Quickads.ai Revolutionizes SMB Advertising with AI-Powered Creative Platform
For the first time in 100 years, creativity is being productized, and small businesses are finally getting access to the kind of sophisticated advertising tools previously reserved for enterprise brands. This revolution isn't coming from Madison Avenue agencies or tech giants – it's being led by Nitin Mahajan, founder of Quickads.ai and BrandBooster.ai, who's on a mission to democratize advertising for the 60-70% of businesses that drive most economies but can't afford traditional marketing.
With a background that spans engineering, consulting at McKinsey, and building multiple ventures, Mahajan has identified a critical choke point in the marketing funnel: 99% of ad budgets are going to waste because small businesses lack the tools, expertise, and resources to create effective advertising. His solution? A powerful combination of AI-powered creative generation and human expertise that's delivering 3x better click-through rates at 80% lower costs than traditional agency work.
"We are a mission-driven company," Mahajan declares, describing his vision to transform how small and medium businesses access the lifeblood of growth: effective marketing.
The Problem: Advertising's Broken Value Chain
Small and medium businesses (SMBs) are the backbone of every major economy, contributing 60-70% of GDP. Yet they face a brutal reality when it comes to advertising: they can't afford the agencies that could help them grow.
💡 The SMB Advertising Crisis
- 80% of SMBs don't generate positive ROI on their ad spend
- Traditional agencies operate at 10% margins and can't serve small clients profitably
- 2-4 week production cycles for video ads in a world of hourly-changing consumer behavior
- 99% of ad budget waste due to poor creative and targeting
Consider the numbers: even the largest unicorns in India take minimum 2-4 weeks to create a single video advertisement. Meanwhile, consumer patterns and habits change every hour. The result? Most advertising is outdated before it even launches.
"If you can't market, you cannot come from a small to a large enterprise," Mahajan explains. "And they are the ones who cannot afford marketing agencies who themselves are running at 10% margin and struggling to make their ends meet."
The Creative Production Bottleneck
The advertising industry has a fundamental mismatch between production speed and market reality. Large companies might spend weeks perfecting a single video ad, complete with multiple rounds of creative review, talent coordination, and production scheduling.
But here's the reality: consumers don't like clicking on ads that look like ads, especially ones that use tired concepts from years past. As Mahajan points out, an influencer saying "come spend a day in my life" might have worked three years ago, but today it's just background noise.
"If I show you an influencer ad or somebody saying come spend a day in my life, you'll be like, 'Oh my gosh, I've heard this. This is cliche. This is like a line from three years back.' But small medium businesses and general marketing professions don't have that knowledge."
— Nitin Mahajan, Founder, Quickads.ai & BrandBooster.ai
The Solution: AI-Powered Creative at Scale
Quickads.ai attacks the problem from multiple angles simultaneously. The platform identifies what are the top new ideas, fresh concepts, and trending ad creative in specific industries, countries, and use cases – then serves them to users on a platter.
Step 1: Intelligence Gathering
The platform continuously analyzes advertising performance across industries and markets to identify what's working right now, not what worked six months ago. This intelligence is combined with data from the user's own ad account to understand what's specifically working for their business.
🔍 How Quickads.ai Works
- Market Intelligence: Analyzes top 50 trending ad concepts in your industry/country
- Account Integration: Combines market data with your specific ad performance
- AI Creative Generation: Creates on-brand images and videos showcasing your products
- Rapid Localization: Adapts creative for different regions (Diwali in Bangalore vs. Punjab)
- Cost Optimization: Production costs under $10 per ad vs. traditional $2,500+
Step 2: AI Creative Generation
Once the platform identifies winning concepts, AI takes over to create actual advertisements. But this isn't about generating generic stock imagery. The system creates on-brand creative that showcases the business's actual products in relevant contexts.
Take the example of Diwali advertising: Instead of shooting 50 different versions for different regions and characters, Quickads.ai can generate localized variations at a fraction of the cost. "Diwali Bangalore looks different than Diwali in Punjab and different characters without spending anything on shooting them," Mahajan explains.
The result? Production costs of less than $10 per ad, compared to thousands for traditional production. This isn't just incremental improvement – it's a 100x reduction in creative production costs.
The Human Touch: BrandBooster.ai's "Controversial" Approach
While many AI companies believe software can automate everything, Mahajan takes what he calls a "very, very controversial positioning". He argues that while science (data, analytics, scaling) can be automated, creativity requires taste.
This philosophy led to BrandBooster.ai, a productized marketing agency that combines AI efficiency with human creativity. The platform uses software to identify what to make and helps create the first version, but then human video editors add the crucial element of taste and customization.
🔄 The Quickads + BrandBooster Synergy
Traditional Agency Model:
- High costs ($5,000+ per video)
- Slow turnaround (2-4 weeks)
- Limited testing capacity
- Fixed creative approaches
Quickads + BrandBooster Model:
- AI-powered concept generation
- Human creative enhancement
- Rapid testing and iteration
- Cost-effective scaling
"Creativity is taste. Science is scaling," Mahajan summarizes. "Brand booster which is our productized marketing agency combines both of them."
The "Uber of Ads" Vision
BrandBooster aims to do for advertising what Uber did for transportation: create a standardized, reliable experience at a fraction of traditional costs. The company's video editors work 24/7, running ads for global clients out of India, adding that crucial human element that pure AI solutions miss.
More ambitiously, Mahajan sees this as building "the next Infosys" – creating a massive delivery center out of India that serves global advertising needs, just as Infosys revolutionized IT services delivery.
The Game-Changer: "Skin in the Game" Business Model
Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Mahajan's approach is his business model. In an industry where agencies get paid regardless of results, he's proposing something radical: making the software completely free and only making money when the ads deliver value.
💡 The "Skin in the Game" Revolution
Traditional agencies get paid whether ads work or not. Mahajan's model flips this: software is free, and revenue comes only when ads deliver results. This aligns incentives and ensures the company succeeds only when clients succeed.
"So if I'm able to crack a business model where you are perhaps the first podcast where we I'm happy to announce we're actually going to make the whole software free," Mahajan reveals. "So whatever for example you do it in video whatever you do it want to search from our our ad library it tells you what the best performing ads it's free."
This confidence comes from real results. Some of India's largest D2C brands, including those with $100 million ad budgets, have been using the services, spending approximately $25,000 per week on completely AI-generated ads across jewelry, skincare, haircare, and fashion categories.
The results speak volumes: 3x higher click-through rates than internal human-led creative, 80% cheaper output, and critically – not one person has detected that the ads are AI-generated.
The Counterintuitive Truth: Why "Ugly Ads" Win
One of the most surprising insights Mahajan shares is that "ugly ads are winning on meta". This goes against everything traditional advertising teaches about polished, perfect creative.
"If everything looks polished and you want to grab people's attention, you better be an ugly ad," Mahajan states. "That's the harsh reality."
🎯 The Liquid Death Example
Mahajan cites the famous water brand Liquid Death as a perfect example. Instead of positioning water as a premium French experience, they embraced an edgy, authentic approach with simple, tongue-in-cheek ads. The result? A powerful connection with consumers who see it as a healthier alternative to beer with the same cultural resonance.
Key Lesson: Authenticity often beats perfection in modern advertising.
The insight is profound: in a world of polished corporate messaging, raw authenticity stands out. This is especially true for SMBs that can leverage their genuine, unpolished nature as a competitive advantage.
The Future of Marketing: Speed, Taste, and Technology
As AI capabilities explode – Mahajan notes that in just 4 days, AI image generation models have become 12-15 times more photorealistic – the marketing industry faces fundamental questions about differentiation.
His answer focuses on two key elements: speed and taste.
Speed as Competitive Advantage
"Speed is your best friend," Mahajan emphasizes. "The algorithms be it Instagram or Twitter is looking for are you on the latest trends are you acting differently out there."
Think of Zara in fashion – they don't necessarily invent trends, but they spot and execute on them faster than anyone else. Quickads.ai aims to do the same for advertising: identify new concepts and convert them into brand-specific creative within seconds, not weeks.
The Enduring Value of Human Taste
While Mahajan believes AI will transform 80% of marketing workflows, he maintains that creativity cannot be commoditized by definition. Marketing, unlike accounting, is subjective and non-deterministic.
"What you like versus I like versus algo likes is very different. Knowing that science and being able to get you 10 times faster and 10 times ahead of the other people is the value that AI or platforms like ours can bring to the table out there. But there is still an element of subjectivity and taste and you still need that."
— Nitin Mahajan, Founder, Quickads.ai & BrandBooster.ai
India's AI Story: Services Over Models
When asked about India's role in the global AI landscape, Mahajan offers a contrarian view. Rather than trying to compete with Western companies building large language models, he suggests India should focus on what it does best: services and consumer applications.
"Why do I have to play in a trillion dollar race where I don't even have the data to do so?" he questions. "Maybe the answer is to offer a next generation of productized service which brings along 100 million youth which we need to employ over the next few years."
📈 India's Three-Act Tech Evolution
Act 1 (2000s): Services revolution led by Infosys and others
Act 2 (2010s): SaaS revolution with cheaper alternatives to global products
Act 3 (2020s): Consumer AI and next-generation productized services
Pattern: Each wave builds on previous strengths while addressing new market opportunities
Just as China didn't try to copy Silicon Valley but instead created live shopping suited to Asian contexts, India can find its own AI path focusing on local consumer needs and service delivery.
Key Takeaways: The Future of AI-Powered Advertising
Quickads.ai and BrandBooster.ai's journey offers crucial insights for entrepreneurs and marketers navigating the AI revolution:
1. Solve Real Pain Points, Not Technology Problems
The Insight: Don't start with AI – start with customer pain.
The Reality: SMBs don't care about AI technology; they care about growth and survival.
Your Action: Focus on outcomes, not features. Quickads.ai succeeds because it solves the fundamental problem of making effective advertising accessible.
2. Combine AI Strengths with Human Strengths
The Insight: AI excels at data processing and scaling; humans excel at taste and judgment.
The Reality: The best results come from collaboration, not replacement.
Your Action: Identify what AI can do better (data analysis, rapid generation) and what humans do better (creative direction, strategic thinking), then design workflows that leverage both.
3. Speed Beats Perfection
The Insight: In rapidly changing markets, being first matters more than being perfect.
The Reality: Good creative deployed today beats perfect creative deployed next month.
Your Action: Build processes that prioritize speed and iteration. Test multiple concepts quickly, then scale winners.
4. Align Incentives with Customer Success
The Insight: Traditional agency models misalign incentives.
The Reality: Getting paid regardless of results encourages complacency.
Your Action: Consider performance-based models or "skin in the game" approaches that ensure you succeed only when customers succeed.
5. Embrace Authenticity Over Polish
The Insight: Modern consumers crave authenticity.
The Reality: Perfect corporate messaging often performs worse than genuine, imperfect communication.
Your Action: Don't be afraid of "ugly" or raw creative that connects emotionally with your target audience.
Looking Ahead: The Next Chapter
With Quickads.ai preparing for its formal launch in the first week of October and making its software completely free, the company is poised to disrupt the $500+ billion global advertising market. The vision extends far beyond just helping SMBs create better ads – it's about fundamentally restructuring how marketing services are delivered and priced.
For Mahajan, this is more than a business opportunity; it's a chance to create what he calls a "once in a 100-year transformation" in how creativity and marketing work. By combining AI's analytical power with human creativity and taste, he's building a new paradigm that could democratize effective advertising for millions of businesses worldwide.
As the lines between technology and creativity continue to blur, Quickads.ai and BrandBooster.ai stand at the forefront of a new era in marketing – one where the most sophisticated advertising tools are accessible to the smallest businesses, and where success is measured not by production budgets or agency fees, but by real business results and growth.
The message for entrepreneurs and marketers is clear: the future of advertising won't be won by those with the biggest budgets, but by those who can combine speed, data, creativity, and authenticity most effectively. In that future, AI isn't replacing human creativity – it's amplifying it, making it accessible, and democratizing it for everyone.
About the Guest
Nitin Mahajan is the founder of Quickads.ai and BrandBooster.ai, bringing a unique combination of engineering expertise, industry knowledge, and marketing insight to the AI advertising revolution. With a background that includes engineering training, a decade building tech products, and another decade learning different industries and marketing, Mahajan represents the intersection of technology and creative marketing.
Before founding his current ventures, Mahajan worked at McKinsey and has been a second-time entrepreneur since 2005, initially founding a company in the Wi-Fi space. His current mission is to transform how small and medium businesses access effective advertising through the combination of AI technology and human creative expertise.
Quickads.ai is an AI-powered platform that identifies trending ad concepts and generates on-brand creative content for businesses, while BrandBooster.ai is a productized marketing agency that combines AI efficiency with human creative taste to deliver comprehensive advertising solutions at scale.