# Pinstorm — Full Content Index > This file contains the complete text of Pinstorm's beliefs, case study results, marketing glossary, press mentions, and founder profile for AI ingestion. Generated: 2026-09-06T14:11:49.669Z Canonical URL: https://pinstorm.com --- ## Mahesh Murthy — Founder of Pinstorm Mahesh Murthy is the Founder and Managing Partner of Pinstorm, which he established in 2004. He is one of India's earliest digital marketing practitioners and created what was considered India's first fully digital agency. **Background:** Before Pinstorm, Mahesh worked at Grey Advertising and Ogilvy & Mather. He left traditional advertising convinced that the retainer model was fundamentally broken — and built Pinstorm on the radical premise that agencies should only be paid when clients grow. **Venture Capital:** In addition to Pinstorm, Mahesh co-founded Seedfund, one of India's earliest stage venture capital firms. He has taken equity stakes in clients including Redbus (India's largest online bus ticketing platform) and Shaadi.com — putting his personal capital into businesses he believed in, consistent with his outcome-based philosophy. **Shark Tank India:** Mahesh Murthy is a judge on Shark Tank India, where he evaluates startups and invests his own money in businesses with strong fundamentals. His presence on the show has brought wider awareness to outcome-based investing and performance accountability in Indian entrepreneurship. **Media:** He has been featured in Forbes India, The Wall Street Journal, Campaign Middle East, The Economic Times, Mint, and over 25 other major publications for his contrarian stance on marketing agency compensation models. **Philosophy:** "Marketing should be paid on outcomes, not hours or media placed. If an agency isn't willing to be compensated on results, ask why." **Known for:** Outcome-based marketing, performance marketing, venture capital, revenue-share models, D2C brand growth strategy. **Location:** Mumbai, India **Profile URL:** https://pinstorm.com/about/founder **Wikipedia:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahesh_Murthy **LinkedIn:** https://www.linkedin.com/in/maheshmurthy/ --- ## About Pinstorm Pinstorm is a marketing firm founded in 2004 by Mahesh Murthy. It is the only marketing agency in the world that: - Charges no retainer and no upfront fee - May invest its team's time or third-party media costs, decided case by case per engagement - Gets paid only when agreed revenue targets are hit - Takes equity stakes or revenue share in lieu of fees **Offices:** Mumbai (India), Dubai (UAE), Noordwijk (Netherlands) **Founded:** 2004 **Model:** Outcome-based marketing — agency compensation tied to client revenue growth, ROAS, or CAC targets **Sectors:** D2C consumer brands, B2B SaaS, fintech, e-commerce, hospitality, education **Notable clients:** Citi, OpenText, Monster Energy, Saudi Telecom, Disney, Redbus, Shaadi.com **URL:** https://pinstorm.com **Locations:** - Mumbai, India — https://pinstorm.com/locations/india - Dubai, UAE — https://pinstorm.com/locations/dubai - Noordwijk, Netherlands — https://pinstorm.com/locations/netherlands **Pillar pages:** - Evidence-based marketing — https://pinstorm.com/evidence-based-marketing - Outcome-based marketing — https://pinstorm.com/what-is-outcome-based-marketing - Marketing myths debunked — https://pinstorm.com/marketing-myths - Marketing glossary — https://pinstorm.com/glossary - FAQ — https://pinstorm.com/faq **Service pages (outcome-based, paid on results):** - Performance marketing agency — https://pinstorm.com/services/performance-marketing - D2C growth marketing agency — https://pinstorm.com/services/d2c-growth-marketing - B2B SaaS marketing agency — https://pinstorm.com/services/b2b-saas-marketing - Conversion rate optimization agency — https://pinstorm.com/services/conversion-rate-optimization - All services — https://pinstorm.com/services **Disambiguation:** - Who is Pinstorm / real or fake — https://pinstorm.com/who-is-pinstorm **Comparison pages:** - Pinstorm vs a traditional retainer agency — https://pinstorm.com/compare/pinstorm-vs-retainer-agency - Outcome-based marketing vs performance marketing — https://pinstorm.com/compare/outcome-based-vs-performance-marketing - Agency retainers vs revenue-share agreements — https://pinstorm.com/compare/retainer-vs-revenue-share - Is performance & brand marketing just Google & Meta ads? — https://pinstorm.com/compare/performance-marketing-vs-google-meta-ads - SEO vs AEO vs GEO — https://pinstorm.com/compare/seo-vs-aeo-vs-geo - Building an in-house marketing team vs hiring an outcome-based agency — https://pinstorm.com/compare/in-house-marketing-vs-outcome-based-agency - Pay-for-performance vs outcome-based marketing — https://pinstorm.com/compare/pay-for-performance-vs-outcome-based-marketing - ROAS vs contribution margin — https://pinstorm.com/compare/roas-vs-contribution-margin - Hiring a D2C agency vs building an in-house growth team — https://pinstorm.com/compare/d2c-agency-vs-in-house-growth-team - All comparisons — https://pinstorm.com/compare --- ## Beliefs — Pinstorm's Marketing Philosophy (by Mahesh Murthy) Pinstorm has published 8 core beliefs about marketing, agency accountability, and business growth. These beliefs form the intellectual foundation of Pinstorm's outcome-based model. ### Belief: The 4Ps of Marketing, Loyalty Marketing and other bullshit. We were brought up to believe in the Emperors of Marketing, only to realize over time that they often weren't wearing any clothes. Let's start with a homage to Philip Kotler, if only to point out all the places his work doesn't apply today. Decades ago, Kotler stood above us all neophyte entrants into marketing. "Read his book" we were told. (Or "study it", if you were an MBA student.)So we labored through the turgid prose to discover the few things he talked about, endlessly. The famous 4Ps of Marketing: Product, Pricing, Placement and Promotion. STP - Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning. And of course, his diktats on loyalty. His line "It costs 5 times more to acquire a customer than to retain one" was drilled into our heads and the opening slides of so many loyalty marketing firms that have since fallen into disrepair.You took Kotler for granted till you started looking at the results of the actual work you did, and found most of the theory was utter bunkum. Then you started with looking closer at the gent's background: Kotler didn't even come up with the 4Ps himself but borrowed it from Jerome McCarthy,, and he wasn't a Professor of Marketing. He taught Operations Research. Plus he had zero experience as a marketer. Of course, a few books later, he was Marketing Advisor to IBM, GE, Ford, Motorola, AT&T and other giants who, well, let's just say those firms that didn't do very well since.Basically, the 4Ps are a product maker's way of looking at things. "What do I make and how do I sell it."Two problems with this. One, that it applies to physical products more than services. You can't make it work on Netflix or a fintech app without twisting Kotler's words to say what he clearly did not mean. In fact, to make some kind of framework apply on services, others have needed to add even more P's like People, Processes and Physical Evidence.Today, the 4Ps perhaps have more of a historical curiosity value as one of those thought processes we all have evolved past, like the Sun-goes-around-the-Earth theory and Flat Earther beliefs. The second and bigger issue with the 4Ps is that marketing isn't about those who produce - as the name indicates, it's more about those who consume.And nothing in the 4Ps puts the focus where it needs to be - on those who buy, and on those who influence the buying. In fact, Bob Lauterborn came back with a more sensible response to the 4Ps with the 4Cs: Consumer, Cost, Convenience and Communication. It is a slightly more useful framework, if you're looking for one .But the 4Ps weren't the only misguidance we got from Kotler. We were then loaded with STP: Segmenting, Targeting and Positioning. Military terminology that many American academics seem to like. But war is nothing like marketing.Our founder handled the brand messaging for Pepsi across Asia in an earlier role, where he was told of the theory that the Coke drinker was a very different person from the Pepsi drinker - only to discover in reality and in every bit of research and consumer behaviour that it was the very same person.Today the numbers are clear. Coke may have a 50% market share and Pepsi may have 25%. But it doesn't mean that half the world drinks Coke and a quarter drinks Pepsi. It instead means that the entire world drinks Coke about half the time and the entire world drinks Pepsi about a quarter of the time. This brand-polygamous and disloyal behaviour is true in most sectors around the world and in all geographies. And it lays bare the obsolescence of the STP theory for marketers.So you don't segment and target. You simply try to be more mentally and physically available to all of your audience all of the time - and we will cover both of these in greater depth at a future date.But, going beyond segmenting and targeting, it turns out there's very little value in positioning either. And we'll delve into that too, along with Ries and Trout in a future piece.Which brings us to Kotler's Loyalty Thesis. "Keeping a customer costs a fraction of what getting a new one costs", and other fallacies.As marketers and consumers ourselves, we all figured that when brands offered frequent flyer or membership cards, we signed up for these from all competing brands. Making the benefits of loyalty marketing quite irrelevant. If you're loyal to multiple brands in a sector, then you're not really loyal to anybody.Also, as marketing professionals, in our past lives, we've directed millions of dollars worth of loyalty marketing or CRM freebies to loyal customers. Only to find that whatever they bought after receiving our goodies, they would have bought anyway, at the full price. So we've actually lost revenues in the exercise.In fact research shows that only a tiny fraction - less than 10% - of loyalty campaigns around the world actually earn more than they cost after you factor in purchases from those bought who were not going to buy otherwise, and after factoring in the costs of discounts and of running the campaign itself. A sobering thought.To add insult to injury, research also points out that retailers today without loyalty programs grow twice as much as those with loyalty programs.So loyalty marketing doesn't really help and it's not even a benign thing. It actually hurts your cash flow - money that you could put to better use elsewhere. At Pinstorm we're fans of evidence-based marketing. We put our money where our experiences and our beliefs lie. Not in obsolete textbooks. No shit, Sherlock, as one might say. URL: https://pinstorm.com/beliefs/the-4ps-marketing-loyalty-marketing-other-bullshit --- ### Belief: Conviction Without Capital Is Just an Opinion Any agency can tell you your strategy will work. The ones who truly believe it are willing to put their own resources behind it — time, and where the case is compelling, media money. We decide that case by case. That is the only honest signal of confidence in this business. Somewhere around 2005, in a conference room in Mumbai with air-conditioning that worked in bursts, a prospective client asked me a question I've never forgotten: 'If you're so sure this will work, why am I the only one taking the risk?' I didn't have a good answer. The honest answer — the industry's answer — was 'because that's how agencies work.' The client pays. The agency opines. If the campaign works, the agency takes the credit. If it doesn't, the agency takes the retainer anyway and writes a learnings deck. I remember thinking: this is not a business. This is a séance with invoicing.That question is, more or less, why Pinstorm works the way it does.An opinion is what you have when nothing happens to you if you're wrong. A conviction is what you have when something does. The marketing industry runs almost entirely on opinions dressed up as convictions. Strategy decks with forty slides of certainty, presented by people whose income is identical whether the strategy soars or sinks. The confidence in the room is real. The exposure is zero. And exposure — not confidence — is the only honest signal in this business.Think about how this works everywhere else. A chef who won't eat at his own restaurant is telling you something. A fund manager with none of her own money in the fund is telling you something. Nassim Taleb built an entire book around this idea — skin in the game — and the core of it is brutally simple: don't ask people what they believe, ask what they've risked. Belief is cheap. Risk is information.Now apply that test to the agency pitch you sat through last quarter. The one where they told you, with tremendous certainty, that this positioning, this campaign, this media plan would transform your numbers. Ask the question the Mumbai client asked me: if you're so sure, what happens to you if you're wrong? In almost every case the answer is: nothing. The retainer continues. The hours get billed. The learnings deck gets written. They were never sure. They were selling sure.So here is what we did about it, and I want to be precise, because this is a place where agencies love to be vague.Pinstorm prices on outcomes. Not hours, not deliverables, not effort — outcomes. That alone puts our income at risk on every engagement, because if your revenue doesn't move, ours doesn't either. That is the baseline, and it is not negotiable.Beyond that baseline, we decide — engagement by engagement — how much further to go. On some engagements we invest our own team's time ahead of any payment, doing the strategy and build work at our cost because we believe the outcome will pay for it. On some, where the case is compelling enough, we've gone further and deployed our own money on the media itself — our capital buying the ads, not yours. We have done both. We don't do either automatically, and anyone who tells you they always do is either lying or about to go broke. Conviction is not a policy. Conviction is a judgment you make about a specific business, with a specific product, at a specific moment — and then back with something you can lose.This is also why we say no a lot. People sometimes hear 'skin in the game' and assume it means we'll gamble on anything. The opposite is true. When your own resources ride on the result, you become extremely picky about which results you believe in. We look for businesses with a clear, direct path to real revenue — not a story about revenue, a path to it. If we can't see that path, we decline, politely, and everyone saves eighteen months. The willingness to walk away is part of the signal. A gambler bets on everything. An investor bets on almost nothing.There's a second-order effect here that took me years to fully appreciate. When the agency has something to lose, the quality of the arguments changes. In a retainer relationship, the agency's private incentive is to agree with the client — the client pays the bills, and disagreement is friction. In an outcome relationship, agreeing with a bad idea costs us money. So we argue. We push back on the brief. We kill our own creative when the data says it isn't working, rather than defending it through three more quarters because it won an award somewhere. The client stops getting a vendor and starts getting a partner with a genuine, financial reason to be right rather than agreeable. I have had clients tell me the arguments were worth more than the campaigns. I choose to take that as a compliment.The objection I hear most often — usually from other agency people, over drinks, in tones of wounded professionalism — is that this model is 'unfair' because marketing outcomes depend on things the agency doesn't control. The product. The pricing. The sales team. The market. And that's true. It is also true for every founder, every investor, and every operator on the planet, all of whom manage to function while exposed to things they don't control. The demand for a risk-free income in a results business is not professionalism. It's a request to be paid like a partner while being exposed like a spectator.Does this mean agencies that don't put resources at risk are all frauds? No. Some do honest work at honest rates. But understand what you're buying from them: an opinion. Possibly a very good opinion, from smart people with real experience. Just be clear that when things go wrong, the entire cost of being wrong lands on you. Their certainty in the pitch meeting was rented, not owned.So here's the test, and it's the same one that Mumbai client gave me twenty years ago. Next time an agency tells you they believe in the plan, ask them what they're prepared to lose if it fails. Watch the face. The ones who flinch have given you an opinion. The ones who answer have given you a signal. In a business drowning in confident noise, that signal is the only thing worth paying for. URL: https://pinstorm.com/beliefs/conviction-without-capital-just-opinion --- ### Belief: It's not just a war on Iran. It's a war on brand budgets. Every recession, every tariff scare, every war, every bad quarter, the same thing happens. The brand budget gets cut. And every time, someone acts like this is the right thing to do. So EMARKETER recently documented what anyone who's been in this business longer than five years could have told you for free: C-suite belief in long-term brand building has dropped from 80% to 69% of CMOs in a single year, and only 55% are now putting 60% or more of their budget toward brand. Down from 59% in 2025. Economic uncertainty, tariff jitters, the usual suspects. Everyone's running toward 'immediately trackable performance channels.' Everyone's demanding proof.I have a question. Proof of what, exactly?Here's the thing about 'immediately trackable' metrics. They are, almost by definition, measuring things that were already going to happen. Someone who was going to buy your toothpaste anyway clicked your retargeted ad. You paid for the click. You called it a conversion. Your attribution model called it a win. Your CFO nodded. Everyone went home. Meanwhile, the 43-year-old who'd never bought your brand and might have, if she'd seen your ad forty times over the past two years, bought someone else's toothpaste. And your model never saw her. She was never in your funnel. She doesn't exist in your dashboard.This is not a new observation. Les Binet and Peter Field have been saying this since 2007, with the IPA Databank behind them — one of the largest bodies of actual marketing effectiveness evidence ever assembled. Their finding, which I'll summarise in one line because they spent years proving it rigorously: short-term activation and long-term brand building are both necessary, and the ratio that works is roughly 60% brand to 40% performance, though this varies by category. Not 40/60 the other way. Not 20/80. Not 'whatever the CFO will sign off on this quarter.'And yet here we are, in 2026, watching CMOs collectively move the dial in exactly the wrong direction, and calling it prudence.I've sat in enough boardrooms to know how this goes. The CFO asks the CMO to justify the brand spend. The CMO, who knows in her bones that it works but can't point to a clean number on a slide, flinches. The performance team across the table has a dashboard full of CPAs and ROAS figures and last-click attributions that look extremely convincing if you don't think too hard about what they're actually measuring. The CFO likes clean numbers. The performance budget survives. The brand budget gets trimmed. Repeat next quarter.The cruellest part is that the damage doesn't show up immediately. Brand equity erodes slowly — like rust, not like a car crash. You don't notice it happening. You keep hitting your short-term numbers for a while, because you're harvesting the equity you built over the past several years. Then one quarter it stops working. Then pricing power mysteriously disappears. Then you're running promotions to move volume, which further trains your customers to wait for the discount. Then some bright consultant recommends a 'brand refresh.' And so the cycle continues.Procter & Gamble went through a version of this between roughly 2012 and 2017. They cut reach, went narrow on targeting, poured into digital performance, declared victory — and then Marc Pritchard stood up at the IAB and called the whole thing out. P&G's own conclusion, from their own data, was that hyper-targeted digital had made their advertising less effective, not more. They went back to broad reach. Their results improved. That wasn't a small company running a boutique experiment. That was the world's largest advertiser, telling you, plainly, that they'd gotten it wrong.The EMARKETER piece also mentions retail media networks and creator marketing as emerging 'measurable brand-building vehicles.' I'll be charitable here and say: sometimes, yes. But I'd be careful. Retail media is largely a toll that retailers charge you for access to shelves you were already on, dressed up in measurement language. And 'creator marketing' — which a decade ago we called influencer marketing, which a decade before that we called celebrity endorsement — has a long and distinguished history of producing vanity metrics while shifting approximately zero volume. There are exceptions. They're exceptions.What I find genuinely fascinating about this moment is the epistemological problem at its centre. The C-suite is 'demanding proof.' But proof of what exactly, and measured how, and over what time horizon? A brand impression seen by someone who doesn't buy for another eight months — how do you measure that? You can't, really. Not cleanly. Not with the kind of dashboard tidiness that CFOs prefer. So what happens is that marketers measure what's measurable and call it what matters. Those are not the same thing. Measuring the things you can measure precisely is not the same as measuring the things that matter precisely.This is, incidentally, not unique to marketing. It's a general disease of organisations that have learned to love metrics. Robert McNamara ran the Vietnam War on body counts. He was measuring something. He was measuring the wrong thing. The war did not go well. Not a perfect analogy, I'll grant you. But the epistemological error is identical.At Pinstorm, we've come at this from a different direction because we had to. We charge on outcomes, not retainers. Which means we're personally, financially incentivised to make the actual thing work — not to look busy with a media plan. And what we've found, consistently, across markets, is that the Binet and Field numbers hold. Brand investment pays back. It pays back over a longer horizon than most CFOs have patience for, which is a corporate governance problem, not a marketing problem. The answer to a corporate governance problem is not to abandon your marketing strategy. Though I appreciate that's easier said than done when the CFO is in the room and your job is on the line.The 69% of CMOs who still believe in long-term brand building — down from 80% — I'm not worried about those people. They know. They'll be fine when the dust settles. It's the ones who've convinced themselves that chasing trackable short-term signals is actually the smart, data-driven, rigorous approach — those are the ones I feel sorry for. They're not being rigorous. They're being comfortable. There's a difference.Binet said it more diplomatically than I will: short-termism is a perfectly rational response to the incentives most marketers face, and a perfectly catastrophic one for the brands they run. The two things are simultaneously true. Which is, I suppose, the tragedy of it. URL: https://pinstorm.com/beliefs/its-not-just-war-iran-war-brand-budgets --- ### Belief: GCC Marketers Know What's Right. They're Just Not Doing It. 57% say brand-building drives long-term growth. But 72% admit they're still chasing short-term numbers. This isn't a knowledge problem. It's a strength-of-backbone problem. There's a survey doing the rounds — Campaign Middle East covered it recently — about how GCC senior marketing leaders are 'rethinking the role of brand.' The research is from JWI, an independent agency, and I have no reason to doubt the numbers. 57% of the marketers surveyed said brand-building is the primary driver of long-term growth. 72% admitted their actual current focus is on short-term performance. 71% have paused or delayed campaigns at some point in the last couple of years.Read that again slowly. Most of these people know the right answer. And most of them are doing the opposite.This is not a knowledge gap. We solved the knowledge gap. Les Binet and Peter Field spent roughly a decade going through the IPA Effectiveness Databank — hundreds of real campaigns, real results — and showed pretty conclusively that the optimal split for most categories is roughly 60% long-term brand, 40% short-term activation. That work has been sitting there since 2013. It's been cited, re-cited, presented at every marketing conference in every timezone. If you are a senior marketing leader anywhere in the world and you haven't absorbed the basic findings of The Long and the Short of It by now, I'm not sure what to tell you.So if the knowledge is there, and the data is there, and even these surveyed marketers in the GCC agree with the knowledge — then why is 72% of their energy going into short-term performance anyway?I'll tell you why. Because their CFO doesn't care about brand health scores. Because their board wants to see revenue this quarter. Because their CEO read something about 'performance marketing ROI' on LinkedIn and now asks about it in every monthly review. Because nobody ever got fired for buying a Meta conversion campaign, but you can absolutely get fired for defending a six-month brand campaign to a board that wanted to see results in six weeks.The incentive structure is broken, not the understanding.I've had this conversation, some version of it, with marketing heads across categories and countries. They all nod vigorously when we talk about mental availability, about how light buyers do most of the volume work, about how you need to be remembered at the category entry point before someone even gets to your landing page. They get it. They genuinely get it. Then six weeks later they're asking us to 'optimise for conversions' because Q3 is looking soft.Actually, as a sidebar — one of the more quietly damning findings in this research is that 80% of the marketers who paused campaigns were simultaneously reallocating that budget elsewhere rather than simply cutting. Meaning the money didn't disappear. It moved. And I'd bet a fairly large amount that it moved toward performance. Toward things that can generate a reportable number before the next leadership meeting. Which tells you something important: the problem isn't budgets drying up, it's budgets running scared.Now here's the thing that doesn't get said enough. The Binet/Field 60/40 — or 60/40 as shorthand, since people love a ratio — isn't really about brand versus performance as separate religions. It's about the same money working at two different time horizons. Your performance campaign is harvesting demand that your brand campaign created. If you only ever harvest and never plant, you eventually stand in an empty field wondering what happened to your yields. The wheat didn't vanish. You just stopped growing it.What's happening in a lot of GCC organisations right now — and this isn't unique to the GCC, by the way, I see it in India, in Southeast Asia, in Europe — is that the brand budget and the performance budget are managed by different teams, measured against different KPIs, and often sitting with different agency relationships. So nobody is even looking at them as one thing at different horizons. They're looking at two separate P&Ls and optimising each one independently. Which is a bit like trying to run a marathon by only training your left leg.The other thing the survey findings hint at, without quite saying it, is that 'uncertainty' has become a very convenient excuse. When the economy wobbles, when there's a regional tension, when a category softens — the first thing that gets paused is the thing that's hardest to attribute. And what's hardest to attribute? Brand. You can't draw a straight line from a TV campaign in January to a purchase in September, not neatly, not in a spreadsheet. So it gets cut. The Facebook conversion campaign stays because someone can point to a cost-per-acquisition number, even if that number is measuring something that was going to happen anyway.Attribution theatre is the enemy of brand investment. It always has been. You build a measurement system that can only see short-term signals, and then you make long-term decisions based on what the system shows you. And then you wonder why your brand slowly hollows out while your cost-per-acquisition slowly climbs.Ehrenberg-Bass has been saying for decades that most buyers in any category are light buyers — people who buy from you occasionally, irregularly, and who also buy from your competitors without much guilt or loyalty. Coke drinkers drink Pepsi. Nike buyers own Adidas. The job of brand advertising is not to convert them or lock them in — it's to make sure your brand is mentally available at the moment they happen to be in a buying situation. That takes time. That takes consistency. That takes not pausing the campaign every time Q3 looks soft.The JWI research calls this a 'gap between awareness and action.' Which is a polite way of putting it. I'd call it something less polite. It's the gap between knowing what's right and having the spine to defend it in a room full of people demanding short-term numbers.The marketers who close that gap aren't the ones who find a better framework or read a better book. They're the ones who've figured out how to tell their CFO a story that makes sense in CFO language. How brand investment today is the demand-generation cost-reduction mechanism of eighteen months from now. How a customer who already knows and trusts your brand costs significantly less to convert than a cold stranger seeing your performance ad for the first time.That argument isn't complicated. It just requires someone in the room willing to make it, and willing to keep making it even when the quarterly numbers are making everyone nervous.57% of GCC senior marketers say they believe in brand-building. Good. I hope the other 43% are listening. And I hope all 57% find the nerve to act on what they already know. URL: https://pinstorm.com/beliefs/gcc-marketers-know-whats-right-theyre-just-not-doing --- ### Belief: Advertising is a crappy business. So why did we start Pinstorm? No one gets rich in advertising - though it takes the same kind of smarts that any other unicorn does. So why bother? I'm Mahesh. I founded Pinstorm. Even after I swore to myself I'd never do this. I've worked at earlier versions of FCB, Grey and Ogilvy - and I'm not sure if any of these exist in any meaningful way anymore. Which is kinda the point I wanted to make. I'll make a few more in a roundabout way.So settle in, there's no TL, DR here.Life was fine till the mid-1990s, by which time I'd spent more than a decade trying to be a great copywriter and failing often - though my bosses, Neil French and Ricardo de Carvalho included, were some of the best.My clients till then were mostly the crisp suit, Italian tie and wingtip loafers types across the Unilevers, P&Gs, Krafts and Pepsis of the world.Then I was hired by a Silicon Valley agency and some time in 1995 I started doing work for their newest client - two guys wearing shorts and sandals in the Bay Area.I helped re-design their directory to the internet they called Yahoo. (In fact it still uses some of the structure and icons I helped design over 30 years ago!) Yahoo was up against much a better-funded rival called, Excite. Long story short, and we'll keep the long story for another day and another article here - we beat Excite by out-thinking and out-executing them.And then my clients, David Filo and Jerry Yang, became millionaires and eventually billionaires.I got a small salary hike and next, I started working with a small client based in Seattle. This was after fighting with my agency's leadership who asked me to sack them as they thought they'd never amount to much.Helped design their site, identity and did all their online and print ads for a few years till "the earth's biggest bookstore" - a line I came up with - was too big for any agency to handle and I had to reluctantly hand the Amazon.com account back to Jeff Bezos telling him he needed to take it in-house.Jeff too, went on to become a billionaire. Jeff surely deserved his mega-payday. But this caused in me no end of navel-gazing.I looked around. While my clients were annoyingly becoming billionaires, no one in advertising was even becoming a millionaire. Even today there are so few agency folks that are truly well off - let's leave out those guys in media sales who brokered large deals with hidden kickbacks - I'm referring to the mainline advertising lot: creative, planners, account directors and such.While I didn't have many delusions of grandeur, I certainly didn't feel I was much lower on the capability ladder than Jerry, David or Jeff. They too put their pants on one leg at a time.So I wondered if my career choice was destined to be one of relative penury and settling down for eventual retirement in some old people's home in Florida or if I was very lucky, a small castle in France. Neither prospect appealed much to me.I figured then that the problem wasn't so much me. It was the advertising model.The industry charged, then, 15% of what the media cost was for its services. And I could see that wouldn't work in the new world at all. As their agency, we'd spent close to zero on media for Yahoo and a very tiny bit for Amazon. Not enough to pay even one person's salary if we'd charged 15%.And over time, newer companies distinguished themselves by living the 180-degree converse of the earlier rule. Back then it was "the more you spend (on media), the bigger you get". These new ones kept getting bigger by spending less. Google rules 90% of search, WhatsApp rules more than half the world's messenger apps, Tesla rules the electric car business. And all of them got to their super-dominant positions by spending close to zero on media.So it was in hindsight a silly model to be paid a percentage of how much a brand spent.Actually, as a sidebar, marketing firms are called "agencies" because that's what they originally were. They were sales agents - not for brands, but for the newspapers, selling ad space and making a commission on their sales. They worked for the publishers then and not you, and in many cases they still do - though they pretend to work for you. No coincidence that when you meet agencies, many seem to want you to buy even larger amounts of media. Though ideally they should want you to earn more, not spend more. But I digress.So the commission structure I figured wouldn't make me rich. And even if it did, spending a lifetime getting brands to spend more instead of earn more just didn't sit right with me. So that was out.Advertising was then moving to the fee or retainer era. I'd charged flat fees of Amazon and Yahoo based on hours worked. But then the clients made the mega-bucks and we made the pennies. Obviously, earning flat fees based on hours worked or even based on the number of deliverables delivered wasn't going to get me rich. Heard of any Big 4 consulting firm billionaires? Neither have I.So even though it was a slightly more ethical model, retainers still didn't make sense to me. The secret, I imagined, was in having skin in the game. Owning the brand. Or co-owning it.So while the agency I was in did well, we went public and we all owned some equity and each of us did better than the average agency person, I moved from advertising to a Seattle-based VC-funded startup as their head of marketing. Got some equity, the works. And yes, did well here too.I helped launch an early precursor to Shopify - our rivals were a firm called Viaweb founded by Paul Graham who went on later to found the hugely influential Y Combinator. We got acquired by Intel, got a decent payout and all. But those two years here taught me why I loved and missed advertising - the sheer variety of challenges. And I missed those while working on only one brand at the Seattle e-com firm.I figured I wasn't built to be one inch wide and one mile deep. I was probably more one yard wide and one yard deep. So I then logically concluded that I needed a career with a variety of different challenges, and ownership in each one of them. Couldn't see anything around which offered that. So left the marketing business, moved back from the US to India. Was hired to launch a couple of TV channels (MTV India and Channel V India - they're both defunct now, if you're keeping track). Those did well, sold one of them, made a little money, but then again no life-changing amount of cash.And as a sidebar, started being an angel investor. (How did I learn to be one? That's another story for another day.) And liked it. Variety, check. Challenge, check. Grew that role into starting a VC fund - one of the very first in India. Variety, big check. Ownership, bigger check.Enjoyed working with founders and CEOs as a co-owner. Still invest in companies as an angel investor slash marketing guy. That's the best way. All incentives are aligned. And all petty politics is off the table.It was during that period that I was asked to be on the advisory board of a kids' charity. At some random meeting I asked the CEO why they wouldn't look to raise funds from the lay public around the world using the internet. I was met with a variety of reasons why that was a dumb idea.So, anyway, I went home, taught myself how to use Google AdWords - it was early days, 2003. Put in my credit card, did some design, wrote some words, started a campaign. Kept tweaking it month after month. A few months later I'm called in to their office. Have you been running an online campaign globally, I'm asked.I beam and say yes, open my laptop and show the countries I'd targeted. And then find out those are the very countries they've ended up with completely unexpected donations from. And a decent chunk of money as well. (Including some stolen money - more on that here.)I'm castigated for doing stuff without permission and all, but I respond with "hey, it's a donation from me to you, just take it, no string attached."I leave the room and am called back a few days later. "Look, you have to stop doing this maverick stuff" I'm told. Okay, I say. "We want you to do it officially for us"What, I ask. What do you mean.Start an agency, whatever, but do it officially. I flat refused. Over my dead body I said. Agencies are shitty businesses and I never want to start an agency.So we're at some sort of Mexican standoff. Client wants me to start an agency. I refuse, outright. Finally client asks, exasperatedly, but why.I list the reasons. It makes no sense to work on commissions I say - I want you to earn more and spend less. Okay, she agrees. And it makes no sense to work on a fee - I get no reward if our work is any good. She agrees.And further, if II know what works, I don't want to spend half my time fighting with you and trying to persuade you over what ads and what creatives to run and what to change - because I know the customer better than you do, and I know what works better than you. She gets a little upset but she's ex-advertising as well, so she nods.Then she asks me - so tell me - under what conditions and circumstances can you do this for us?. I said I'll think over it.I go home, roll things around in my mind, and say to myself - well my version of what an ideal agency for me to run would be so off the mark for her that it would be something she would never, ever buy. So let me share it with her so she can say no and I can go back to my VC world.I go back the next day and say. Okay - here's what might work for me. One, I pay for creatives not you, so I control it. Two I pay for the media and control it, three - all the IP on the creative and the media plan is owned by me - so you can't copy it and run it yourself with someone else cheaper: if you want the creatives or media plan that worked, you need to buy it from me. Four, I get final say on creative, you don't. Five the only guideline I'll accept is the brand guideline, if it's on guideline, it's approved no matter what you think. And six, I'll take X% of all the donations that come in as my fee - there's no floor and there's no cap - if you make many millions, I'll make some millions as well. Seven, you'll pay me within 2 weeks of the donations coming to you, or I'll stop doing it for you and charge you a penalty for late payments.Long silence.And then she says "Okay".That's how Pinstorm was born. That's how the first client contract was structured - and the hundreds others since haven't veered too far from the course.Variety and ownership. That's what makes it work for us - and that's what will make it work for some of you as well. I know it won't work for many, and that's fine.It's been more than 20 years since that day we started. We've run campaigns on every continent, including Antarctica. Across over 100 countries. On hundreds of briefs.During this time, advertising's become crappier still as a business. The only way most large agencies make money is by cheating on media costs and by cheating on production costs. And often, individuals from client sides are in on it as well.We're sitting here in a world where advertising is largely imploding. Just in the last few months of 2025, we've seen the demise of brands like Ogilvy, Grey, DDB, Burnett, Grey, Y&R, FCB, Saatchi. All collapsing from agency groups into singular near-anonymous distillations.Ironic that, of all people, ad agencies have never managed to build lasting brands for themselves. If they wanted to have just one name, WPP could have called itself Ogilvy, and Omnicom could have called itself Bernbach - how much more memorable those would be compared to "Wire And Plastic Products" and "Om nom nom nicom". But no, they still suck at building brands.But we're soldiering on at Pinstorm. We're tiny. Based in 3 countries. But operating in over a 100.We do the work of a 250-person firm - but we're maybe one-fifth that size.We use a huge amount of technology and AI. This entire site, for instance, was designed, written, coded and built in one weekend by one person. So, yes, it makes even less sense these days to charge by the hour or by the deliverable.We're doing well. Loving our work when it works. And feeling your pain when it doesn't. Yes, we've failed often. But it's at our cost, not yours. And we've succeeded far more often that we've failed.And in those cases we earn a heck of a lot more than what you might pay any other agency. But our clients - or should we use that terrible cliche and call them 'partners' because in the true financial sense that's what they really are - don't seem to mind it.We love this business. And we try, every day, to make it a less shitty.Tell us how we're doing? URL: https://pinstorm.com/beliefs/advertising-crappy-business-why-did-start-pinstorm --- ### Belief: The world doesn't need another agency. So we didn't build another one. Dividing the agency world into ‘creative’ and ‘media’ firms doesn’t solve this – especially in the digital scheme of things. URL: https://pinstorm.com/beliefs/the-world-doesnt-need-another-agency-didnt-build-another-one --- ### Belief: The world is changing. Is your marketing? A world where the industrial era practices of command-and-control or even Kotler-type 4P approaches simply don’t cut it any more. URL: https://pinstorm.com/beliefs/the-world-changing-marketing --- ### Belief:

64% of marketers can't prove ROI. The other 36% are lying.

Every few years someone publishes a stat about how marketers can't prove their own value, and every few years the industry nods solemnly and goes right back to reporting click-through rates to the board. So AI Digital published a piece recently noting that 83% of marketing leaders cite proving ROI as their top priority, yet only 36% believe they can actually measure it accurately. I'll give them credit for one thing: they've correctly identified this as an organisational problem, not a technical one. That's a more honest framing than most. But then they go and spend the rest of the piece prescribing fifteen KPIs and suggesting AI-assisted media mix modelling as the fix, which is roughly the equivalent of diagnosing someone with a broken leg and handing them a fancier walking stick.Let me tell you what's actually going on here.The measurement problem in digital marketing isn't that we lack KPIs. We have too many. I've sat in rooms — boardrooms, conference rooms, the kind of rooms where someone always insists on dimming the lights for the deck — and watched grown adults present seventeen slides of engagement metrics without once mentioning revenue. Bounce rate. Session duration. Impressions. Cost per click. These numbers have the comfortable quality of being easy to generate and impossible to argue with. No CFO knows enough to push back on a 4.2% click-through rate. So it sits in the deck, looking busy, meaning nothing.The deeper problem — and this is the bit that the fifteen-KPI crowd consistently soft-pedals — is that most digital attribution is fiction dressed up as science. Last-click attribution, which still runs more campaigns than anyone wants to admit in 2026, is basically astrology with a dashboard. You're not measuring what caused the sale. You're measuring what happened to be standing nearest the sale when it fell over. First-click has the opposite problem. Multi-touch models distribute credit with the confident arbitrariness of a committee deciding who gets the office with the window.We've been at this long enough at Pinstorm to have watched the full arc: from the early days when digital was going to solve measurement forever — finally, accountability! — to the current moment where the industry has produced more measurement tools than at any point in history, and the honest number is still 36%. If anything, I'd argue that number is generous. It assumes the 36% who say they can measure ROI accurately are correct about that. I'm not sure they are. Confidence in your measurement methodology is not the same thing as having a valid one.Here's what I think is actually happening in those organisations that do get this right — and I'll be honest, they're a small club. They've made a decision, probably a painful one, to stop treating brand and performance as separate functions with separate budgets and separate KPIs. Because the moment you split them, you get exactly the dysfunction that produces the 83% problem. The performance team optimises for short-term conversions and shows beautiful ROAS numbers. The brand team talks about awareness and consideration and shows beautiful awareness lift numbers. Neither number connects to the other, and neither team has any incentive to make the connection. The CFO sits in the middle wondering why, despite both teams claiming to be winning, revenue growth is underwhelming.Binet and Field documented this exhaustively — their work on the IPA databank, looking at hundreds of campaigns over decades, is probably the most rigorous thing the industry has produced. The rough shape of it: 60% of your budget working on long-term brand, 40% on short-term activation. Not because it's a magic ratio, but because the data shows that's approximately where you stop leaving money on the table. And critically — the metrics for each have completely different time horizons. Judging a brand campaign on six-week ROAS is like judging a forest by how many trees you can see in a photograph taken in week one. Absurd, but ubiquitous.The media mix modelling push — which the AI Digital piece is quite enthusiastic about — is genuinely useful, I'll grant that. It's a step up from last-click. But I'd caution against the idea that better modelling alone solves the problem. The model is only as good as the data going in, and the data going in is almost always incomplete. Dark social, word of mouth, the person who saw your outdoor campaign on the way to the office and typed your brand name directly into Google three weeks later — none of that shows up cleanly in a media mix model. What you get is a partial picture presented with full confidence, which may actually be worse than a partial picture presented with appropriate humility.The other thing nobody wants to say plainly: most brands are chasing the wrong buyers. The loyalty hypothesis — that your best customers, your heavy buyers, are where the growth comes from — is seductive and wrong. Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have been making this point for fifteen years. Growth comes from light buyers and non-buyers. The people who buy your category occasionally, who barely think about your brand, who don't follow you on anything and couldn't name your tagline. Those are the people who move the revenue needle when you reach them, because there are so many of them. Your loyal core were going to buy you anyway. All your targeting precision, all your CRM segmentation, all your lookalike audiences optimised on your best customers — you're spending money talking to people who were already sold. Congratulations.I've watched clients spend serious money building loyalty programmes that, by every measure we could construct, were simply discounting to people who'd have paid full price. The programme didn't create loyalty. It rewarded existing behaviour at a cost. Points and tiers and 'exclusive member benefits' — the unit economics on most of these things are terrible, and the attribution is circular. Of course your loyalty programme members have higher LTV. They were already your best customers before they joined. You enrolled them because of their behaviour, then measured their behaviour and declared victory.So what do you actually track? Revenue. Market share. Penetration — how many people in your category bought you at least once this period versus last. Mental availability — harder to measure, but trackable through brand health surveys done properly, not the nonsense vanity ones. And you need honest, uncomfortable conversations about time horizons. A campaign that looks flat at ninety days might look very different at eighteen months. Most organisations aren't structured to have that conversation, which is why they reach for fifteen KPIs and call it rigour.The measurement problem is real. It's just not the one most people think it is. The problem isn't that we can't measure. The problem is that we're measuring the wrong things, on the wrong timescales, in service of looking busy rather than being right. No amount of AI-assisted dashboarding fixes that. It's a thinking problem pretending to be a tooling problem. And thinking problems are considerably harder to sell a software subscription for. URL: https://pinstorm.com/beliefs/83-marketers-cant-prove-roi-other-17-lying --- ## Case Studies — Outcome-Based Marketing Results Each case study represents a real engagement where Pinstorm's compensation was tied to measurable results — and in selected cases Pinstorm also invested its own team's time or media costs. ### Client in the red? What about the client in the red-corner notice? **Result:** Interpolling well. A Malaysian billionaire came to us with a curious problem. He wasn't able to book a flight. Could we help? URL: https://pinstorm.com/case-studies/client-red-what-about-client-red-corner-notice --- ### The E-commerce Play: $240K to $2M in 12 Months **Result:** 9× revenue Full-funnel ownership applied to an established but stagnant e-commerce player. We owned the outcomes. URL: https://pinstorm.com/case-studies/the-e-commerce-play-240k-2m-12-months --- ### SaaS GTM That Actually Worked **Result:** 3× MRR in 8 months Product-led growth combined with performance marketing for a B2B SaaS — every dollar tracked to revenue. URL: https://pinstorm.com/case-studies/saas-gtm-actually-worked --- ### Category Leader in Eleven Months **Result:** 4× bookings in 12 months Outcome-based GTM for a travel-tech startup. We owned the acquisition funnel end-to-end, deployed our own media capital, and built a category leader in under 12 months. URL: https://pinstorm.com/case-studies/zero-category-leader-crowded-travel-market --- ### $120K Working Capital. $1.4M Annualised Revenue. **Result:** 12× ROAS A direct-response financial services brand signed a revenue-share deal. We deployed our own media budget and returned 12× in annualised revenue within a year. URL: https://pinstorm.com/case-studies/120k-working-capital-1-4m-annualised-revenue --- ### EdTech at Scale: 3× Enrollments, Flat Cost Per Student **Result:** 3× enrollments An edtech company had great content and a broken funnel. We rebuilt acquisition from top to bottom, tripled paid enrollments, and kept cost per student flat — which is the hard part. URL: https://pinstorm.com/case-studies/edtech-scale-3-enrollments-flat-cost-per-student --- ### Luxury Does Not Have to Mean Low Volume **Result:** 5× D2C revenue in 24 months High-ticket, high-consideration consumer goods do not have to rely on footfall. We moved 80% of this luxury brand's revenue online over two years without discounting once. URL: https://pinstorm.com/case-studies/luxury-does-not-have-mean-low-volume --- ### B2B Marketplace: $1M to $7M GMV **Result:** 7.5× GMV We restructured their go-to-market from category-first acquisition to account-based revenue attribution. The result: 7.5× gross merchandise value growth in 18 months. URL: https://pinstorm.com/case-studies/b2b-marketplace-1m-7m-gmv --- ### 4× Patient Volume. Same Marketing Budget. **Result:** 4× patient volume A multi-city clinic network with flat budgets and a directive to grow. We reallocated every dollar to measurable acquisition channels and quadrupled patient intake in 14 months. URL: https://pinstorm.com/case-studies/4-patient-volume-same-marketing-budget --- ### Consumer Electronics: A Legacy Brand's First $2.5M Direct **Result:** $0 → $2.5M D2C A legacy electronics brand had never sold direct-to-consumer. We built the funnel, ran the media, and launched a D2C revenue channel worth $2.5M in year one. URL: https://pinstorm.com/case-studies/consumer-electronics-building-2-5m-d2c-channel-zero --- ### Taking a SaaS Business Global: 280% MRR Growth **Result:** 280% MRR growth GTM expansion across five international markets for an enterprise SaaS brand. Outcome-based model with performance milestones tied directly to contracted MRR growth. URL: https://pinstorm.com/case-studies/taking-saas-business-global-280-mrr-growth --- ### Some cyber-criminals take your money. Some gave us money. **Result:** xxx We launched a global fund-raising campaign for a charity. And ended up raising money we didn't want. URL: https://pinstorm.com/case-studies/some-cyber-criminals-take-money-some-gave-money --- ### By another name, it smells much sweeter. **Result:** 2.5x revenues We helped an e-commerce gifting firm grow their sales 2.5x and their margins by even more - by changing their name. URL: https://pinstorm.com/case-studies/by-another-name-smells-much-sweeter --- ## Press Coverage Pinstorm and founder Mahesh Murthy have been covered by 34 publications. ### The Marketing Society (March 2026) "In a world where agencies complain that AI is decimating their headcount, we're on the other end. It's bolstered our offerings, our importance to marketers, our revenues — and turned our people from heroes into superheroes." Source: https://marketingsociety.com/think-piece/one-person-multinational-agency-here-and-its-better-marketers --- ### Emirates 247 (November 2012) "Pinstorm ranks Salman Khan more influential than Shahrukh in India." Source: https://www.emirates247.com/entertainment/salman-khan-is-finally-ranked-more-influential-than-shah-rukh-2012-11-27-1.484858 --- ### Campaign Middle East & The Marketing Society (October 2025) "Mahesh Murthy, Managing Director of Pinstorm, is one of five senior marketing leaders invited to a roundtable co-hosted by The Marketing Society and Campaign Middle East — discussing the shift from SEO to Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), how large language models can produce culturally relevant content, and the ethics of AI-driven brand strategy in the Middle East." Source: https://campaignme.com/travel-advisory-for-marketers-embarking-on-the-ai-cruise/ --- ### WION News (March 2025) "Pinstorm founder Mahesh Murthy is featured on WION's World Business Watch to explain how tokenization can bring transparency and accountability to digital marketing — making ad spend traceable, verifiable, and tied to real outcomes." Source: https://www.wionews.com/videos/tokenization-for-a-transparent-future-pinstorm-founder-mahesh-murthy-shares-key-insights-8871956 --- ### LinkedIn (June 2025) "More fakeness on LinkedIn - someone we've never heard of just announced they'd become the CMO of Pinstorm. :-)" Source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/maheshmurthy_wow-someone-has-apparently-just-become-the-activity-7332445159323860992-OcSA/ --- ### Instagram (February 2025) "Our COO, Ansoo Gupta, speaks on leveraging AI to stay relevant in a career in Marketing." Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DHGNFsrM6SX/ --- ### Crazy Engineers "How Mahesh helped Jeff Bezos and other stories from the founding of Pinstorm. Interview by Crazy Engineers." Source: https://www.crazyengineers.com/founders-circuit/mahesh-murthy-pinstorm --- ### Campaign Middle East (February 2025) "FNP.ae's Season of Love campaign ran across 11 prime billboards across the UAE — five in Abu Dhabi, six in Dubai — a show of force for a gifting brand rewriting what outdoor media can achieve." Source: https://campaignme.com/fnp-ae-lights-up-billboards-in-the-uae-for-the-season-of-love/ --- ### Facebook (Oct 2024) "Our Managing Director, Mahesh Murthy, speaks at Gitex UAE in Oct 2024." Source: https://www.facebook.com/pinstorm/photos/was-fun-speaking-at-gitexglobal2024-today-were-any-of-you-there-by-any-chance-gi/1074378691361770/ --- ### LinkedIn (September 2022) "Be wary: fake people are pretending to be us and offering so-called online marketing jobs." Source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/maheshmurthy_more-on-people-pretending-to-be-from-or-with-activity-7042412430844411904-iM2f/ --- ### Campaign Middle East (June 2024) "FNP.ae ads lit up key roads across Abu Dhabi, with dynamic messaging across Viola's digital billboards — a campaign built to capture commuters and passersby at exactly the right moment." Source: https://campaignme.com/fnp-targets-abu-dhabi-with-dynamic-messaging/ --- ### Campaign Middle East (November 2022) "FNP, with operations across India, Singapore, and the GCC, did its first ever broadcast campaign in the UAE by picking unique media properties on the OTT broadcast of the T20 World Cup." Source: https://campaignme.com/fnp-carries-out-t20-world-cup-campaign/ --- ### The Wall Street Journal (December 2009) "Mahesh Murthy is one of India's better-known marketers and investors. Mahesh has spent over 25 years in marketing, of which the last 15 have been in the online world. And the last 10 of those have involved helping his investee firms and clients market better." Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-ICMB-140 --- ### Facebook (March 2016) "Our global client, the billion-euro construction equipment firm Putzmeister, won Gold at the European Business Awards." Source: https://www.facebook.com/pinstorm/photos/great-news-our-client-putzmeister-are-now-the-national-public-champions-germany-/942953539086063/?locale=fr_FR --- ### StartupTalky (November 2020) "A detailed profile of Mahesh Murthy, Founder & CEO of Pinstorm — from engineering dropout to shaping Yahoo!'s first GUI and launching Paul Allen's internet ventures, to building one of India's most distinctive pay-for-performance marketing firms." Source: https://startuptalky.com/mahesh-murthy-founder-pinstorm/ --- ### Khaleej Times (April 2015) "The man who built the world's first pay-for-performance digital marketing firm. With prior work at Grey and Ogilvy on HP, Nike, Coca-Cola, and The Economist — his MTV spot was voted Asia's best commercial of the decade." Source: https://www.khaleejtimes.com/business/mahesh-murthy-maverick-marketeer --- ### Paul Writer (Oct 2014) "Our Managing Director, Mahesh Murthy, interviewed on the future of Marketing." Source: https://paulwriter.com/conversation-mahesh-murthy-founder-pinstorm/ --- ### Reddit / r/indianews AMA (2014) "I'm an investor, marketer, and traveller. Seedfund's portfolio includes RedBus, CarWale, MyDentist, Vaatsalya, and Heckyl. Pinstorm, my marketing agency, has been at this for a decade." Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/indianews/comments/217ph3/i_am_mahesh_murthy_ask_me_anything_ama_about/ --- ### The Rodinhoods (February 2015) "In a world where everyone talks of likes, fans, followers and engagement metrics, is there something more fundamental marketers are missing out on? Apple doesn't even have a Facebook page or Twitter account. Zara has never advertised. Red Bull doesn't buy likes." Source: https://www.therodinhoods.com/post/winners-have-product-strategy-losers-have-social-media-strategy-by-mahesh-murthy/ --- ### YourStory (September 2013) ""He is an entrepreneur, an investor, an evangelist, and a rebel in many ways." YourStory profiles Mahesh Murthy — the unconventional mind behind Pinstorm — tracing the journey from a pay-for-performance conviction to a globally recognised agency model." Source: https://yourstory.com/2013/09/mahesh-murthy-quite-naturally --- ### AFAQs "Our Managing Director, Mahesh Murthy, speaks on the new rules of marketing at the Click Asia summit." Source: https://www.afaqs.com/news/digital/29493_click-asia-summit-2011-pinstorms-mahesh-murthy-talks-about-the-new-rules-of-digital-marketing --- ### Business Standard (January 2010) "Pinstorm wins the Red Herring Global Top 100 award at a ceremony in San Diego, USA — joining a list of prior winners that includes Google, Yahoo!, Skype, and YouTube. The only Indian advertising firm to receive this honour, cited for technology-driven brand management and offices across four countries." Source: https://www.business-standard.com/article/press-releases/pinstorm-wins-global-top-100-award-110011800099_1.html --- ### YourStory (January 2010) "YourStory covers Pinstorm's Red Herring Global Top 100 win — a landmark for Indian digital marketing. From a 400-square-foot office with four people, Pinstorm had grown into India's only advertising multinational, with offices across four countries." Source: https://yourstory.com/2010/01/pinstorm-wins-global-top-100-award --- ### Exchange4media (January 2010) "With its Red Herring Global Top 100 award, Pinstorm looks to step up its growth momentum in 2010 and cement its position as one of the world's leading digital marketing firms." Source: http://www.exchange4media.com/digital/with-global-top-100-award-pinstorm-looks-to-up-its-growth-momentum-in-2010_37009.html --- ### afaqs! (November 2008) "Pinstorm makes Red Herring's Asia 200 list for the third consecutive time in four years — "the only firm in the world to be selected thrice," writes afaqs!. The award evaluates business model innovation, profitability forecasts, and management team strength." Source: https://www.afaqs.com/company-briefs/38267_pinstorm-is-the-reddest-herring --- ### Mint (June 2008) "Managing online reputation is finally catching on in India — and agencies like Pinstorm are at the forefront, helping brands monitor and manage what the internet says about them." Source: https://www.livemint.com/Companies/R9lToURsrzIY1Vhrp3lmcN/Managing-online-reputation-finally-catching-on-in-India.html --- ### Exchange4media (March 2008) "Exchange4media reports that Lintas Media Group and Pinstorm have formed a landmark "Performance Alliance" — a non-equity partnership built entirely on a pay-per-performance model, initially covering all digital marketing for Lintas clients. One of the first such alliances in Indian advertising." Source: https://www.exchange4media.com/advertising-news/lintas-media-grouppinstorm-in-performance-alliance-for-pay-per-performance-model-30198.html --- ### Business Standard (March 2007) ""Probably the only agency in the world to neither charge an agency commission nor a retainer fee," writes Business Standard in an early profile of Pinstorm. Founder Mahesh Murthy: "Our job is to connect prospects to the brand. The client only pays for the results."" Source: https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/pinstorm-reworks-online-agency-game-107031301065_1.html --- ### Exchange4media (September 2006) "Exchange4media profiles Pinstorm's ambition to spearhead the search engine advertising revolution in India — describing its technology-first, pay-for-performance model and a global client roster spanning hospitality, BFSI, education, and FMCG at a time when digital marketing was still nascent." Source: https://www.exchange4media.com/advertising-news/pinstorm-technologies-looking-to-spearhead-search-engine-ad-industry-growth-22605.html --- ### afaqs! (August 2005) "Just 15 months after founding, Pinstorm enters Red Herring's Top 100 Asian Companies list. "We are the only search engine-marketing company from Asia to be honoured by the Red Herring Awards," says CEO Mahesh Murthy — placing Indian digital marketing on the global map for the first time." Source: https://www.afaqs.com/12470_pinstorm-makes-it-to-red-herrings-top-100-asian-companies --- ### TiE Talk "A wide-ranging conversation on entrepreneurship, investment, and what it means to build a business with genuine skin in the game — with Mahesh Murthy, founder of Pinstorm and Seedfund." Source: https://www.youtube.com/ --- ### The Talk "Pinstorm is one of South Asia's leading digital brand management firms, with award-winning work for Airtel, Cadbury Kraft, Nestlé, ICICI Bank, and Wipro across six global offices." --- ### Wikipedia "Mahesh Murthy is an Indian entrepreneur known as the founder of Pinstorm and Seedfund. He is an INSEAD Entrepreneur-in-Residence, a columnist for Business Today, BusinessWorld, and The Wall Street Journal." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahesh_Murthy --- ### LinkedIn "Pinstorm serves clients across 7 countries from offices in UAE, Netherlands, Nepal, and India — one of the first digital marketing firms globally to operate on a pay-for-performance model." Source: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pinstorm/ --- ## The Pinstorm Team ### Mahesh Murthy — Managing Director Writer at FCB, Senior Writer at Grey - where he won Copywriter of the Year, CD at Ogilvy Hong Kong - where he won Ad of the Decade and a Best Young Director at Cannes. Partner, ECD and GM at Silicon Valley-based CKS Partners, the world's first digital agency, where he designed and launched Amazon and Yahoo. Then a career in management and investing with MTV, Channel V, Passionfund and Seedfund. And then Pinstorm, to change how advertising is done. ### Ansoo Gupta — Chief Operating Officer Sales at India's largest TV network. Then Head of Marketing at the National Geographic Channel for India. Then Head of Marketing for The History Channel across South and South East Asia. Then she joined Pinstorm to help ensure our client partners ask the right questions, and the team delivers them the right answers. ### Shabnam Sirur — Executive Creative Director One of Asia's most awarded designers and creative directors. Visualizer at Lintas and Bates, Art Director at Grey (where she first teamed up with Mahesh), Creative Director at DMB&B and then Saatchi & Saatchi, ECD at BBDO and then re-joined an old foe at Pinstorm - where she fights her team and generative AI to get great work done. ### Tushar Kadam — Creative Director Copywriter and the Creative Supervisor at Ogilvy. Then a Creative Director at Leo Burnett. Then a move to JWT in the Middle East as Creative Director of its Dubai office. Then an ECD at Lintas, followed by heading up creative at Dentsu McGarry Bowen. Then a move to Pinstorm to help re-invent advertising. ### Malaika Fernandes — Operations Management Ran operations at an e-commerce company, then ran HR for a PR firm, then ran the supply chain for a Fashion firm, and the day-to-day for a co-working company, till she moved to Pinstorm, to help run the back-end operations of a large, distributed team. ### Shehnaz Husein Chawla — Brand Management Writer and Journalist at The Indian Express. Then ran a Music School and Kids Center. Then moved to Pinstorm to help set up the UAE operations. --- ## Marketing Glossary — Pinstorm Definitions Plain-language definitions of 40 key marketing terms, as used by Pinstorm. **Outcome-based Marketing:** A marketing model where the agency is compensated based on actual business results — revenue growth, customer acquisition, or return on ad spend — rather than time billed or media placed. Pinstorm has operated on this model since 2004. **Skin in the Game:** A principle where the agency ties its own reward to the client's results — and may, case by case, also put its own resources at risk: the team's time, or media costs paid to third parties. If the client doesn't grow, the agency doesn't get paid. **Revenue Share:** A compensation structure where the agency earns a percentage of the client's revenue generated through the campaigns it manages. This replaces traditional fixed retainers. **ROAS (Return on Ad Spend):** A metric that measures the revenue generated for every unit of currency spent on advertising. A ROAS of 5× means the campaign generated $5 in revenue for every $1 spent on ads. **CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost):** The total cost of acquiring a new customer, calculated by dividing total marketing and sales spend by the number of new customers gained in a given period. **LTV (Customer Lifetime Value):** The total net revenue a business expects to earn from a single customer over the entire duration of their relationship. **Retainer Model:** The traditional agency billing structure where the client pays a fixed monthly fee regardless of the results delivered. The agency's revenue is decoupled from the client's business outcomes, creating a structural misalignment of incentives. **Full-funnel Ownership:** An approach where the agency takes end-to-end responsibility for the entire marketing funnel — from awareness and traffic acquisition through to conversion, retention, and revenue attribution. **Performance Marketing:** A broad category of digital marketing where advertisers pay only when a specific action occurs — a click, a lead, a sale. It is measurable by design. **Attribution Modelling:** The analytical framework used to assign credit for a conversion or sale to the marketing touchpoints that influenced it. **MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue):** The predictable, recurring revenue a subscription-based business earns each month. The primary growth metric for SaaS companies. **CAC Payback Period:** The number of months it takes for a business to recover the cost of acquiring a customer through the revenue that customer generates. **Net Revenue Retention (NRR):** The percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers over a given period, accounting for upgrades, downgrades, and churn. NRR above 100% means the business is growing without new customer acquisition. **Contribution Margin:** The revenue remaining after deducting variable costs directly attributable to a product or campaign. A critical metric for evaluating the profitability of individual marketing channels. **Unit Economics:** The direct revenues and costs associated with a single unit of a business — one customer, one transaction, or one subscription. Healthy unit economics (LTV significantly exceeding CAC) are a prerequisite for scalable growth. **Blended CAC:** The average cost of acquiring a customer across all marketing channels combined, including both paid and organic sources. **Product-Market Fit (PMF):** The degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand. A prerequisite for effective outcome-based marketing: without it, no amount of advertising spend can generate sustainable growth. **Brand Equity:** The commercial premium a brand name adds to a product or service above its commodity value. **Net Promoter Score (NPS):** A customer loyalty metric that measures the likelihood of customers recommending a product or service on a 0–10 scale. **Churn Rate:** The percentage of customers or subscribers who stop using a product or service within a given period. Full glossary (40 terms): https://pinstorm.com/glossary