaping campaigns.
The marketers who thrive are the ones who can move comfortably between data, creativity, and business conversations — understanding numbers, shaping narratives, and tying it all back to growth. That balance of art and science will ensure your career stays relevant through every wave of disruption. And most importantly, treat every role and every campaign as a learning ground — because in marketing, the learning never stops.
