At Meesho, creativity isn’t about out of the box ideas, it’s about building messages grounded in our user’s truth. We speak in the language of our users, shaped by insight, and designed to deliver impact. For us, creativity is a powerful loop. It begins with a user's insight, connects by speaking their language, and completes its mission by driving tangible business impact.

[Since late 2024] , we have been in the process to redesign how creativity functions here – making it deeply insight-led, AI-powered, and wired into the core business
This wasn’t about chasing trends. It was about solving a hard problem:
How do you take a traditionally siloed creative team and turn it into an AI integrated, insight-fueled, growth-driving system?

We call our answer: The Creative Intelligence Unit (CIU)

From Service Function to Strategic Partner

This is where the magic started. We were done with treating creativity as a downstream service i.e the last piece of the puzzle that just executes the brief. The old ‘send a brief, get an output/ model was parked.

Instead, we moved upstream. Way upstream. We embedded our creative team at the problem discovery stage, where the briefs are still being shaped, not just solved. Today, our writers, designers and editors are on the ground, in the thick of problem discovery. We talk to users, uncover what's holding them back, what makes them tick. These are insights we unearth to understand the real problem well. The actual words from our users often end up as the lines in our scripts. And once we create something, we go back and test it with the users who inspired it.

For our recent barrier breaking campaign Kar Ke Toh Dekho Meesho, we didn't start with a brief, we started with real conversations. We heard the user stories about them trusting a relative's recommendation and a very real fear of their money getting stuck online if they don’t like the product. Those truths became our north star. We crafted a mother-daughter story, anchored it with Meesho's quick refund process, and prototyped the entire concept with AI-powered animatics to test it before a single camera rolled.

Ground Truth Over Guesswork

Every creative system needs data, but the kind that matters most to us isn't in a dashboard. The numbers can tell us what's working, what's not. But it's our users who tell us the why.

We have started listening for patterns- how they speak, what they notice, and what makes them stop scrolling. These firsthand insights are the fuel for everything we make, from the words in a push notification to the emotion in a TV spot. We don’t experiment until we get the right nuance from the user because we believe that is what will convert the user.

And sometimes, we get it wrong. In a recent performance marketing campaign, we tried to hyper-regionalize our creatives with Rajasthan’s local dialects and city-specific references. On paper, it looked like it should work. But the campaign underperformed. We realized we’d gone too far from the emotional cues people actually connect with and expect from a digital experience.

So we reset. We wanted to understand the local perspective, from users based in Rajasthan and began by asking "When you're scrolling through social media applications, what makes you stop? What feels real? What feels forced?" The answers were honest, surprising, and incredibly useful. Now, we’re building the next set of regional creatives- not just more localized, but better understood.
Insight isn't just how we start, now it's also how we course correct.

The creative AI Pod

In December 2024, we decided to experiment with our own GenAI-powered creative lab from the ground up. This wasn't about finding a shortcut,  it was about building a new way to make creatives at scale.

The beginning was anything but glamorous. Our first attempts at automating push notifications and videos weren’t, up to the mark. The outputs were off-brand, and off-tone. We didn't throw in the towel. Instead, we sat with every single output, watched every error, and dug into exactly what the model was misunderstanding. We were building a new craft from scratch, slowly shaping the AI to understand the language, tone, and structure our users respond to.

By February, we began automating short-form videos for digital channels. With each test, we refined our models and our creative logic. And then came our big leap: a fully AI-generated TV campaign in April.

We have now built a new creative workflow. A system where:

AI drafts copy at scale, turning a single copy into countless variations.
Designers focus on storytelling, not tedious formatting and iterations.
Output speed increases, but never at the cost of context or quality.

Today, this creative intelligence unit powers monthly TV campaigns, automated workflows on performance marketing and integrated communications with faster creative operations, freeing up our team’s bandwidth to focus on experiments and the big ideas.

It's a creative sandbox engineered for speed, scale, and storytelling.

Creative That Moves the Business

Today, creativity at Meesho is a business lever, not just a brand layer. Our ideas are built on insight, amplified through AI, and engineered to perform across every channel, and user touchpoint.

What we are building is more than a team, it's a new system. It blends creative thinking, cultural understanding, AI systems, and operational rigor to create something unique.

This is what a creative system looks like when it's built to drive business:
We own the brief, not just the output. We're involved in problem discovery from the very beginning. We use AI as a creative accelerator, not a shortcut. AI frees our team to focus on the big ideas and deep storytelling.We scale storytelling with both soul and systems. Our creative is as authentic as it is effective. We measure success in impact. Our work is designed to drive tangible business results.

We're constantly looking for folks who are excited to join our mission and help us write the next chapter. If this resonates with you, please reach out to mini.gautam@meesho.com!