Monjita Sarkar 
Q1. You founded Pulp Strategy at a time when digital marketing in India was still only emerging. What specific gap did you see in the market that no existing agency was filling?
When we started, the agency landscape in India was very clearly divided — you had your traditional creative agencies on one side, and on the other, you had technology companies. Never the twain shall meet. What was missing was an organization that could sit at the intersection of strategy, creativity, and technology and treat all three as equally important to business outcomes. Most agencies were either great storytellers with no tech muscle, or tech implementers with no strategic depth. We built Pulp Strategy to be that hybrid — what we call a hybrid agency consultant — because we believed that the brands of the future would need partners who could think in systems, not just campaigns. That instinct has only been validated over time. Every major shift since — mobile, social, data, and now AI — has required exactly that kind of integrated thinking, and we were already structured for it.
Q2. What is one thing about the work culture you foster, or how you serve clients, that makes organizations like Google and Microsoft so highly recommend you?
I think it comes down to one word: accountability. We don’t just show up with ideas — we show up with outcomes. The Microsoft Azure Cloud Champions campaign, for example, ran for three award-winning seasons, covered over 90 cities, and fundamentally transformed how Microsoft engaged its partner ecosystem in India. That doesn’t happen unless your agency operates with the same level of commitment to results as the client does. Internally, we foster a culture of what I call being adventurers, achievers, and agents of change. We hire people who are genuinely curious about where technology is going and are not afraid to build new things. And I think clients sense that energy. They’re not outsourcing work to us — they’re working with a team that is as invested in their growth as they are. That is the culture, and it shows in the partnerships we’ve maintained across our agency’s lifetime.
You’ve built a proprietary IP portfolio with NeuroRank™ and ChannelCommand™. As AI reshapes workflows and services, what is the future of such IP-driven solutions within marketing agencies?
IP is not just the future — it is the only sustainable differentiator left for agencies. Here’s why: AI is rapidly commoditizing execution. Content, creative, media optimization — all of that is becoming table stakes. What AI cannot commoditize is proprietary methodology, governed systems, and the institutional knowledge baked into a purpose-built engine. NeuroRank™ is not a tool you can replicate by stitching together a few APIs. It is a full-stack LLMO system — combining strategy, proprietary diagnostics, human engineering, and technical SEO — built specifically to govern how brands are represented inside large language models. ChannelCommand™ solves a problem that generic platforms don’t even understand yet: how do you activate, motivate, and transform a partner ecosystem using AI at scale? These are deeply specialized, methodologically governed solutions. I believe agencies that don’t build IP will become vendors. Agencies that do will become strategic partners. The distinction is going to matter enormously in the next three to five years.
What is the immediate cost to a brand that is well-ranked in Google searches but remains either invisible or misrepresented inside AI answers?
The cost is invisible until it is catastrophic, and that is what makes it so dangerous. Think about how buyer behavior has shifted. A significant and growing portion of decision-stage research is now happening inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and similar tools — not on Google. When a prospective buyer asks an AI system which brand to consider, or how a company compares to its competitors, and your brand is either omitted entirely, replaced by a competitor, or worse, hallucinated inaccurately — you have lost that buyer at the moment of highest intent, and you don’t even know it happened. There is no bounce rate, no impression data, no click analytics. The loss is silent. Your Google rankings are measuring one surface of visibility. The AI answer layer is now the decision layer. A brand that dominates search but is absent from AI synthesis is, in effect, invisible to a rapidly growing segment of its own market. That gap compounds every single day you don’t address it.
What’s the one thing most Indian enterprises are wrong about when it comes to AI adoption in marketing?
They think AI adoption is a technology decision when it is actually a strategy decision. Most Indian enterprises are approaching AI by asking, “which tool should we buy?” or “how do we automate this process?” — and that is the wrong starting question entirely. The right question is: how does AI change the way our customers discover us, evaluate us, and trust us? The companies that are going to win are not the ones that deployed AI the fastest internally. They are the ones that understood AI was reshaping the external environment — how brands are found, how narratives are formed, how authority is established — and made strategic investments accordingly. The second mistake is treating AI as a cost-reduction play rather than a growth play. You can use AI to cut content costs, yes. Or you can use it to build systems that make your brand the preferred answer inside every AI-driven discovery environment your customer touches. One is operational efficiency. The other is competitive advantage. Most Indian enterprises are still choosing the former, and they will feel the consequences of that choice within the next two to three years
