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Aayushi M.
Brand Strategist
SUMMARY OF EXPERIENCE
• 2 years of agency experience across content and creative strategy, currently working as a Creative Strategist at LWYD Interactive in Bangalore, where she leads end-to-end strategy for premium alcohol portfolios including Pernod Ricard, Bacardi, Diageo, and United Breweries. She typically leads new business pitches independently, including full competitor and audience analysis, platform strategy, and concept decks for clients like Baileys and Tanqueray, often presenting directly to the client.
• At LWYD, she was awarded "Rising Star" within her first 2 months and won "Idea of the Quarter" for an IP brand strategy, giving her a track record of performing above expectations quickly.
• She has strong copywriting skills with hands-on experience writing social captions, ad scripts, video scripts, blog content, and emailers across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn for up to 5 active client accounts simultaneously.
👍 What we loved about them
• Pre-interview preparation: Before the technical interview even started, she'd already mapped NCPC's content gaps, proposed a 60/30/10 content split with platform-specific rationale, identified the barbecue championship as a community-building opportunity, researched the renewable gas innovation coming out of hog waste, and pulled references from their Beyond Bacon blog. She also showed up knowing their demographic skewed 30-60 and had a clear view on where the brand's credibility gap sits. We were genuinely impressed by her level of preparation and proactiveness.
• Understanding of human psychology: Her degree in Psychology genuinely informs how she approaches ad strategy. When she answered the problem-aware versus solution-aware question, she grounded it in the concept of the real self versus the ideal self, the idea that people are constantly trying to bridge a gap between who they are and who they want to be. She applied that to ad scripting in a way that felt natural and well-thought-through. She also referenced it when talking about why audiences scroll away from ads the moment they feel like they're being sold to, and how that affects the kind of hooks she writes.
• Strong crises management instincts: Across all three crisis scenarios in the technical interview, her default was to stay measured, lead with empathy, and resist over-engagement. She knew the difference between a troll and a genuine complaint, she knew when to escalate and when not to, and she understood that responding to every comment on a coordinated attack often does more damage than saying nothing. Her framework for the Facebook complaint specifically was good, i.e., ask a clarifying question first, bring in data once they've told you what they specifically mean, and acknowledge that if it happened in the past, things have changed since then.
• She's genuinely curious: Her version of ambition is about not feeling like she's stopped learning. She talked about Reddit threads she reads even when she has no interest in the topic, about saving content in folders across multiple platforms just because something about it was interesting, about wanting to understand what made someone save or engage with a post.
ℹ️ Things to be aware of
• She has a 30-day notice period.
• She's always handed off work to designers and account managers after the initial brief stage. Although she can mock up visuals in Canva, made decks, and generate AI creatives under time pressure, she's not independently owned the end-to-end execution and analytics side of the process.
💁♀️ Where he may need support
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Although he lacks extensive experience with LinkedIn and Bing ads, his proficiency in Google ads suggests a high adaptability to new platforms.
👩💻 Technical interview performance
Objective
This candidate was invited to a 60-minute follow-up interview to assess their technical capabilities in more detail. During this interview, we assessed their critical-thinking skills, technical expertise, and overall conversational skills.
Technical abilities
• Content strategy and planning [8.5/10]: Aayushi's approach to content planning is structured and clearly comes from real experience. Her 60/30/10 content split for NCPC (60% proactive brand storytelling, 30% community and culture, 10% reactive and educational) has a clear rationale, which was based on identifying where the brand's credibility gap actually sits and which platforms would close it most efficiently. She also outlined a full calendar workflow involving brand audit first, cultural calendar layered in, concepts built around that, with detailed briefs that include references, visual hooks, and copy direction. When creating a post, what stood out is that she thinks about what the audience is doing in culture right now and works backwards from that. Her habit of maintaining platform-specific save folders (on Pinterest, Instagram, Reddit) means her ideation is continuously fed by real-world content signals rather than just personal instinct.
• Community engagement and crisis management [8/10]: This was one of the more revealing parts of the interview because the scenarios were genuinely tricky, and Aayushi handled most of them well. Her instinct across the board was to stay calm, lead with empathy, and resist the urge to over-engage (which should be the default for a brand operating in a scrutinised industry). On the coordinated bot attack scenario, she initially leaned towards engaging, but when pushed on whether that was the best use of her time, she course-corrected quickly and landed on the right call (block, don't engage). Her framework for deciding when to escalate to the client was also clear, e.g., is it genuinely changing public perception, is it verifiable, and is it gaining real traction? On the Facebook negative comment, she went further than most would by accounting for the fact that the complaint was historical ("when I grew up near a pig farm") and shaped her response accordingly, which showed us that she read the context very carefully rather than firing off a templated response.
• Platform knowledge and audience understanding [9/10]: This is where Aayushi is the strongest. She understands the cultural logic behind each platform and how audiences behave differently depending on where they are. Her breakdown of X and Reddit as spaces for proactive credibility-building (i.e. getting ahead of criticism before it snowballs) versus Instagram and Facebook as spaces for warmth and visual storytelling was well-reasoned and showed she thinks about platforms as distinct environments rather than just distribution channels. Her Reddit thinking was particularly sharp – she talked about how that audience engages with moral dilemmas and abstraction, which means the brand needs to show up in the philosophical conversation. She also identified Instagram as the more important long-term platform for NCPC, tying it to the growing cultural romanticisation of rural life and the engagement patterns she's observed on similar content; she referenced specific examples (WWOOFing, Luis Bollard's TED talk) that showed she'd genuinely immersed herself in the brand's world before the interview.
• Writing ability and tone adaptability [8/10]: She spoke about reducing caption copy by 2 to 3 words and seeing a measurable difference in engagement. She also described writing all her own captions, briefs, and video scripts, so it's not like copy is something she only touches occasionally. Her understanding of tone adaptability came through clearly when she walked through how she'd write differently for Instagram versus X versus Reddit for the same NCPC blog – she adjusted formality, call-to-action style, and emotional register across all 3 without being prompted. Her background in psychology adds something useful here too, in that she thinks about why a line lands rather than just whether it reads well.
Areas of growth
• Her analytics access has been limited by how her current team is structured, so she hasn't yet owned performance reporting independently. She'll need to build a habit of pulling and interpreting data proactively rather than receiving a monthly summary from someone else.